[ Overview | the avi container | Ogm tools ( installation , usage ) | vorbis tools |  Matroska ( installation , usage ) ]

Last modified February 20, 2025

Video containers

This site has been automatically translated with Google Translate from this original page written in french, there may be some translation errors

Presentation

A definition of containers is given in the video definition page . On this page are presented the ogm and matroska containers which both have a lot of future and are the successors of the avi container briefly described on this page. These two containers are really very rich compared to avi, this page however does not even touch on the most interesting features (chaptering, multiple video streams, subtitling, ...), but rest assured this page is intended to evolve and be enriched to address all the features of these two containers.

The avi container

AVI is a video container developed by Microsoft, it is the acronym for Audio Video Interleaved. Each stream (video or audio) is defined by a codec, so we can have different combinations of audio or video codecs, here is a list of usable codecs:

Video codec
- MPEG
- divx
- xvid
- raw (YUV, YV12, ...)
- others (indeo, cinepak, ...)

Audio codec
- mp3
- mp2
- pcm / wav
- others

This container has the particularity of being able to contain a video stream and two audio streams (two languages ​​for example).
The most used combinations are divx / mp3 or xvid / mp3. This container does not allow chaptering, subtitles and does not recognize some more modern codecs such as vorbis.

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OGM tools

Facility

First you need to install libdvdread as indicated in the video player page .

The official ogm tools website is http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/ogmtools/index.html where you get the archive and unzip it by typing

tar xvfj ogmtools-1.5.tar.bz2

This gives the ogmtools-1.5 directory in which you type

./configure
make

Then as root

make install
ldconfig

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Use

We will create an ogm file from an avi. Open the .avi file with avidemux , save the soundtrack in mp2 format ( Audio -> Save the audio track ). Open the file with xmms and with its recording module, save it in wav format. We now transform it into ogg format.

oggenc -q4 -o bandeson1.ogg video.wav

Here is the result

Opening with wav module: WAV file reader
Encoding "video.wav" to
         "bandeson1.ogg"
at quality 4.00
        [100.0%] [0m00s remaining] -

Done encoding file "bandeson1.ogg"

        File length: 2m 49.0s
        Elapsed time: 0m 45.6s
        Rate: 3.7212
        Average bitrate: 99.3 kb/s

Now we can merge the video and the sound.

ogmmerge -o video.ogm video.avi bandeson1.ogg

Note that the resulting file will have two soundtracks, the original one and the one previously obtained (provided that the original one is compatible with ogm). To avoid this and have only one soundtrack (it will delete the original soundtrack) we will type:

ogmmerge -o video.ogm -A  video.avi bandeson1.ogg

Here is the result

Using AVI demultiplexer for video.avi. Opening file. This may take some time depending on the file's size.
+-> Using video output module for video stream.
Using OGG/OGM demultiplexer for bandeson1.ogg.
OGG/OGM demultiplexer (bandeson1.ogg): using Vorbis audio output module for stream 1.
progress: 4246/4246 frames (100%)

In the event that you would like to add a second soundtrack (film in English or French for example). To take the previous example, we will type

ogmmerge -o movie.ogm video.ogm soundtrack2.ogg

We could just as well have typed

ogmmerge -o movie.ogm -A video.avi soundtrack1.ogg soundtrack2.ogg

If your files are too big to fit on a CD, you have the following command to split them into files of 700MB max (the files will start with movie)

ogmsplit -o movie -s 700 movie.ogm

with mplayer to have the first soundtrack just type (the first track is numbered 1, the next 2, etc.). mplayer -aid 1 movie.ogm with gmplayer by clicking on the image you have the Audio Track command, you just have to choose Track 1 or Track 2.

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Vorbis tools

As its name suggests, vorbis tools allows you to install a bunch of command line tools to manipulate ogg audio files. We will first install the curl-devel package . With vorbis tools we can encode, read or edit ogg files all in a shell. The official site is http://www.xiph.org/downloads/ we will retrieve the archive there and decompress it by typing

tar xvfz vorbis-tools-1.4.2.tar.gz

This gives the vorbis-tools-1.4.2 directory in which we will type

./configure
make

then as root

make install

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Matroska

Facility

The official site is http://www.matroska.org/ we will get two libraries there. We unzip the first by typing

tar xvfz libebml-release-1.4.5.tar.gz

This gives the directory libebml-release-1.4.5 , in which we type

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

and as root

make install
ldconfig

Now we unzip the second archive

tar xvfz libmatroska-release-1.7.1.tar.gz

This gives the directory libmatroska-release-1.7.1 , in which we type

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

And as root

make install
ldconfig

Now we get the matroska tools from the site http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/ . We will need to install the qt6 packages needed for the installation qtbase6-common-devel, qt6core-devel, qt6widgets-devel, qt6network-devel, qt6concurrent-devel, qt6svg-devel, qt6multimedia-devel, qt6gui-devel as well as ruby ​​and lib64cmark-devel beforehand. We unzip the archive by typing

tar xvf mkvtoolnix-90 . 0 .tar.xz

This gives the directory mkvtoolnix-90 . 0 in which we type

./configure
rake

if you have the following error

Ignoring io-console-0.8.0 because its extensions are not built. Try: gem pristine io-console --version 0.8.0
Ignoring psych-5.2.2 because its extensions are not built. Try: gem pristine psych --version 5.2.2
rake aborted!

as root you will have to type

gem pristine io-console --version 0.8.0
gem pristine psych --version 5.2.2

we retype rake then as root

rake install

if you do not have the rake command , you can recover it by typing as root

gem install rake

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Use

The syntax is very similar to that of ogm tools (normal it is the same author). We take the same video and audio files as before. The command to create a matroska container (mkv) with the avi file video.avi, from which we extracted the soundtrack as seen previously, is the following mkvmerge -o video.mkv video.avi soundtrack1.ogg Here is the result

mkvmerge v90.0 ('Hanging On') 64-bit
video.avi': Using the AVI demultiplexer. Opening file. This may take some time depending on the file's size.
'video.ogg': Using the OGG/OGM demultiplexer.
'video.avi' track 0: Using the video output module for the video track.
'video.avi' track 1: Using the MPEG audio output module.
'video.ogg' track 0: Using the Vorbis output module.
The file 'video.mkv' has been opened for writing.
progress: 4246/4246 frames (100%)
The cue entries (the index) are being written...
Muxing took 17 seconds.

As with ogm tools, the file obtained will have two soundtracks, the original one and the one previously obtained (on the condition that the original one is compatible with ogm). To avoid this and have only one soundtrack (it will delete the original soundtrack) we will type:

mkvmerge v90.0 ('Hanging On') 64-bit
video.avi': Using the AVI demultiplexer. Opening file. This may take some time depending on the file's size.
'video.ogg': Using the OGG/OGM demultiplexer.
'video.avi' track 0: Using the video output module for the video track.
'video.avi' track 1: Using the MPEG audio output module.
'video.ogg' track 0: Using the Vorbis output module.
The file 'video.mkv' has been opened for writing.
progress: 4246/4246 frames (100%)
The cue entries (the index) are being written...
Muxing took 17 seconds.

In case you would like to add a second soundtrack (film in English or French for example). To use the previous example, we will type

mkvmerge -o movie.ogm video.ogm bandeson2.ogg

We could just as well have typed

mkvmerge -o movie.ogm -A video.avi bandeson1.ogg bandeson2.ogg

The resulting file is played with mplayer in the same way as an ogm file. Note that mkvtoolnix comes with a graphical interface that looks really complete. Just type mkvtoolnix-gui

At this place  http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/doc/mkvmerge-gui.html you will find a very good help to use this software. For those allergic to English, I made a literal translation of this page.

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