MKVToolNix v7.0.0 released

Hey,

I’ve released mkvtoolnix v7.0.0. It’s a release that includes a couple of minor enhancements to mmg and mkvmerge and the usual bug fixes (nothing major – though some more cases of overly long file detection times have been fixed).

The most prominent change is that mkvmkerge will now write certain track-specific statistics (such as bit rate) as tags. See the ChangeLog for more details. Accompanying this change is that mkvmerge’s verbose identification mode will now include the track’s tags as well in order to make retrieving that information easier for other programs.

For packagers: this build requires Boost’s Date/Time library.

You can download the source code or one of the binaries. Note that binaries for 6.9.1 are still being built and may not be available for download yet.

Here’s the full ChangeLog since release 6.9.1:

  • 2014-06-09 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
    • Released v7.0.0.
  • 2014-05-26 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
    • mkvmerge: enhancement: In addition to the track statistics tags»BPS«, »DURATION«, »NUMBER_OF_BYTES« and »NUMBER_OF_FRAMES«mkvmerge will write two more tags identifying which application wrote the statistics (»_STATISTICS_WRITING_APP«) and when the file in question was written: »_STATISTICS_WRITING_DATE_UTC«.»_STATISTICS_WRITING_APP« will always contain the same string contained in the segment info header element »WritingApp«.»_STATISTICS_WRITING_DATE_UTC« will contain the same timestamp as in the segment info header element »Date«, though»_STATISTICS_WRITING_DATE_UTC« is actually a string representation instead of an integer value. Additionally a tag named »_STATISTICS_TAGS« is written containing the names of the tags that mkvmerge has set automatically. It equals the following currently: »BPS DURATION NUMBER_OF_BYTES NUMBER_OF_FRAMES«.
    • build system: Boost’s "date/time" library is now required.
  • 2014-05-25 John Peebles <johnpeeb@gmail.com>
    • mkvmerge: bug fix: If a single subtitle track contains two or more entries at the same timecode then the cue duration and cue relative position elements written were wrong.
  • 2014-05-24 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
    • mkvinfo: bug fix: fixed wrong progress percentage shown during saving the information to text files. Fixes #1016.
    • mkvmerge: new feature: Added a global option for disabling writing the tags with statistics for each track: –disable-track-specific-tags.
  • 2014-05-20 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
    • mkvmerge: new feature: When identifying a Matroska file in verbose identification mode track-specific tags will be output as well. The format is »tag_<tag name in lower case>:<tag value>», e.g. for a tag named »BPS« with the value »224000« the output would be »tag_bps:224000«. Enhancement for #1021.
    • mkvmerge: new feature: mkvmerge will write track-specific tags with statistics (»BPS« for the average number of bits per second,»DURATION« for the duration, »NUMBER_OF_BYTES« and»NUMBER_OF_FRAMES« for the track’s size in bytes and its number of frames/packets). Implements #1021.
  • 2014-05-18 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
    • mkvmerge: bug fix: Changed the file type detection order again. The text subtitle formats are now probed after those binary formats that can be detected quickly and unambiguously. This avoids some mis-detection if e.g. Matroska files as ASS text subtitles if they do contain such a track.
    • mmg: enhancement: The chapter editor will only use fast-mode parsing when loading chapters from Matroska files.
  • 2014-05-14 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
    • all: bug fix: fixed invalid memory access in the cleanup procedures which only occurred if the output was redirected with the »–redirect-output« command line parameter.
  • 2014-05-04 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
    • mkvmerge: enhancement: The last chapter entry read from MPLS files is removed if it is at most five seconds long. Patch by Andrew Dvorak (see AUTHORS).
    • mkvmerge: enhancement: added the attachment UID to the verbose identification output of Matroska files.
  • 2014-04-21 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
    • mmg: bug fix: Selecting a subtitle track correctly sets the»character set« drop-down box if no character set was set for this track. Fixes #1008.
    • mmg: enhancement: the subtitle character set cannot be set anymore for subtitle tracks read from Matroska files as mkvmerge ignores that setting for said container anyway (text subs are always encoded in UTF-8 in Matroska).
  • 2014-04-20 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
    • mmg: enhancement: mmg will look for the »mkvmerge« executable in the same directory as the »mmg« executable is located it if the location hasn’t been set by the user on all operating systems (before: only on Windows). Improves detection if »mkvmerge« is not in the $PATH.

Have fun.

26 thoughts on “MKVToolNix v7.0.0 released”

  1. Lenmaer

    Please deactivate those tags by default, those are just a really annoying enhancement, besides no one asked for those.
    Also those are just a pain in the ass for the fansub industry.

    1. mosu Post author

      > those are just a really annoying enhancement, besides no one asked for those.

      Quite the opposite. Numerous users have asked for some file/track statistics time and again. There are several use cases apart from a simple »I’m just curious« that profit from such information. Just because you have no use for it doesn’t mean others don’t.

      > Please deactivate those tags by default,

      I will most likely not do this. I am definitely willing to consider adding an appropriate option in the GUI (something like »disable track statistics by default«), though I’ll gather some more feedback before spending time on it.

      > Also those are just a pain in the ass for the fansub industry.

      Can you please provide details? Which use cases are prevented or made a lot harder by having such tags? Simply saying »they suck« (yes I’m exaggerating intentionally) isn’t very convincing.

  2. David

    Hello, Mosu,

    I’d personally like to know what those tags are for. If they correspond to the elements that appear now following the tracks and subtitles, I think they add a little bit of noise to the structure of the MKV files and are distracting, at least to me. I know these reasons don’t sound very convincing, but it’d be nice if users could decide whether to disable the tags or not.

    Thanks!

    1. mosu Post author

      They provide statistics for each track. Informational data. Any kind of meta information can be noise to someone who isn’t interested in said piece of meta information, e.g. if you’re always only speaking English then even the »language« information might be considered noise. For others such information (including statistics) is a vital piece of information, and there are plenty of users who considered their absence to be one of Matroska’s serious disadvantages.

      Users can definitely decide this on their own as they can easily deactivate those tags with mkvmerge’s option »–disable-track-statistics-tags« (see its documentation); in mmg you can add that option via »Muxing« → »Add command line options«.

      1. David

        Thanks, Mosu. Inserting that line under “Add command line options” did the trick. There’s nothing like giving users flexibility to use or not certain features, and I really appreciate it. Those tags may be useful for other people, so it’s great they can make the most of these tags.

        By the way, when you click on “Add command line options”, in mmg.exe, and the dialogue box comes up, I can see a misspelling in the title of the window: the last word should be “comandos” (with one “s” and not two).

        Again, thanks!

        Regards!!

      2. David

        Oh, I just noticed that “comandoss” (with two “s”) also appears below in the dialogue box itself.

        1. mosu Post author

          You’re talking about the Spanish translation, right? I’ll fix it (even though I don’t speak Spanish – such a small fix is easy enough).

          1. mosu Post author

            Hmmm that translation file contains a lot of occurrences of »commandoss« with two »s«. I’ll get in touch with the translator.

  3. David

    By the way, Mosu, I’ve meant to ask you this for a long time. When you try to download MKVExtractGUI-2, it says the latest version is 2.2.2.8. However, there appears to be, on the list, a version 2.2.2.9. Which one should people use? Thanks! (I’m presuming you have to do with this tool, which I’m not sure to be the case.)

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/mkvextractgui-2/files/

    1. mosu Post author

      I have nothing to do with the tool’s development at all, nor am I one of its users. So I cannot really comment on it.

  4. Alofa

    Спасибо Mosu за разработку и пояснение новой функции.
    А также за предоставление возможности ее отключения. Вы правы – люди должны сами решать, что им нужно, а что нет.

    1. mosu Post author

      You’re welcome. (No, I don’t speak Russian, but Google Translate to the rescue :D )

  5. Amiya

    Hi Mosu,
    I am using MKVToolNix v7.0.0 in my Laptop.
    OS – Windows 7 Enterprise Edition
    I am not able to do forward after muxing the videos, It always sticks to a certain time and starting from there. I have tested same with v.6.0.0 and facing same issue.
    But when tested with 5.7.0 and enabled the “disable header removal compression for audio and video tracks by default” it is working fine.
    Could you please help me how to do this in v7.0.0

      1. Amiya

        Thanks Mosu,

        This helped Me and I am able to use v7.0.0. now

        Thanks Again
        Amiya.

  6. kukushka

    now, how those tags are supposed to be read? even embedded mkvinfo seems to not give a damn about it

  7. Soukyuu

    Ever since updating from a 6.x release, I’m getting an unhandled exception when dragging/adding any type of files (even .mkv) on win8.1 x64. Both x64 and x86 versions. Any idea what might be causing this?

    1. Soukyuu

      To elaborate, the last working version for me is 6.9.0, 6.9.1 is where it breaks. Maybe related to the memory usage fix?

      I don’t know if it matters, but my \user\appdata\local\temp is symlinked to my 8GB RAMdisk.

    2. mosu Post author

      Unfortunately I don’t have any idea what might be the cause. It’s not a general issue as no one else has reported something similar so far. Sorry.

      1. Soukyuu

        I have just tried setting my TEMP variables to my RAMdisk directly instead of symlinking the default folder to it and the 7.0.0 version works. It’s definitely because of the symlink. The thing is, another software expects TEMP to be the default folder, so it’s either that software works, or mkvtoolnix works… could you please look at why mkvtoolnix fails to parse the symlink?

        You can create a test link with mklink from the cmd line.

        1. mosu Post author

          I currently don’t have the time to chase down such rare situations, sorry. If you want me to investigate then please open a ticket in my bug tracker, otherwise I will most likely forget about it.

  8. Rog

    Just like to say, thanks very much for your hard work, this tool is absolutely brilliant.

    ttfn
    rog

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