Compare/Contrast AVI/OGM/MKV

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cwilhelm

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 15, 2007
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I'm aware these are all simply containers for the same audio/video file and for the most part the quality will be the same, but I'm curious of the specific drawbacks and advantages of each. I've heard OGM has problems handling AC3 audio, AVI has problems with VBR MP3 audio, etc... can anyone give a detailed breakdown of these? I've been ripping my DVDs into an AVI container and I'm just curious if I should be doing them in OGM or MKV instead. I use h.264 for my video codec and AC3 for my audio.

Suggestions?
 
For years I've been using AVI - not preaching it up, mind you, just using it because for Windows it was the "format" of choice for audio/video files. But lately I've been spending more time learning about MKV and I'd agree with what Snowknight26 just said. It's time for something new, and unless Microsoft has some intention to magically create one out of thin air (WMV sure ain't it, but it is capable of quite a bit, just never been actually used for everything it's capable of), then I'd have to agree again that MKV > pretty much anything else that's ever existed.

I finally found a tool - mkvmerge GUI, part of the MKVtoolnix set - that lets me take any subtitle files I have (.srt format) and merge them directly into the container (as most of my HD stuff is, 720p format) so that when my Wife watches 'em, she can enable the subs for herself (as she's deaf) and I can disable 'em when I watch 'em (as I'm not deaf) using MPC-HC.

Now I don't need to hassle with the hardcoding of subs anymore. That was the "last hurdle" to me before committing to the MKV container format fully, and now that I've finally discovered the methodology to simply add them as required, it's a piece of cake to do it, takes less than a minute for most TV rips I've acquired, and we're both happy.

Now I just need a few terabyte of storage for a home server and we're set. ;)

So yeah, definitely, MKV is the one to watch. It's got so many possibilities, does practically anything, can hold practically anything... great stuff, indeed.
 
Any suggestions on good programs to convert high definition (1080) .wmv files to .mkv without a loss of audio or video quality? Even if it seems pointless, I'm a bit OCD and would like all of my movies to be of the same file extension... stupid I know...
 
hehe Just making them all the same extension... yeah, that's a bit odd as the content and format can be completely off.

As for conversion, you're already looking at WMV which is lossy as pretty much all video compression is (save for Huffyuv and maybe one or two others, but they're not for daily use, just mastering content for editing). So... I could make suggestions but I'm sure Snowknight26 will pounce on this one.

HandBrake should be able to load the WMV files and then you can run with it from there unless he's got some other tool to do the transcoding, and I'm sure he'll offer a suggestion of settings probably.
 
cwilhelm said:
Any suggestions on good programs to convert high definition (1080) .wmv files to .mkv without a loss of audio or video quality? Even if it seems pointless, I'm a bit OCD and would like all of my movies to be of the same file extension... stupid I know...
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if mkvmerge allows .wmv source files, but you could give that a go. If not, try gdsmux, part of Haali Media Splitter.

If you're really pro, you could use graphedit and a dump filter to dump the VC-1 ES to a file then mux that raw VC-1 stream to mkv using eac3to, mkvmerge, or what have you.

Joe Average said:
hehe Just making them all the same extension... yeah, that's a bit odd as the content and format can be completely off.
Click to expand...

Great thing about MKV is that it supports virtually type of audio/video streams.
 
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