Matroska is a multimedia container format which can contain inside it a number of audio and video files. Because the Matroska format is a container for all sorts of multimedia (audio, video, subtitles etc.), these movies (usually with extension MKV) can contain a full DVD or a complete movie in a single file. The MKVToolnix is an open source software for creating, merging, extracting and manipulating the MKV movies. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
MKVToolnix makes it easy to work with MKV files. It contains a GUI frontend for working with other command line tools. You can download it from the MKVToolnix website which has download links for all supported operating systems. In this article, we tested MKVToolnix on Windows 7 using its portable edition for Windows.
To run the MKVToolnix GUI (only for the merging of media files), you have to double-click on the mmg.exe program. To create a new MKV file, you have to add all the media files you want to pack inside it. To add files, just click on the add button and select media files from your hard disk. Once media files are added, you can move them up or down to alter the order in which they are played.
You can also select the track options, format specific options etc., but it is not necessary. In the attachment section, you can attach the subtitles which should have same name as the video files and SRT file extension. In the Global section, you can choose to create a WebM compliant file. The WebM standard is used to play videos online in the web browsers that support HTML5. You can also choose to split a file into smaller files under the Splitting section. The chapter editor can be used to edit chapters if found in the added media files.
Once you have adjusted the settings to your liking, you can click on the Start muxing button to start the creation of the MKV file. Depending on the number of files you have added, it may take some time to complete the process.
The GUI frontend is available only for the MKVMerge tool. For other tools like MKVInfo, MKVPropEdit and MKVExtract, you will have to open a command prompt window and give the commands. The command formats and syntax for these tools is available on the MKVToolnix website.
You can download MKVToolnix from http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/.