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Tools
MKVtools is an application that acts as a graphical user interface for various UNIX commandline programs. These are the tools that do all the video and audio processing. MKVtools just supplies a pretty face to simplify the process of using these tools. Without the hard work of numerous programmers and their willingness to release their work as open source, the applications on this web site would not be available to you. The following is a list of the open source applications used by MKVtools and links to their web sites where you can learn more about them.
Mencoder and Mplayer do the brunt of the work in MKVtools. The ffmpegx builds are used. Both are now universal binary. Note that these are old binaries, and though they work they limit the capabilities of MKVtools. Please feel free to contact me if you have some newer universal binaries laying around :-).
Mkvextract and mkvmerge are the tools used by MKVtools to manipulate .mkv files. They are part of the MKVToolnix package. Version 2.0.0 is used.
Ogmdemux is the tool used by MKVtools to extract tracks from .ogm files. This is also a part of a package - OGMtools. Version 1.5 is used.
Mp4box is the tool used by MKVtools that muxes the various tracks into a .mp4 file.
AtomicParsley is the tool used by MKVtools to set the option in the .mp4 file so that it is playable in iPods.
Mediainfo is the tools used by MKVtools to find properties of videos.
Click on the above links to get more details on any of the above tools.
Updating the Tools
You can also use the above links to easily update the tools used by MKVtools. For example, perhaps you have found a build of mencoder that is optimized for your multi-processor Mac. Here are the steps:
- Control click on the MKVtools icon and select "Show Package Contents". A new Finder window should appear.
- Open the Contents folder in this new window and then open the Resources folder. You should see the four tools listed above.
- Replace the tool of interest with the updated version making sure that their names are the same. Just in case, you might want to keep the old version(s) of the file.
- Close the folder and run MKVtools as usual.