jamesmacwhite

Converting mkv to mp4 with ffmpeg

Essentially just copy the existing video and audio stream as is into a new container, no funny business!

The easiest way to "convert" MKV to MP4, is to copy the existing video and audio streams and place them into a new container. This avoids any encoding task and hence no quality will be lost, it is also a fairly quick process and requires very little CPU power. The main factor is disk read/write speed.

With ffmpeg this can be achieved with -c copy. Older examples may use -vcodec copy -acodec copy which does the same thing.

These examples assume ffmpeg is in your PATH. If not just substitute with the full path to your ffmpeg binary.

Single file conversion example

jscelza

#!/bin/sh
#
# Originally part of vpnc source code:
# © 2005-2012 Maurice Massar, Jörg Mayer, Antonio Borneo et al.
# © 2009-2012 David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.

nazgob

# you have ctags but it does not work...
$ ctags -R --exclude=.git --exclude=log *
ctags: illegal option -- R
usage: ctags [-BFadtuwvx] [-f tagsfile] file ...

#you need to get new ctags, i recommend homebrew but anything will work
$ brew install ctags

#alias ctags if you used homebrew
$ alias ctags="`brew --prefix`/bin/ctags"