Finally! Here it is: mkvtoolnix 1.0
I've meant to release this for over a week now, but something always got in the way. But no longer
After...- nearly one year and ten months after joining the Matroska team on 2003-01-14,
- over one year and five months since the first public release on 2003-06-12,
- writing more than 62000 lines of code, documentation and examples,
- a LOT of bugs,
- as many bug fixes,
- way too many hours of coding, idling on IRC, writing mails and posts to various forums
... I've decided to call this release 1.0.
And I'm REALLY happy to have gotten this far. Because to be honest -- I don't do this for myself. If I was I would have stopped a long time ago, because the features that I want and need have been there for quite some time now. No, I work on this project for three reasons:
1. Fame,
2. Money,
3. becoming the Supreme Overlord of the Known Universe.
Less important reasons are:
1. I believe that Matroska is a great project, and that the multimedia scene needed such a container.
2. You ask for it
Seriously. Your constant feedback (be it bug reports or feature requests) tells me what I've done wrong and what you need. I really prefer doing things that a lot of people can use over doing things only I might need. So everyone out there contributing to the project, coding for Matroska, sending patches, reporting bugs, nagging me about new features, providing sample files (!), sending a nice postcard or a nice cup from this year's European championship in Portugal (!!) -- a big THANKS from my side to you all. You keep the project going as much as I do.3. I like coding in general, and I like coding on this container level in particular. It's fun
So what have I accomplished? Well, mkvtoolnix can handle a small number of different containers and flat file formats like
- AAC,
- AC3,
- AVI
- DTS,
- FLAC,
- Matroska
- MP3,
- Ogg/OGM,
- Quicktime/MP4,
- RealMedia,
- SRT,
- SSA/ASS,
- TTA,
- VobSubs and
- WAV.
It can deal with a number of different codecs, meaning it knows exactly how to put them into Matroska:
- AAC,
- AC3,
- DTS,
- FLAC,
- MP3,
- PCM,
- RealAudio,
- RealVideo (pretty much all versions),
- SRT,
- SSA/ASS
- TTA,
- different video formats,
- VobSubs,
- Vorbis
On top of that mkvmerge can handle attachments, chapters, tags, reorder tracks... There is a totally horrible GUI called mmg
which is probably the reason for mkvtoolnix' success on Windows (even though I really, really don't like GUI programming). There's a tool that can get most of those tracks out of a Matroska file into other container formats again. And there's a tool for getting information on a per-element level from a Matroska file.Quite some work, I assure you, but you know why I keep on doing this
Another round of thanks goes out to the "core" of the Matroska team and those who don't consider themselves a member of the team but who've done tremendous work nevertheless (/me waves to alexnoe
).Where will I go from here? A few months ago I posted a "1.0 release plan", and I haven't changed my expectations since then. I will continue the 1.0 line with bug fixes only. I've started working on another code branch, often called 'trunk', which will result in a releast "1.2" next year. This is where new features will be implemented like support for MPEG1/2 video (already working on that,
good progress), support for native MPEG4, support for appending / concatenating files (already working on that with very good progress), partial redesign of mmg etc. The "1.0" release line will stay stable and (hopefully) mostly bug free.
And now to the usual links to...
... the home page:
http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/
... the source code:
http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolni...nix-1.0.tar.bz2
... the Windows binaries:
http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolni...toolnix-1.0.rar
Binary packages for Debian, FedoraCore and SuSE have already been built and uploaded to the home page.
Here are the final changes between 0.9.7 and 1.0:
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2004-11-10 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
* mkvmerge: bug fix: The Matroska reader doesn't insist on having a default duration ( = FPS) for video tracks in the "AVI compatibility mode" ( = with the CodecID "V_MS/VFW/FOURCC"). This enables re-muxing of Matroska files created from MP4 files.
2004-11-05 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
* mmg: bug fix: File names with non-ASCII characters were not working if mmg was compiled against a Unicode enabled wxWidgets.
2004-11-04 Moritz Bunkus <moritz@bunkus.org>
* mkvmerge: new feature: Added reading DTS from AVIs and from Matroska files.
* mkvmerge: bug fix: A variable initialization was missing which very recent gcc versions (3.4.2) did not like very much. Also fixed a small compilation bug.
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You see, a couple of small bug fixes and small additions. Nothing major, and nothing to worry about.
That's it for tonight. Have fun
Mosu
