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missroseroseHoly crow, I actually found a multiplexer for Matroska video files that works on OS X and (while surrounded by text files describing how to do this or that in command line) actually has a working (if spartan) graphical interface and doesn't require you to go to the command line for general operations. WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO?
Side note, since I actually have some experience ripping movies for funand profit: Matroska is actually quite a neat idea - it's designed to be an open-source container format for multimedia files. The idea being, therefore, that you can put together multiple video/audio/subtitle tracks complete with menus if you like, and just have the one file for easy transferring. Speaking as someone who's done a bit of DVD ripping in her time, that's a much more elegant solution than the traditional "choose the one audio and one video track you want to rip, encode them separately, then smash them together into a single file" method that you had to do a decade ago.
The weird part, though, is how this particular file was constructed. It was obviously geared to a Russian audience (judging by the Cyrillic characters included in the torrent), so I figured it would have the original video track and either a Russian dub (if it existed) as the audio stream or Russian subtitles. Opening it up, I was pleased to find that the original English track appeared to be intact. Strangely, though, there was another audio track on top of it that I can only describe as "audible subtitles", since it appeared to be one dude reading the title placards and script out loud, in Russian, over the original audio. Very odd, and a bit confusing - if you didn't have a Russian dub handy, wouldn't a plain ol' subtitle track have worked better? - but, having read about the file format, I figured it wouldn't be that tough to find an editor that'd allow me to strip out the Russian track and leave the English intact. (And, amazingly enough, I found one that both worked well and didn't require me to go to the command line - much as I love the open-source philosophy, there seems to be a general sense in the community that if you, the creator, know how to use your program to do something, everyone else should be able to figure it out and there's no reason to make it intuitive or easy to use for a n00b. And these are the same people who can't understand why most folks don't use Linux. Sigh.)
Well, when I opened up the file in the multiplexer, there were only two tracks there - one labeled "video" and one labeled "audio, Russian". I stripped out the audio, hoping that (for whatever reason) the file's creator had simply stuck a single-file video/audio stream in with the dub, but no dice - for whatever reason, they'd smashed together the original audio and the "dub" together into one stream. The weirdness of the dubbing style aside, why would you do that when the whole idea of the container file is to be able to hold (and, I assume, play back) multiple tracks at once?
But all is not lost! Fearing that something of this nature would occur, I hedged my bets and also pulled down a more traditional axxo DivX rip of the same movie. The issue with that is, while the audio works great (most DivX files use plain old mp3 encoding for their soundtracks, so there's a relatively non-noticeable loss of quality unless you're playing it back on a high-end setup), the movie in question was filmed using a lot of natural light (especially candlelight), which really doesn't make for a very pretty image when compressed as heavily as a 700 MB DivX file requires. So, looks like it's time to figure out if there's some way to rip the audio track off of that and recombine it with the much higher definiton Russian video track...
Side note, since I actually have some experience ripping movies for fun
The weird part, though, is how this particular file was constructed. It was obviously geared to a Russian audience (judging by the Cyrillic characters included in the torrent), so I figured it would have the original video track and either a Russian dub (if it existed) as the audio stream or Russian subtitles. Opening it up, I was pleased to find that the original English track appeared to be intact. Strangely, though, there was another audio track on top of it that I can only describe as "audible subtitles", since it appeared to be one dude reading the title placards and script out loud, in Russian, over the original audio. Very odd, and a bit confusing - if you didn't have a Russian dub handy, wouldn't a plain ol' subtitle track have worked better? - but, having read about the file format, I figured it wouldn't be that tough to find an editor that'd allow me to strip out the Russian track and leave the English intact. (And, amazingly enough, I found one that both worked well and didn't require me to go to the command line - much as I love the open-source philosophy, there seems to be a general sense in the community that if you, the creator, know how to use your program to do something, everyone else should be able to figure it out and there's no reason to make it intuitive or easy to use for a n00b. And these are the same people who can't understand why most folks don't use Linux. Sigh.)
Well, when I opened up the file in the multiplexer, there were only two tracks there - one labeled "video" and one labeled "audio, Russian". I stripped out the audio, hoping that (for whatever reason) the file's creator had simply stuck a single-file video/audio stream in with the dub, but no dice - for whatever reason, they'd smashed together the original audio and the "dub" together into one stream. The weirdness of the dubbing style aside, why would you do that when the whole idea of the container file is to be able to hold (and, I assume, play back) multiple tracks at once?
But all is not lost! Fearing that something of this nature would occur, I hedged my bets and also pulled down a more traditional axxo DivX rip of the same movie. The issue with that is, while the audio works great (most DivX files use plain old mp3 encoding for their soundtracks, so there's a relatively non-noticeable loss of quality unless you're playing it back on a high-end setup), the movie in question was filmed using a lot of natural light (especially candlelight), which really doesn't make for a very pretty image when compressed as heavily as a 700 MB DivX file requires. So, looks like it's time to figure out if there's some way to rip the audio track off of that and recombine it with the much higher definiton Russian video track...
