Extracting video or audio from MKV

Recently my brother gave me a mkv video file which I have a problem playing with my laptop. Initially I thought that the laptop problem or the k-lite that I install is outdated. So I went to download and install the latest k-lite. But this didn't resolve the problem. And I did tried with Windows Media Player, KMPLayer, and MediaPlayerClassic, playback of the same file still very sluggish. Later when I check the file format with MediaInfo (come together with k-lite), the video inside the mkv is actually rmvb. I think all the playback software did not know how to decode rmvb inside mkv correctly.

After some goggle-ing, I found a MKV extract tool that can separate video and/or audio. By separating the rmvb video and the audio (forgot what format was the audio) from the mkv, I can play the movie with no problem. Due to I did not intend to keep the movie (watch and delete!), so I did not merge the video with the audio that I extracted. What I did was play the rmvb and load the audio file at same time with KMPlayer.

The tools (actually is 2 tools) to extract video and/or audio from mkv that I mentioned is MKVExtractGUI and MKVToolnix. I found them at videohelp.com.

MKVEXtractGUI is the GUI and MKVtoolnix is the executable file. Please download them from the links that I included on the name on this paragraph. Don't worry, both of them are freeware. :)

After downloaded them, unzip them to same folder. Run MKVEXtractGUI.

1. Choose your mkv you want to extract, it will show you what are the track (video and audio) that you can extract.
2. Make sure you also choose the output directory.
3. Check or uncheck that format that you want or don't want from the "Track/Attachment list" box.
4. Click "Extract" and wait for it to complete.
5. Check the output dir, you should able to find the file you want.

You can also merge them back to mkv format (maybe exclude one of the track, to save space) using mkvmergeGUI that included in MKVtoolnix.

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source: http://www.videohelp.com