Wednesday, April 15, 2009

MPlayer And Mkv Linked Chapters

An increasing number of anime fan subbers are using the .mkv feature of linked chapters to have separate files for the opening and ending title sequences (OP and ED), which are usually constant for the duration of the series. Separating the OP and ED allows the fan subber to either make each episode file smaller, or to encode the video at a better quality setting in the same size file. Thankfully, we are a long way from everyone jumping on this bandwagon, because there is one problem. There is only one player on Windows that supports .mkv linked chapters and the feature isn't even on the road map of any of the Linux media players.

There is a patch to add .mkv linked chapters to MPlayer, but the developers have rejected the patch as an ugly hack. Even the patch submitter conceded it is crap! Even ugly hacks have been known to work so I downloaded the MPlayer source from the Subversion repositories in preparation for trying the patch. I got a working build fairly quickly which is always surprising. I only included the necessary codecs that I need for daily use and everything worked correctly with the two .mkv files that I watched tonight.

The patch will require some extra work since it does not match the current Subversion source any more. A dry run indicates that most of the patch still applies albeit with some very large fuzz offsets. However, I decided to tackle this step with a fresh mind tomorrow.

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