HandBrake

Hello all,

I use a number of Amazon Fire Sticks in my home, for media streaming. Most of my media content is in MKV. I would like to transcode to MP4 without losing any quality, ie just converting the wrapper. Is there a default config for this type of work?

Thanks,
Steve

What you want is called remuxing, not transcoding. HandBrake doesn't do remuxing, it always re-encodes the video track.

Thanks...any suggestions on a tool to use for this?

You can do this with ffmpeg command line; in fact, their site has several examples of how to do it.

What are you using for playback on the FireTV? I use ViMu, and it plays MKV files just fine. VLC can work, as well.

As mentioned, rewrap in ffmpeg is a simple process.

VideoRedo is a paid solution for Windows that will mux or transcode, and also clean up stream and GOP errors, resync audio and indices, and even remove commercials from broadcast recordings. I'm not a stockholder, just a big fan.

I am using Plex to playback on my Fire devices, and what I am finding is that the MKV is transcoded on the fly for these devices, whereas my Nvidia Shield does not transcode. Since my daughter is accessing remotely I want to keep her transcoding to a minimum.

Plex is usually able to remux without re-encoding the video, but if there are subtitles it may need to transcode regardless of whether the source in Plex is MKV or not.

The best tool for it is XMedia Recode (freeware).
It is a video encoder like handbrake, but have some big advantages to copy a video or audio stream from the source file to the destination file.
You can copy the video stream and encode the audio stream to another format. Although you can convert a mkv file to mp4 or otherwise without reencoding! That is fantastic.

Xmedia Recode supports different languages (english, german, french, etc.)

Here is the english website:
https://www.xmedia-recode.de/en/

Avidemux for lossless cutting, changing the container, etc. Also does transcoding with more audio and video filters than HB.