Trancode Without Losing Quality

[spetrillo]

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

[Deleted User 11865]

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

[spetrillo]

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

[Woodstock]

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.

[Deleted User 13735]

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.

[spetrillo]

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.

[Deleted User 11865]

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.

[masterjp]

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.

[masterjp]

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

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

[andrewk89]

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