Old post detected!
This post is roughly 15 years old; originally published on April 15, 2009! The information presented here may be out of date and inaccurate.
Please read this page but do keep its age in mind.
It has been a while since I last posted, mainly due to not having Internet access at home for a month. Anyway, I’m online again and I have been tinkering with various projects the most recent of which is Matroska conversion (again).
Matroska to MP4
For sometime I have been converting Martoska files to MPEG-4 with AAC 5.1 audio so I can stream them via Mediatomb to my PlayStation 3. The conversion process works well although there is some overhead in transcoding the audio and the AAC 5.1 audio is not as good quality as the original AC3 or DTS.
If you are interested I’ve put my code in GitHub, the script automates the whole process.
Matroska to M2TS
A little while back I read it was possible to convert those same Matroska file to M2TS files which, so long as the audio is AC3, so takes much less time to convert. As the PlayStation 3 can’t play DTS audio streams inside a M2TS container there is still a requirement to transcode DTS to AC3. That said the conversion to M2TS requires less file I/O than converting to MPEG-4 and is therefore it is generally a quicker conversion method, typically just 2 or 3 minutes on my workstation at home.
Plus the audio quality of the AC3 or transcoded DTS is better than that of transcoded AAC 5.1. I’ve created my own script to fully automate the conversion process. The script has been tested on Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit but there is an outside chance it will work on Mac OS X if you can get the required tools installed. Again, you can find my script on GitHub.