[MEncoder-users] how to convert mkv to avi?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 02:47:41PM +0200, Grozdan wrote:
> 2009/6/30  <rulet1 at meta.ua>:
> >> rulet1 at meta.ua writes:
> >>
> >>> So I see before to convert I have to know what is inside mkv
> >>> container,
> >>
> >> Yes.
> >>
> >>> how todo that -- is Mediainfo a program for that?
> >>
> >> You can just use mplayer:
> >>
> >> ,----
> >> | mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -identify your_mkv_file.mkv
> >> `----
> >>
> >> and post the output.
> >>
> >> Charles
> >>
> >> --
> >> "It's God. No, not Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds, but God."
> >> (By Matt Welsh)
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> MEncoder-users mailing list
> >> MEncoder-users at mplayerhq.hu
> >> https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mencoder-users
> >
> >  Maybe I don't understand something, everybody says that avi container
> > doesn't support h.264 codec,
> > but here is
> > [url=http://pic.ipicture.ru/uploads/090630/hznhQuHBC4.jpg]screenshot[url]
> > of using Xilisoft HD Converter converting pretty fast mkv to avi using
> > h.264,
> > and the end avi-file is the same quality as input mkv-file. How to do that
> > with mencoder in Linux?
> 
> Whomever says AVI doesn't support H.264 video is an idiot... period.

Well, it's mostly that VFW can not handle it correctly, and due to the
many dependent B-frames (and thus long codec delay) it is hard to handle
H.264 in AVI correctly, so you have to expect that quite a few applications
will handle it wrong.
It's basically this issue: http://guru.multimedia.cx/avi-and-b-frames/
just that it is worse for H.264 (you can of course encode to H.264
without B-frames and there should be no issue at all then).