MKVToolNix v15.0.0 released

2017-08-19 — mosu

Here’s the brand new version 15.0.0 of MKVToolNix. A lot of work has gone into improving support for new track header elements important for video archival purposes. A couple of bugs have been fixed, too, as usual.

Changes for package maintainers: libEBML v1.3.5 is now required. An option has been added to configure for compiling without the code that checks online for new releases. See below for details.

Deprecation warning

This is a reminder that certain features having been deprecated since v9.7.0. They’re scheduled to be removed in the first release of 2018. These features are:

mkvmerge: the options “–identify-verbose”, “–identify-for-gui”, “–identify-for-mmg” and “–identification-format verbose” (use “–identification-format json –identify” or its short form “-J” instead)
all command line tools: the old, proprietary format used for option files (use JSON option files instead)

You can download the source code or one of the binaries. The Windows and macOS binaries have been built already and are available for download. The Linux binaries will be available later today.

Here are the NEWS since the previous release:

Important notes

mkvmerge, mkvpropedit, GUI’s header and chapter editors: the programs will no longer add most missing Matroska elements that are mandatory but have a default value in the Matroska specification (e.g. the TagLanguage element with a value of und if it isn’t present in its SimpleTag parent). Due to this change libEBML v1.3.5 is now required.

New features and enhancements

MKVToolNix GUI: multiplex tool: added a new entry to the “source files” context menu labeled “Set destination file name from selected file’s name”. It will force the GUI to consider the selected file to be the reference for automatically setting the file name, no matter which file was originally added as the first file. It will also force setting the destination file name once if automatic destination file name generation is turned off in the preferences. Implements part of #2058.
MKVToolNix GUI: multiplex tool: added an option in the preferences on “Multiplexer” → “Output” labeled “Only use the first source file that contains a video track”. If enabled, only source files containing video tracks will be used for setting the destination file name. Other files that are added are ignore. Implements the rest of #2058.
MKVToolNix GUI: header editor: added support for editing the video colour attributes. Implements the second half of #2038.
MKVToolNix GUI: header editor: added support for the “video projection” track header attributes. Part of the implementation of #2064.
MKVToolNix GUI: job queue: selected jobs can now be move up and down by pressing the Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down keys. Additionally, push buttons to move them up & down are shown if the corresponding option is enabled in the preferences. Implements #2060.
mkvmerge: added support for the “video projection” track header attributes. Part of the implementation of #2064.
mkvinfo: added support for the “video projection” track header attributes. Part of the implementation of #2064.
mkvpropedit: added support for editing the video colour attributes. Implements one half of #2038.
mkvpropedit: added support for the “video projection” track header attributes. Part of the implementation of #2064.

Bug fixes

all: selecting the program’s language (e.g. via the --ui-language command-line option or via the GUI’s preferences) did not work on Linux & Unix if the LANGUAGE environment variable was set and didn’t include the desired language. Fixes #2070.
MKVToolNix GUI: removed the keyboard shortcuts for switching between the different tools (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+1 for the multiplexer). They overlapped with basic functionality on keyboards that use an AltGr key, e.g. German ones, where AltGr+7 emits {. As AltGr+key is implemented as Ctrl+Alt+key under the hood, this means that AltGr+7 is really Ctrl+Alt+7 which the GUI now took to mean “switch to the job queue” instead of “insert {”. Fixes #2056.
MKVToolNix GUI: header editor: after saving the file the GUI wasn’t updating its internal file modification timestamp. That lead to the GUI wrongfully claiming that the file had been modified externally when the user wanted to save the file once more, requiring a reload of the file losing all modifications made since saving the first time.
mkvmerge: DTS handling: some source files provide timestamps for audio tracks only once every n audio frames. In such situations mkvmerge was buffering too much data resulting in a single gap in the timestamps of one frame duration after frame number n - 1 (the second audio timestamp read from the source file was used one output frame too early). Fixes #2071.
mkvinfo: fixed a null pointer dereference if an EbmlBinary element’s data pointer is a null pointer. Fixes #2072.

Build system changes

configure: added option --disable-update-check. If given, the code checking online for available updates will be disabled. The update check is enabled and included in the GUI by default.
libEBML v1.3.5 is now required.

Other changes

mkvmerge: the option --colour-matrix has been renamed to --colour-matrix-coefficients in order to match the specification more closely. The old option name will continue to be recognized as well.