MKVToolNix v47.0.0 relesaed

2020-05-30 — mosu

Well hello, gentle people.

Surprisingly it’s still May, even though it feels much longer since… well everything, really. Anyway, roughly four weeks since the previous release means it’s a good time for another MKVToolNix release.

v47 contains a couple of new enhancements and few bug fixes. However, under the hood big chunks of the source code was changed in an ongoing effort of switching from using Boost libraries to the C++ standard library. For end users this replacement doesn’t mean much — apart from the usual danger of accidentally introducing bugs. Hopefully not too many.

For package maintainers the situation is different. There were several changes, not only due to this migration. Please read the news below carefully. Thanks.

You can download the source code or one of the binaries. The Windows and macOS binaries as well as the Linux AppImage are available already. The other Linux binaries are stil being built and will be available over the course of the next couple of hours.

Here are the NEWS since the previous release:

New features and enhancements

• mkvmerge: chapters: mkvmerge can now read chapters from DVDs if the user
  specifies the path to a DVD folder structure via the --chapters …
  parameter. By default chapters from the first title will be imported. This
  can be changed by append :<title number> to the file/directory name in the
  --chapters … argument, e.g. --chapters /srv/dvds/BigBuckBunny/VIDEO_TS:3
  This feature requires mkvmerge to have been built with the libdvdread
  library. Part of the implementation of #2808.
• mkvmerge: added --engage append_and_split_flac that enables mkvmerge to
  append and split FLAC tracks, restoring pre-v45 behavior. The resulting
  tracks will be broken: the official FLAC tools will not be able to decode
  them and seeking will not work as expected.
• MKVToolNix GUI: multiplexer: added support for mkvmerge’s new support for
  reading chapters from DVDs if both have been built with the libdvdread
  library. Part of the implementation of #2808.
• MKVToolNix GUI: multiplexer: when deriving languages from file names the GUI
  will now look for simplified language names instead of the full ones
  (e.g. instead of looking for “Greek, Modern (1453-)” it would simply look
  for “Greek”).
• MKVToolNix GUI: multiplexer: the options in the “additional command-line
  options” dialog are now sorted alphabetically. Additionally the
  --append-mode option has been added as one of the only missing global
  options.
• MKVToolNix GUI: chapter editor: the chapter editor can now read chapters
  from DVDs if MKVToolNix has been build with the libdvdread library. Part
  of the implementation of #2808.
• MKVToolNix GUI: header editor: added an option in the preferences for
  displaying all date & time values in UTC instead of the local time
  zone. Implements #2814.

Bug fixes

• all: fixed a crash when using the MTX_LOGGER=file syntax for logging debug
  messages without specifying a file name to log to. It will now log to a file
  called mkvtoolnix-debug.log in the system’s default temporary directory,
  as initially intended.

Build system changes

• The libdvdread
  library will be used if found via pkg-config. If it is found, support for
  reading chapters from DVDs will be enabled in mkvmerge and the MKVToolNix
  GUI. Part of the implementation of #2808.
• Boost’s Date/Time, Lexical Cast, Range, Range Adaptors, Tri-Bool, Variant
  libraries are not used anymore.
• MKVToolNix now requires a C++ compiler & standard library that support the
  following features of the C++17 standard: “std::variant”, “std::gcd”.
  For the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) this means v7 or newer; for clang it
  means v4 or newer — the same versions required by earlier MKVToolNix
  versions.
• MKVToolNix now requires version 6.1.0 of fmtlib or later for the
  fmt::to_string function and bugfixes to the formatting of floating point
  numbers. If a system-wide version is installed that’s older, the bundled
  copy will be used.
• The bundled version of fmtlib has been updated to release 6.2.1.

Have fun!