For the last few months, I’ve been dillegently ripping my media library to storage in MKV format.
Now, I’ve got a desire to do something to make the library a tad more “Owner” friendly…
I want to add about a 5-10 second splash at the beginning of all my MKVs that will show:
1- Audio tracks available (IE, if a Director’s Commentary is present)
2- Subtitle track usage (like, “Enable Subtitle track 1 for Alien Translation” or whatever.)
Something like this:
(Won’t be visible until Moderator approves.)
I’m a passable Perl programmer, so I can write a script to go through my ~1,500 files to pull this information OUT of the MKV files. I can also write an ImageMagick script to create pretty little PNG (or JPG, or whatever works best) files that have this information texted out.
But what I CAN’T find is a utility that will simply take that single image file and turn it into a 5-10 second MPEG file, which I could then prepend to my MKVs using MKVmuxer.
Anyone have any ideas?
Tony,
If I wanted to do the same thing I’d:
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I’d throw the JPG into Adobe Premiere and write out an AVI
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I’d bring the AVI into Handbrake (which I know you use) and create the MKV for it.
So – it boils down to the first step, I guess (which is really what you were asking for) and cheap (free) alternatives to Premiere would be MS Movie (used to come free with XP, then became a freebie download – I have NO idea what the status is nowadays) or even Elements (not free, but so cheap that if you do ANY other video editing you might want to have it around – quite frankly I’m amazed it’s so cheap since it does nearly all of what Premiere does at a fraction of the cost).
Handbrake is the field leveler here – no matter what you use to generate the start file, Handbrake will mush it down to a quality MKV for your use.
Oh, and if you want to automate the whole process you don’t need a Perl script – just use Autoit and you can automate anything from Windows.
Any “editing” program should work. All you need to do is take that first frame you want to use, add the info to it you want, and duplicate it for the next however many frames per second you want it to show. You don’t have to remux if you start the sound on the first frame without the info - as in the original. I used to do a lot of this, so I know how easy it can be. Of course, I had premier and others.
