Chapter, subtitle and audio control for MKV files (1 Viewer)

[gdb66]

MediaPortal Version: 0.2.2.0
Windows Version: Windows XP Pro

Hi, I have a matroska (MKV) file which contains chapters and a subtitle track. When I play it in MediaPortal it displays the subs, but when I press the prev/next chapter buttons on my MCE remote, nothing happens. The same goes for the subtitle button. I can only guess about the audio button, since I don't have an MKV file (yet) with multiple audio tracks. All these buttons work fine when I play a dvd in MediaPortal, just not for MKV files.

Does anybody have any idea how to make these buttons work for video files, other than dvd?

 

[meek]

MKV - Multiple Audio Tracks / Streams

For Multiple Audio Tracks, I had to do the following:

1) I installed ffdshow to play all H.264 content. This was what all my (MKV) files were in.
2) Open Media Portal Configuration
3) Go to Movies -> Movie Post Processing
4) Double-Click ffdshow Audio Decoder
5) Click Filter Properties Button
6) Click "Stream switcher" on the left
7) Check the Enable box.
8) Click OK
9) Check the box "ffdshow Audio Decoder" to activate
10) Click OK.


* TA-DAH * ... Multiple audio streams now works in Media Portal. It will default to the first stream, you can now view/change the audio streams in the menu (by hitting "info" on your MC remote)... or by hitting "a" on your keyboard to switch audio tracks (default mapping).

This was sadly a lot more work than I wanted to do. To me, this was very unintuitive, and requires a higher level of comfort with customizing applications (especially with the big warning "USE AT YOUR OWN RISK"). This is unfortunate as I would like to see MP continue with a very easy to use out-of-the-box applications.

Hope this helps anyone with MKV & Multiple Audio Track problems.

 

[ranger0293]

Hope this helps anyone with MKV & Multiple Audio Track problems.

Just wanted to point out that this worked for my .avi files as well. For me, both tracks were playing at the same time. You can imagine how annoying that was.

 

[meek]

MKV - Subtitles

Since I did a quick run down of how to get multiple audio tracks running, I figure I would explain what I did for MKV files with subtitles.

By default, for me, Media Portal plays MKV files fine and if the file has a *.srt subtitle with the same name as the film in the same directory (ex: Movie.mkv, Movie.srt) the subtitles work just fine. However, if the subtitles were embedded into the MKV file, no go, so here is what I did:

1) I installed ffdshow to play all H.264 content. This was what all my (MKV) files were in.
2) Open Media Portal Configuration
3) Go to Movies -> Movie Post Processing
4) Double-Click DirectVobSub (autoloading)
5) Check the Enable box.
6) Click OK

And that was it! If the film has subtitles, they automatically played. IF you want to disable them, just go into the information section (I press the "i" button on my remote), and you can disable them or enable them anytime during the film.

This is GREAT for some foreign movies if you hate dubbed tracks!


P.S. I haven't played with the "non-autoloading" DirectVobSub yet, if anyone has experience with that, feel free to post an update. I'm VERY new with all these plug-ins, and do not pretend to be an expert on them. My assumption is that it would play the subtitles just the same, but you would have to manually turn them on movie-by-movie? This could be useful if you have a lot of movies with subtitles, but you don't frequently want the subtitles?