MKV Buddy - Tool to help handling of Videos

Hi.
I like to introduce you a tool I've developed. It's called "MKV Buddy" . The main goal of MKV Buddy is to simplify and speed up daily work with video files. The basic use is pretty simple. You choose what you want to do, select the folder to work on and let MKV Buddy do the rest without further interaction.

The new MKV-Buddy V2 brings you wizards for any kind of video rework. The program can decide if a video needs to be recoded, remuxed or only be renamed and enriched with fanart and metadata with a single mouse click.

Aside this all options known from MKV-Buddý V1 are available too, most of them are enhanced or completely redone. As example the option to generate fanart for videos without online sources. Here you now can use templates for cover, backdrop and even borders (easy to create, add and remove by yourself). And you can select how many stills are ued for cover and backdrop as you like. Options are 1 or 2 stills for poster and 2 to 6 stills for backdrops...

MKV Buddy is fully localized. English (default), French, Russian and German language files are delivered. The French and Russian translations are only at about 80% done. I need help from someone who can speak and write French or Russian to complete this. All language files are plain text files (language.lng) so it's pretty easy to translate it to your own language... Simply copy English.lng to "MyLanguage.lng" and translate the terms after the "=" in every line. If you've done a translation I would love to add it to the next release of MKV Buddy.

MKV Buddy is written in AutoIt3 and published under GPL licence

MKV Buddy needs a System running Windows XP or higher, x86 and x64 are good to go. As of 1.2.0 there are separated 32 and 64 bit versions. Please download the version fitting to your OS. Version 2.0.4.2 will be the last 32 bit version. All newer versions will be available as 64 bit only.

MKV Buddy is using (pretty well known) external programs to handle different tasks. Those programs are all command-line tools, powerful but not that easy to use. Here is where MKV Buddy jumps in. Under the clean hood of MKV Buddy those tools doing their work invisible and without any needed action from the user. Those tools are:



a) ffmpeg - https://www.ffmpeg.org/

FFMpeg is used to remux "exotic“ formats to MKV. And it's used to extract still pictures from the video files used to generate missing fan-art.

b) mkvmerge, mkvextractand mkvpropedit - https://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/

Mkvmerge is used to remux the "not that exotic“ formats to MKV. Mkvpropedit is needed for tagging and for attaching the fan-art to the MKV files and Mkvextract is used to extract tracks.

c) HandbrakeCLI - https://handbrake.fr/

HandBrakeCLI is the command-line version of the well known video transcoding tool Handbrake. HandbrakeCLI is used to recode videos to h264 and MKV.

d) nfo4mp - http://htpc-tools.de

This tool is written by @lightshock especially for MKV Buddy. It is used to grab meta-data and fan-art and to rename video files.

e) ImageMagick - http://www.imagemagick.org/

This program, especially one part of it, is used to generate fanart from still pictures.

f) meteorite.exe

This program is based on the original Meteorite program - http://www.mkvrepair.com/ - but was modified for MKV Buddy needs by @hwahrmann


MKV Buddy comes with a comfortable installer package containing all needed external programs in a 32 bit or 64 bit version.

Recent version is 2.1.1.3

Download MP Repository:
https://www.team-mediaportal.com/extensions/tools/mkv-buddy

Link to German forum:
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/mkv-buddy-klenier-helfer-fürs-tägliche-video-basteln.127298/

Link to MKV Buddy Homepage (under construction)
http://htpc-tools.de/en/mkv-buddy-en/

 

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Hi.

This should be the case already. As long as you don't add a <ext>mkv</ext> line to filetypes.xml by yourself, mkv files are not processed while remuxing.

For this two features you need the full mkvmerge program and a lot more (disk-) space and time. Maybe I add this later.

 

Hi.
New version 0.2.0 in first post.
Now the MKV tagging from .nfo files is working for movies. This unique feature takes the data from widely used .nfo files and add the data as MKV tags to your movie files. For this feature to work the .nfo file must be in the same directory than the video file and it must have the same name (excerpt for extension ofc). As example, if the Video file name is "D:\movies\avatar.mkv" the Nfo File name needs to be "D:\movies\avatar.nfo".

I've tested this with .nfo from MovPicNfo and tinyMediaManager (in XBMC and MP mode). More tests (e.G. with MP1 MyVideos, Ember or "original" XBMC .nfo) are welcome...


Next step will be the tagging for series. This is a bit more complicated as there are two .nfo, One for the whole series and another one for the episode with different names and (probably) locations

 

Hi.
New version 0.3.0 in first post.
Some bugfixes are done and the series tagging now is implemented. Atm it's tested with tinyMediaManager .nfo only. If someone can test e.g. XBMC nfo I would love to hear if it's working, tia. To make series tagging work you need to have an extra folder for each series. In this folder there must be a tvshow.nfo and all your episodes videos and episodes .nfos. Episodes videos and nfos can be in season subfolders if you like. MKV Buddy works both, with and without season folders.

 

Hi.
New version 0.4.0 in first Post.
Version 0.4.0 brings you, aside some Bugfixes, an improved progress display and as a new Feature Batch- Recoding. For this HandBrakeCLI is used. It's capable of using Quick Sync with recent Intel IGPU. The needed time to recode decreases massive. On my Core i5 it lasts only a quarter the time. You need to activate Quick Sync in MKV Buddy config if you want to use it.

MediaInfo.dll is used to set recoding parameters as bitrate and interlacing method in dependence to the individual input video. Bitrates are defined in a xml file, "bitrates.xml". So advanced users can modify them to fit their needs. An average user did not need to do so. The default values giving a nice result in 99,9% of all cases.

The use is as easy as ever, select folder, press OK and wait until MKV Buddy is ready. Recoding can last very, very long. So please be patient.

 

Hi.
New version 0.4.1 in first post. Some bug fixes and a config option to decide what should happen with audio tracks that can't be copied by HandbrakeCLI. Normally all audio tracks are 1 to 1 copied but some formats could not be copied. As the widely used mp2 codec is one of them the user needs to decide what to do. If you choose "none" in config, those tracks are removed. If you choose one of the other options, mp3, ac3 or aac, this tracks are recoded to the chosen codec...

 

Hi,
Thanks for your effort!

For a long time now I was looking into a way to display more metadata for local movie files in Windows Explorer to be able to quickly search through the collection for movies from a specific country or period.

Icaros provides me with a way to display, and for Windows to index, media details. MediaBrowser (and a collection of other software - MCM and others) provides internet-scraped movie metadata in .nfo and .xml files.

I've tried to use your tool to embed that .xml or .nfo metadata into .mkv files. Unfortunately, only some tags from the .nfo file gets embedded (Year, Album for the movie name), unless I use tinyMediaManager - but even then the .mkv won't have all the metadata. MediaBrowser's .xml files are not getting embedded at all.

But in any case none of those tags from .mkv files are showing in Windows Explorer It may be a limitation of Icaros, really... but since your tool is the closest to what I was looking for, I will ask anyway:

Do you, or anyone, knows of a way for Director, Year, Laguages, Country of origin and other metadata to be shown in Windows Explorer (any combination of software/file format would be fine).

Thank you!

 

Hi.
My main goal for tagging is not to display those metadata in Windows explorer (to be honest normally I don't use explorer at all). The main goal is to 100% identify a movie/episode by tagging IMDB or TVDB ID...

And Microsoft did not like the MKV container at all as it is free and open source, so no DRM restrictions can be "save" in there. A native support for MKV is not available in Windows and probably never will be. That's why I don't believe there ever will be a nice display of MKV- metadata in windows explorer.

With MKV Buddy the following medtadata would be tagged if present in .nfo file:
For movies:
IMDB-ID, TMDB-ID, Title, Plot, Year, MPAA- Rating.
For Series:
TVDB-ID, Season Nr, Episodes Nr, Series Title, Episodes Title, Series Plot, Episodes Plot, Series Premiere, Episodes first aired, MPAA-Rating, Network.
It's possible to extend those lists, but it is lot of (boring) work. Maybe you can do this by yourself. AutoIT is easy to understand and the source is available.

Please try to rename those xml to .nfo just for testing. MKV Buddy recognises metadata files on ".nfo" file extension. Never tried it but it could work. If it works I will add XML as extension for metadata files in the next version.

 

Hi,
Thank you for a prompt answer.

I just find Windows Explorer the fastest and most flexible when it comes to quickly searching the library. With Icaros I can search and filter for a complicated criteria and save those searches for later (but it only gives access to mediainfo related data). I find fancy MediaCenter-like interfaces slow and while they are visually stunning they often do not provide a simple way to display e.g. all the 1080p movies from Poland for years 1970-1980. That would be easy in Explorer and if there would be a standard many more applications could use it too. And I could get rid of all the extra files in movie folders...

Anyway, I think (I may be wrong), that while there is a technical standard when it comes to tagging .mkv files, there isn't a standard when it comes to a 'dictionary' of those tags for movies, TV series, TV programmes and so on...

Thank you for providing info on which metadata fields MKV Buddy is populating. I think it would be useful if your application would provide a simple .ini file with the names of .nfo tags and their matching tags in .mkv file, sth like:

<title> - Title

so that I could add

<director> - Director

Unfortunately I can't code myself.

Changing the name for mediabowser-generated .xml file to .nfo resulted in AutoIt Error 'Line 5654 (File "[file]"): Error: Subscript used on non-accessible variable.'

I attach the .xml file, just in case

Thank you again for your work, and I will be still looking for a solution.

Regards
m.