

Since AVC's native container, MP4, treats the AC-3 audio used for standard DTV boradcasts as a private stream it's not well supported in either software or hardware. The MPEG-2 video is often re-encoded to AVC in order to save space, which is where the real importance of MKV comes in. Those streams can be muxed into a MKV file either directly from the capture, or after editing of some kind. DTV is generally captured as a MPEG-TS stream, containing the original MPEG-2 video and AC-3 audio from the source broadcast. MKV and DTV Captures MKV files are most commonly used for DTV captures. Compared to MPEG-2 TS (Transport Streams), the Matroska container is more widely supported in media players, or as a source for editing and encoding programs. In an MKV container all streams supported by your playback or other video related software are treated equally.
MKVTOOLNIX AVI TO MKV MP4
Support for audio streams in MPEG containers may be limited to those mandated by the associated MPEG container, which is why AC-3 audio can't generally be used in the MP4 container. Unlike the MPEG-PS, MPEG-TS, and MP4 containers standardized for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 it treats all types of audio equally instead of classifying some as standard streams and others as private.
MKVTOOLNIX AVI TO MKV PORTABLE
Why MKV? Unlike the older and Windows-based AVI container, MKV is designed to handle features found in all modern encoders like B frames, as well as being portable across most operating systems. If you don't already have video and audio prepared to be muxed you should do that first. MKV isn't a type of compression, but rather a container that holds whatever video and audio you have. Muxing vs Encoding This guide requires that you have your video and audio already encoded and ready for muxing.

Although currently consumer electronics support in devices like standalone DVD players is lacking, for HTPCs, and even some mobile devices it's becoming more common. The primary reasons for this are the need for a standard container more adavanced (with better cross-platform support) than AVI which can handle streams from different sources equally well.

Matroska (MKV) files have become a popular container for storing various types of video and audio, but perhaps most commonly AVC video with Dolby Digital (AC-3) audio.
