#mkv to mp4

I found a good method for batch converting mkv to mp4. VLC wasn’t doing the job for me (it stopped batching entirely, and its encoding was slow, and it was doing something weird to the files so they were coming up garbled when I’d open them in photoshop). And handbrake is hard! I want a one-click solution, so I went with this method that uses ffmpeg.  

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/problem-with-mkv-format/td-p/10248788

Here’s a link to the original comment on the adobe forum, but since that’s probably impermanent I also grabbed the text.  Credit goes to adobe forumite basil1891, who is obviously a mensch. The link they provided to get ffmpeg has gone away, so I snipped it, but you can get the sources at ffmpeg.org, and I got a good .exe at https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/

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basil1891  Enthusiast , Jun 02, 2019

Maybe converting is the easiest, but hardly the best way, imho. I’d just remux files instead of converting.  ffmpeg can do it nicely 

How to:

• place the .mkv’s in a separate folder along with ffmpeg.exe
•  in notepad create a pair of .bat files there:

StartRemux.bat  with a string:

for %%F in (*.mkv) do remux_settings_.bat "%%F"

remux_settings_.bat  with a string:

ffmpeg.exe -i %~d1%~p1%~n1.mkv -c:v copy -c:a copy %~d1%~p1%~n1.mp4

Now you can just run the StartRemux.bat, and in a minute you’ll get your videos in .mp4 container, without losing quality and time. If you like, you can change .mp4 to .mov in the settings. Sometimes it’s needed ( as in case when .mp4 does not allow uncompressed audio).

p.s. Important note - those .mkv filenames should not have spaces, or wont work.

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I’ll add that I got an error in my original directory, but when I created a root-level directory with no spaces in the name, it worked fine there. I just converted 30+ mkv’s cleanly with this method and am a happy camper :)