Does mkclean preserve Dolby Vision in MKV files?

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1

Hello,

I’m new here and this is my first post. I have a question regarding mkclean and Dolby Vision in MKV files.

I currently have a remuxed .mkv file containing Dolby Vision, and I’m considering using mkclean to optimize the container. In particular, I’m interested in using the --optimize and --remux options.

Since mkclean modifies the Matroska container structure (e.g. reordering elements, cleaning non-standard data, and optionally remuxing clusters), I would like to know:

Does mkclean preserve Dolby Vision metadata 100% reliably in the output file, regardless of the DV profile?

I understand that mkclean does not re-encode the video stream, but Dolby Vision in MKV seems to be sensitive to container-level changes, so I’m concerned whether such structural modifications alone could affect DV playback or detection in compatible players.

Also, I noticed that mkclean has not been updated since January 2021 (latest version 0.9.0) .

In general, is it still considered safe to use mkclean today, especially for more complex or non-standard content such as Dolby Vision?

I realize this forum is mainly for MKVToolNix, but I couldn’t find a more appropriate place to ask about mkclean. Since it is also part of the Matroska ecosystem, I hope it’s okay to ask here.

Thank you in advance.

2

Welcome!

As you likely know mkclean is not part of the MKVToolNix package, and I don’t think the mkclean author, Steve Lhomme, frequents this forum much if at all. In short, I don’t think we can answer your question with authority (I know I can).

On the other hand ask yourself what using mkclean actually gets you apart from the uncertainty. Let’s assume that --optimize produces slightly smaller files at the cost of removing certain parts of the file that’re needed if you ever want to edit the file in-place with e.g. mkvpropedit / the MKVToolnix GUI header editor. Let’s be really generous here and say that using --optimize results in a file that’s 100 KB smaller than the file produced by mkvmerge. Let’s further assume you have an extensive movie collection of around 3.000 movies. Using --optimize on all of them would yield a gain of a whopping 300 MB of saved space. Now think of how big a single movie file is — for an HD movie, not heavily compressed, especially containing Dolby Vision, it’ll easily be 5 GB upwards. Meaning with all that work, with all those movies processed, you would only have saved less than 10% of a single movie file in space in total.