Idx file problem

Help
1

I am remuxing a series of German TV shows from .avi to mkv, including subtitles. The subs are in the form of an .idx file and a .sub file. Episodes 1-11 have all worked without any issues, but episode 12 is giving me the message “The file xyz.idx’ was not recognized as a supported format (exit code: 2).” I have searched for this problem, and the answers I found referred to missing language codes. I have compared the language codes in the idx files that worked, with the one that isn’t working, and I can’t see any difference. Can anyone help me with this?
I am using MkvToolnix v82.0 and Windows 10.

EDIT: After making this post it occurred to me that the files I was remuxing had names which were much longer than I would ever use myself. I wondered if this could be causing problems. I shortened all the file names and now it is working. Is the length of filenames an known issue with MkvToolNix?

2

Welcome!

MKVToolNix doesn’t have limits wrt. to file names. That being said, Windows does have some stringent limits for the maximum length of the complete file name (which includes the drive letter, all the directory names, the separators & the file’s name & extension). One can circumvent this limit with different methods. See this FAQ entry for details.

3

Did you figure out the problem? I’m having the same issue.

mkvmerge -o output.mkv input.mkv VobSub.eng.sub VobSub.eng.idx

When using MKVMerge v17.0 it’s working perfectly but when I use v95.0 it fails with an error The type of file VobSub.eng.idx could not be recognized

If I add only the .sub file with v95 it doesn’t give an error but it doesn’t add the subtitle to the MKV either.

Am I missing something here or could this be a regression bug?

If it matters, there the content of the .idx file


# VobSub index file, v7 (do not modify this line!)
#
size: 1920x1080
palette: d3dfdb, 000000, 7f8684, 1e211d, 1f2420, 3c403f, 3e4341, 4b504e, 5c615f, 5f6362, 757f79, 7a8380, 8f9993, a7b1ad, b8c4c0, c0ccc8
# ON: displays only forced subtitles, OFF: shows everything
forced subs: OFF

# Language index in use
langidx: 0
id: en, index: 0
timestamp: 00:00:15:011, filepos: 000000000
timestamp: 00:00:15:031, filepos: 000001800
timestamp: 00:00:15:037, filepos: 000002000
timestamp: 00:00:15:056, filepos: 000003000
timestamp: 00:00:15:060, filepos: 000003800
timestamp: 00:00:15:077, filepos: 000004800
4

@mbunkus I did a little backtesting and found that v74 is the last working version where it doesn’t give this error and the output file plays the IDX track just fine.

Starting v75 it breaks, is there a way to trace out what change happened between v74 and v75 which causes embedding of the VobSub subtitles to throw this error?

5

Please open an issue over on Codeberg. That’s the place for debugging & bug hunting. Thanks.

1 Like
6

Done