Hi
I’m running v91.0 on Windows 11 Pro.
I’ve successfully merged 2 MKV files that I’ve ripped from DVDs, but am new to “merging MKVs” in general.
Now, I’m trying to merge a 3-part documentary that I’ve ripped, but not having any success.
I thought I would merge the first 2 parts first, then merge the 3rd later, but I’m getting an immediate
error, with no useful error messages.
Would someone help me to understand why this merge is failing?
Thanks
You can find the output including the error messages in the “Job output” tool.
Thanks.
This is what is shown"Files cannot be appended to themselves. The argument for ‘–append-to’ was invalid." which doesn’t make sense.
The two files have completely different names, as does the output file.
I’m now trying “Add files as additional parts” instead of appending, and it’s working.
Whether it will play as 1 movie or not is another issue.
This is usually the case when the second (appended) file has more tracks than the first one. When appending a file in the GUI, the GUI will try to match appended tracks to the tracks from the file they’re appended to by their type (and their position) — because mkvmerge can only append tracks to the same type. So when you append a file with e.g. one video track & two audio tracks to a file which also contains a video track & two audio tracks, the mapping is pretty clear: the appended video track will be mapped to the video track from the first file, the first appended audio track will be mapped to the first audio track from the first file and the second appended audio track will be mapped to the second audio track from the first file.
Let’s take another example: file 1 contains 1 audio, 1 video & 1 subtitle track, whereas file 2 contains 1 audio, 1 video and 2 subtitle tracks. When deciding what to do with the second appended subtitle track, the GUI cannot find a corresponding second subtitle track in the first file and will therefore assign the second appended subtitle track to the first subtitle track of the first file — for which it had already assigned the first appended subtitle track, resulting in a situation where file 1 sub 1 should be followed by file 2 sub 1 & file 2 sub 2. That last part is what mkvmerge doesn’t support.
This is left for the user to fix intentionally as the GUI cannot know which of the two appended subtitle tracks the user would want to keep. You can solve this by telling the GUI not to mux one of those superfluous appended tracks.
That will not work as you hope it will. The “additional parts” feature is only intended for files that are split at arbitrary positions, such as the ones on DVDs. It’s not meant to be used with & will not work well with any other type of container such as Matroska.
Thanks, but how do I do that- and to which track(s) ?
Also, since this is a 3-part movie. Should I append the 3rd part to the Part2 or to Part 1 (as I did with Part 2) ?
There’s a control on the right called “copy this item”. Deactivate it for the superfluous track you don’t want copied.
As to which tracks, you’ll have to figure that out yourself. The screenshot you posted was only of non-superfluous tracks; we cannot tell anything from it.
Makes no difference; the result will be identical in the GUI: file 1 is the top-level file, and it’ll have two files appended to it, files 2 & 3.
Thanks, but in this case- how do I know which tracks are superfluous and which are not?
When I did the append, the GUI interleaves tracks from each file (which doesn’t make sense to me).
Look for tracks where there’s more than one appended track (most likely the last ones of their respective types). The second & following appended tracks are the superfluous ones.
