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How to use video from one .mkv with audio from another .mkv? Also subtitles from another .mkv.

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 (Edited)

So I’d like to see the video of one version of a movie while hearing the audio of another version of a movie. I’ve never made a video file other than ripping a DVD or two years ago, but if I already have several versions of a movie in mkv format, is there a way to combine elements of these mkv’s into a new version? If so, how do I do that?

And optionally another question, how to get the subtitles from one mkv file and extract them to put into another mkv file.

For the record the movie I’m talking about is The Killer (1989 John Woo), which I own a DVD and blu-ray of. They messed with the audio on my preferred version of the blu-ray video (an HK one in an mkv file mentioned), so I want to play it with the original audio (in an mkv of the criterion DVD) for example. And if possible I’d also like to use the Criterion one’s subtitles.

And to add to the wackiness, I’d have to add a second or two of silence to the beginning of one of the preferred audio tracks to time them up properly I think. Or any other method of having it start playing at the exact moment it should by comparing the two.

Short version, I’m looking to watch a blu-ray mkv I have of a fav movie while listening to the DVD audio of this movie, and optionally using the subtitles from that DVD version as well, but that is less important than the audio thing. I guess that part would involve reading up on how to rip mkv’s subtitles to an .srt or something which is probably easier than the audio/video stuff I’m looking to do. Thanks folks!

I could just pop in the old DVD I have of this movie, but as we know on here, that would be too simple. 😄

Also for the audio syncing to another video thing, another simple solution could be to figure out a way to start two different instances of a video player at the same moment, in MPC-HC64 for example. I’d have to put one a second or two in, pause, then via some method get them both to resume playing at the same moment. I don’t currently know of what that method is though.

edit: I just watched the movie via two media players, had to pause and mess around with them a bit to re-sync the audio on occasion, so there must be a few seconds of difference between the two versions here and there maybe a second at the end of a scene in one version etc. But I’ll leave this topic up just for curiosity and because it would be cool to know how to do this stuff for all purpose stuff, if not this film in particular.

Great film, recommend everybody check it out by the way! If you’re a fan of stylish hard hitting emotional action/drama.

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 (Edited)

Well if your sources were correctly synchronized, your work would be extremely easy.

Get mkvtoolnix if you’re on Linux or Windows. It has different tools which allow you to work with mkv files, that includes different operations like muxing, demuxing and simple editing, and of course changing different things like attachments, chapters, tags etc.

However if you are sure the sources are not properly synchronized, your work will be much more complicated. It can be a framerate difference (e.g. your DVD is PAL, therefore 25fps and the Blu-ray is 23.976fps), in that case it would be pretty simple (just demux the audio stream from the DVD, convert the speed using any good audio editor (or besweet), and mux the corrected audio to the Blu-ray video.
If there is just a constant delay, you can do it directly in mkvtoolnix.
If the movies are a different cut (e.g. one of them is a director’s cut), you will need some video editor (and maybe before that use some software for converting the video to a format which you editor supports) but that shouldn’t be a problem, I think all 3 main systems have very simple and free video editors which will be capable of doing this.

Subtitles - it really depends on format of your subtitles inside of your mkv file. If it was created using some ripping software it will be as the graphic sup format. You can do some pretty basic operations on that directly inside mkvtoolnix, but for something complex you will need to first use an OCR to convert the graphical format to a text format (srt), and then edit the srt file to your needs - SubtitleEdit is a great free tool which does both.

If you want to go really fancy and want your mkv file to have things like cover art, named chapters, information about things like plot, actors etc. it can be done in mkvtoolnix using a couple of xml files

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Thanks, the info is muchly appreciate!

It looks like the editing to make that particular movie line up with another audio track would be very subtle. It’s not a different framerate or officially different cut of the movie, it just may be that the more recent blu-ray release for whatever reason used a print where say a couple seconds are added overall via just a few less than a second differences adding up, maybe in scene transitions etc.

That’s just hypothesizing though. My hats are off to people who add audio tracks like all the one available in the Star Wars releases on here, I can only imagine the work that goes into making sure they’re all properly synced up.