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View Full Version : excessive matroska overhead?


danieru
4th October 2008, 00:13
Hello,
I'm encoding a 120 minute DVD to x264 video and vorbis audio, with Handbrake. I used a video bitrate of 1800 kbps and vorbis at 160 kbps (I know vorbis uses a quality setting, but handbrake asks for a bitrate so I'm assuming it's equating to quality level 5 or such when it actually calls vorbis). I'm muxing the video and one audio stream and end up with a 1.8GB file.
I was curious how large the separate streams were so I used mkvmerge to dump each single stream to it's own container. I ended up with:

video.mkv - 1.4GB
audio1.mkv - 627MB
video_audio_muxed.mkv - 1.8GB

what?! the final muxed file with both video and audio ends up at 1.8GB! So I'm thinking to myself, this has got to be a bug, there's no way matroska should be taking roughly 3.4GB overhead! I took the separate streams and remuxed to a combined file and still end up with 1.8GB!

As another test, I extracted just 1 chapter from the same movie, and ended up with:

video.mkv - 45.8MB
audio.mkv - 19.9MB
video_audio_muxed.mkv - 65.6MB

...forgiving the MB rounding my file explorer is making, this seems right on, and just what I would expect, but I have no idea where things are going wrong the full-length mux.

Has anyone seen this type of problem before or have any thoughts or insights? I think perhaps Handbrake is messing up the matroska container somehow, but I just don't know enough to discount any other possible causes as well.

J_Darnley
4th October 2008, 01:31
Huh? 1.4 + 0.627 = 2.0 gigabytes so your file is actually smaller by 200 megabytes! Also, Windows Explorer shows the size of a file in bytes.

danieru
4th October 2008, 08:08
LOL! You're absolutely right! The math works just fine and the resulting mux'd file size is quite reasonable. For some strange reason In my head I was carrying the decimal over one place to the left on the MB when adding them, and didn't even realize it. blaming it on a late night! Thanks for pointing out the extremely obvious! crazy. Well for an otherwise worthless thread I hope someone gets a good laugh out of this:)