MKV or MP4

[kshawkeye]

Just started to back up a few movies I had, and had a simple question.

I have H.264 video, 6 channel AAC audio, and SRT subtitles. I need to mux them, and have been using the MP4 container for a while now but MKV has caught my eye.

As far as I can tell there are no major advantages to muxing in a MKV with what I need muxed, but maybe I am wrong?

MP4 is a standardized MPEG-4 container, and I feel that muxing into an MKV would actually be worse.

Tell me your thoughts.

[AlekseiV]

MKV has lower compatibility with mainstream programs (Windows Media Player out of the box, etc) and devices. But it has usually less overhead and is more adaptable (AC3, DTS, many types of subtitles, etc). I also prefer MKVtoolnix to any MP4-container-GUI I have seen.

I use MKV because I do not need compatibility with anything but my computer's players.

[kshawkeye]

Makes sense, if I was using something like DTS or some odd media types than I probably would. My question was more about my case specifically. I would use MKV over MP4 if I was doing just about anything other than what I need muxed, but is there any reason that I should be using MKV with H.264 video, 6 channel AAC and SRT subtitles?

[AlekseiV]

Yes: Lower overhead.
No: Worse compatibility.

If you don't need compatibility, use MKV. Or flip a coin, I doubt the difference is very noticeable. Or wait for somebody else to chime in.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Not noticeable. The overhead is very low in any case.

I usually use MKV, but again that's because I like to be able to mux whatever I want into the finished file. MP4 is perfectly good, and is indeed more widely supported on various hardware devices.

Thankully, the only hardware device I care about is my iPhone 4, which can play almost anything I've ever encoded with a simple remux (and transcode of the audio if it's not already AAC). This does not take long, at all.

[sneaker_ger]

One reason for mkv would be that it supports srt subtitles, which mp4 does not. Hardware compatibility isn't that bad anymore - quite a few blu-ray players support it out of the box.

[kshawkeye]

Where did you find information that says MP4 cant have SRT subtitles? Reading http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=62723 it says

In contrary to MPEG-1/2 the MPEG-4 Standard defines its own Text Stream/Subtitle Format under ISO 14496-17 (MPEG-4 Timed Text). Its text-based (not picture-based as DVD subs), uses UTF-8/16 (including cyrilic, arabic, chinese characters...), allows all sorts of animations (scrolling, colors, karaoke aso...), allows attaching of fonts and is streamable
MPEG-4 TTXT creation is already supported in MP4Box and Quicktime. Playback works with Gabest's and Haali's MP4 dshow parser, Osmo4, Realplayer and Quicktime (only when placed in .3gp) and VideoLAN.

[sneaker_ger]

TTXT is not SRT, is it? But fair enough, you're right in that it supports text based subtitles.
Does your player support ttxt subtitles? Many mkv players support embedded srt subtitles - and there will be more, as it is a requirement of DivX HD.

[nurbs]

Players that support mkv often support sub/idx too. Save me the trouble to OCR the subtitles.

[GodofaGap]

Players that support mkv often support sub/idx too. Save me the trouble to OCR the subtitles.
Unfortunately it is not always a trouble that can be avoided. :(

I used to convert to srt because I didn't like how the vobsubs looked. For most DVDs they look ok nowadays, but now I have to do it because the quality of translation seems to have gone down in the last 2 years.