Software Update: MKVToolnix 47.0.0

Moritz Bunkus has released version 47 of MKVToolNix. With this open source program, matroska files can be viewed, edited and converted. For example, sound tracks and subtitles can be added, removed or set as default. MKVToolNix is ​​a collection of separate command line tools, but a graphical user interface is also included. Downloads are available for Windows, various Linux distributions, and macOS. The changelog for this release looks like this:

New features and enhancements

• mkvmerge: chapters: mkvmerge can now read chapters from DVDs if the user specifies the path to a DVD folder structure via the –chapters … parameter. By default chapters from the first title will be imported. This can be changed by append :
• mkvmerge: added –engage append_and_split_flac that enables mkvmerge to append and split FLAC tracks, restoring pre-v45 behavior. The resulting tracks will be broken: the official FLAC tools will not be able to decode them and seeking will not work as expected.
• MKVToolNix GUI: multiplexer: added support for mkvmerge’s new support for reading chapters from DVDs if both have been built with the libdvdread library. Part of the implementation of #2808.
• MKVToolNix GUI: multiplexer: when deriving languages ​​from file names the GUI will now look for simplified language names instead of the full ones (eg instead of looking for “Greek, Modern (1453-)” it would simply look for “Greek”).
• MKVToolNix GUI: multiplexer: the options in the “additional command-line options” dialog are now sorted alphabetically. Additionally the –append-mode option has been added as one of the only missing global options.
• MKVToolNix GUI: chapter editor: the chapter editor can now read chapters from DVDs if MKVToolNix has been build with the libdvdread library. Part of the implementation of #2808.
• MKVToolNix GUI: header editor: added an option in the preferences for displaying all date & time values ​​in UTC instead of the local time zone. implementations #2814.

Bug fixes

• all: fixed a crash when using the MTX_LOGGER=file syntax for logging debug messages without specifying a file name to log to. It will now log to a file called mkvtoolnix-debug.log in the system’s default temporary directory, as initially intended.

Build system changes

• the libdvdread library will be used if found via pkg-config. If it is found, support for reading chapters from DVDs will be enabled in mkvmerge and the MKVToolNix GUI. Part of the implementation of #2808.
• Boost’s Date/Time, Lexical Cast, Range, Range Adapters, Tri-Bool, Variant libraries are not used anymore.
• MKVToolNix now requires a C++ compiler & standard library that support the following features of the C++17 standard: “std::variant”, “std::gcd”. For the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) this means v7 or newer; for clang it means v4 or newer — the same versions required by earlier MKVToolNix versions.
• MKVToolNix now requires version 6.1.0 of fmtlib or later for the fmt::to_string function and bugfixes to the formatting of floating point numbers. If a system-wide version is installed that’s older, the bundled copy will be used.
• The bundled version of fmtlib has been updated to release 6.2.1.