MKV and OGM files are audio video containers. They contain AV streams such as H.264 video and AAC audio. One of the benefits to an MKV file is the ability to have DVD like menus and chapter entries.

I've been downloading a series off of BitTorrent, Engineering the World Rally, I'm waiting until I get all 6 episodes before I watch it. It's a documentary of sorts with my favorite World Rally driver being featured, Petter Solberg and his Subaru WRC Team.

I don't care to watch TV shows on my computer, so I'll convert these to MPEG2 and play them on my AV system via Windows Media Center. I was converting the first three episodes to MPEG. Shows 1 and 2 were AVI's so that's an easy convert. But Show 3 was an MKV file and none of my standard tools like ffmpegX or MPEG Streamclip could successfully convert the file to another format.

Some digging led me to an awesome program MoKgVm2DVD (this stands for MKV - OGM). It is really just a frontend for MEncoder (or was it ffmpeg, I'm not positive) but it correctly identifies the audio and video streams and passes on the correct commands to convert them into another file format.

The developer of this freeware application cautions that it is in preliminary stages and far from stable, however, I had great success with it.

It can also play MKV files too, as well as VLC.

MoKgVm Screenshots:

Main screen after opening the MKV:





When you press the Convert button you are presented with this slide out option window:






And when you press the OK button from the above Convert option window, you are presented with this Queue / Status window:




Even though this application isn't fully developed yet, it is a great asset.




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