Remuxing will not result in loss of quality. TRANSCODING will. Remuxing
just pulls the MKV apart into it’s individual parts, letting you relayer
them as you choose, including adding or removing parts.
Thanks for the help everybody!
Did something work?
@seanfrisbey said:
Did something work?
I think the mkv files I was struggling with are corrupted or just encoded strangely. If I open them in VLC, they show long run times like they need to be split. But Plex seems to start and end the episodes on the time they should. Windows Player seems to be confused with them and can’t figure out a time schedule at all. No luck in remuxing them with MKVToolNix.
Then my next suggestion, to at LEAST see of it fixes it, is to run the file
through Handbrake. Transcode it at a quality you are happy with, and try
breaking up the resulting file. Odds are that Handbrake will not output a
broken file too.
Ok, what I ended up doing was putting the files through MakeMKV. Looks like the indexing was generally screwed on this whole series. Just doing a straight re-enconde (re-mux) through MakeMKV maintained the exact file size and now the indexing is fixed. Turns out the episodes didn’t need to be split at all, and that VLC was misleading me in the first placevia the files having messed up indexing.
Guess it’s a lesson learned when you download media you never quite know what you’ll get!
Thanks again for all the assistance.
Good job! Glad you got it figured out 
This is absolutely the best, no time issues, it’s perfect. Thank you so much! This multi-episode thing has plagued me for so long!
@OttoKerner said:
weird things that multi-episode files are plagued with.
this drives me nuts. there has to be a way to solve this (how kodi does) in the software itself.
personally i just skip over the repeated episode after i have watched the 2 part episodes but other users on my pms thing i have doubles of stuff haha.
Thanks for sharing
I tried MKVtoolnix to split my file of two episodes into one and it won’t split it precisely. For example in VLC the episode needs to be cut at 00:11:20 and that’s right before the next title of the second episode comes up. But MKVtoolnix ends up cutting too much before 00:11:20 or too much after. Meaning I end up with the second episode title in the first file or the end of the first episode in the second file. I tried fiddling with the nanoseconds or whatever at the end. And it still wouldn’t cut the file precisely where it needs to be.
I am at a loss for this. I have a bunch of cartoons that are like this but Plex expects each episode to be 1x01, 1x02, etc when showing up in the season menu. If I leave it as one episode I have duplicates of episodes 1 and 2 as two different links both linking to the same file. Very frustrating since I don’t want to start the second episode at the beginning of the file when it’s in the middle of the file.
An example of a cartoon with two episodes would be Rugrats. I need to get those mini episodes split from the one file. But without being precise in MKVtoolnix I can’t do it. I also don’t want to go through the hassle of re-encoding because I’m not good at that and I don’t want any quality loss.
Are there any other MKV splitters that can split the file with a visual preview (so I know for a fact where I’m cutting the episode) without re-encoding the file?
1 Like
This is great, thanks!
I’ve become a fan of avidemux. Free, open source… will remix any of the major formats provided you select the remuxer matching the format within the pullback. Avidemux won me over after previously using MKVtoonix but this may just be a matter of preference.
1 Like
Great stuff! Just what I needed; took only 10 minutes or so from first Google search - to this page and Otto’s very clear walk through, to then download and instal latest MKVtoolnix, and split Madagascar documentary combined Ep 01 and 02 from my BluRay disc rip. Many thanks.
1 Like
You are my hero!!! I have been AGONIZING about this project and you just saved me WEEKS of work.
I can’t seem to get the nanoseconds option to work. The programs seems to ignore it and I have the format correct.
00:11:49.488000000 or 11:49.488000000
max 9 numbers for nanoseconds.
Yeah, I’ve been having that trouble too. I think the remux-splitting process just isn’t very precise, since the nearest I-Frame can be anywhere +/- 2-3 seconds of where you specify, as hinted at by @OttoKerner.
Does anyone know if there is such a thing as a stream splitter that wouldn’t need to reencode the whole file, but could just cut at an individual frame? I guess it would have to fixup the encoding for those first/last blocks…
AFAIR VideoReDo will do exactly that.
I use https://www.solveigmm.com/en/products/video-splitter/ for that. It also handles HEVC-Videos.
Bandicut works for splitting video files on Windows and is fairly easy to use. The free version adds a few seconds of their logo to each file split. It’s $30 for the paid version that removes the logo. You have the option to remux or re-encode. For me the software gives you just enough fine control without giving you too many options.
Free version from Microsoft store.
Get Bandicut Video Cutter (Free) - Microsoft Store
Free or paid version from the developers website.
Bandicut Video Cutter, Joiner and Splitter Software (bandicam.com)
