VLC media player is a popular, open-source multimedia player that supports various video and audio formats. However, it may not display chapter markers for some MKV files, especially those containing chaptered videos from YouTube. In such cases, you can use FFmpeg, a powerful multimedia framework, to create an .xml metadata file with chapter information. This file can be embedded in the MKV file, allowing VLC to display chapter markers correctly.
Prerequisites
To follow this tutorial, you need:
- VLC media player
- FFmpeg
You can download VLC from https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html. To install FFmpeg, refer to the official documentation for your operating system:
Creating a metadata file using FFmpeg
First, extract the video and audio streams from the MKV file:
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -vcodec copy -an temp_audio.mp3 -c:v libx264:aic flag=global_header temp_video.mp4
Replace "input.mkv" with the name of your MKV file. This command creates two files: "temp_audio.mp3" and "temp_video.mp4".
Next, create the metadata file:
ffmpeg -i temp_video.mp4 -filter:v "setts=entry_index=0,setpts=PTS-TIME_BASE/1000" -map 0:a:0 -metadata title="Introduction" -f matroska output.mkv
Replace "temp_video.mp4" with the name of the video file created in the previous step. This command creates an output file named "output.mkv" with the embedded metadata.
Merging the audio and metadata files
Finally, merge the audio and metadata files:
ffmpeg -i output.mkv -i temp_audio.mp3 -c:a copy output_final.mkv
Replace "output.mkv" with the name of the file created in the previous step. This command creates the final MKV file with embedded chapter markers.
Testing the result
Open the final MKV file in VLC media player. The chapter markers should now be displayed correctly.