Converting a .mkv to .mp4, & watching it on an Xbox 360

I recently came upon a 720p .mkv Matroska video file I wanted to watch on my Xbox 360 and HDTV. This presents a couple problems. One, the Xbox 360 doesn’t support the Matroska container. Two, the video file itself is over 4GB, and the FAT32 file system on my flash drive only supports files under 2GB. So, I needed to find a way to transcode the movie over to a .mp4 container, and split the resulting files to be smaller than 2GB.

I started out by looking at the video and audio tracks of the Matroska file with Mediainfo Mac. I discovered that the video track was standard .h264, while the audio was Dolby Digital (DTS). I didn’t want to have to re-encode the video (and loose additional quality) during the conversion to .mp4, so I threw out some common tools like Handbrake, in order to focus on tools that offered video pass through. One option is to use Quicktime 7 Pro to pass-through the video to a .mov file (which the Xbox should play). The audio track, however, becomes a problem, because you can’t passthrough DTS audio to a .mp4 file or .mov file (you must re-encode as AAC, and loose the Dolby). This also doesn’t solve problem two (the size issue). For more on using Quicktime 7 Pro for this task, & streaming via the excellent Connect 360 tool (which I didn’t want to do), check out this tutorial.

So, I think I found a better tool, which happily solves both of the above two problems – MKVTool (unfortunately, not free). The first thing I did with MKVTool was split the original Matroska file into 5 smaller Matroska files. Then, I converted each one individually over to .mp4, using “pass-through” for video and AAC for audio. Note that selecting passthrough for audio results in a completely dropped audio track, as the .mp4 container can’t take DTS audio. I also tried creating a .h264/DTS AVI file, which MKVTool warned probably wouldn’t play, and it was right.

Success! Using MKVTool, I was able to split and pass-through my .mkv movie over to the .mp4 container, and successfully play it off a flash drive on my Xbox 360. The only downside is loosing the Dolby surround sound during the conversion to AAC, but the resulting audio still sounds good to my ears. I’ll keep looking for better/free tools, and a way to keep the DTS audio so if you know of any, feel free to leave a comment!