Alice in Userland

Formatting an MKV container into DVD format with Avidemux, Mkvtoolnix, dvdauthor, and K3B

1. If there are subtitles in the MKV that you want to appear in the video, download/install mkvtoolnix and mkvextract-gui. With the GUI, open the MKV file, check the box next to the subtitle track you want, and extract.
2. Open the MKV container in Avidemux. At the first dialogue, “H.264 Detected”, hit cancel. At the second dialogue, “Index is not up to date”, hit yes.
3. From the top menu bar, select Auto > DVD
4. If you extracted subtitles earlier, click “Filters” under “Video” on the left-hand side-bar. Select “Subtitles” from the list, choose the type of subtitle that you extracted, press add (“+” button), and navigate to the subtitle file (in the folder with MKV file by default)
5. If your video is in widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, you’ll want to click “Configure” under “Video” and change it accordingly, or else it will default to 4:3 aspect ratio.
6. Select “File -> Save -> Save Video…” and save it as “your_filename_here.mpeg”. This step will take a long time, as your video is encoding to another format.
7. Create a new textfile called “movie.xml” and save the following as the contents:
   <dvdauthor>
   <vmgm>
   </vmgm>
   <titleset>
   <titles>
   <pgc>
   <vob file=”your_filename_here.mpeg” />
   </pgc>
   </titles>
   </titleset>
   </dvdauthor>
8. In the folder with your mpeg file and xml file, do the following command as regular user: dvdauthor -o outputfolder -x movie.xml
9. Open up K3B, and select New Project > New Video DVD Project
10. In the upperhalf of the window, navigate to the outputfolder created in step 8
11. Copy the contents of VIDEO_TS into the VIDEO_TS folder in the lower half of the window.
12. Insert a blank DVD, press Burn, and fill in any additional parameters for your DVD.

It’s magical! Here’s the article I expanded on: [plug]