Conversion (High Definition)
Things get interesting here. You will encounter newer containers like matroska (.mkv) and .MP4. The numbers 720p and 1080p join the party and what we get is scintillating video. I personally try and watch everything in HD, and if you don't have a Blu-ray player or drive yet, you can start off by downloading HD movie trailers.
The codecs to play MKV and MPEG4 files are included in the K-Lite pack, so don't worry about playback. Media Player Classic will play back the file for you, and so will VLC player (except if it's directly from a Blu-ray disc, an M2TS file). The video in these files is actually VC-1 format, which is MPEG-4, but of a higher profile. These need to be played on a commercial (but brilliant) software called PowerDVD.
I have given one successful method of converting them to regular AVIs; you can use it to back up your Blu-ray files. This technique is a little advanced; it involves demuxing the M2TS file using a software called tsMuxer. Then I ReMux it into the familiar AVI file with a software called VC-1toAVI. (Demuxing, incidentally, involves separating the individual audio and video streams. Your output will contain a VC-1 file for video and an AC3 file for audio.)
Once it's in an AVI container, you can re-encode and compress to whatever file you want, but I must warn you that dealing with HD files is a very memory-intensive process.
Another tool you need if you intend to convert and use MKV is the MKVToolnix software. You can convert regular AVIs, join several video files and add chapters, add additional audio streams etc with this. Even SUPER converts to MKV, it's in the previous section.
Conclusion
So here I've tried to explain in simple terms how to do things in digital video. Iin future I hope to do more features covering the topic, in greater detail – such as DVD authoring, editing etc. One important thing I have left out in this feature is subtitling, because I had done a full-length article on it a few weeks ago.
Hi Siddharth
