BEST Lossless MKV converter?

[BladEra123]

Hello everyone,
I recently installed a batch of 52 episodes of an anime, which is worth 23GBs', they're all MKV and have fantastic quality! I am looking for a great converter/encoder which will make the files into MP4, Sony Vegas supported; doesn't matter if the file size remains the same (Each episode is around 300-600MB) I just really need an easy tool which can do the job for me, I'd appreciate any help, thank you

[l33tmeatwad]

There are two ways to accomplish getting the footage in a workable format for your editing software without losing any quality. The first is recontainering the footage. This is a fairly quick process and will copy the video data into a MP4 container that most editing software can use. The second method is to convert it to a lossless AVI. The files from this process are very large and will take up a lot of space, however it does prevent you from losing any quality and is also a fairly fast procedure. While recontainering sounds more appealing, if your MKV files contain 10bit video you may have to convert to lossless AVI. The only editing software I am aware of that supports 10bit h264 video is Adobe CC 2015, if you are using anything else you will be out of luck. I actually have guides that covers how to do both of these methods and a software pack with everything you need.

Just a piece of advice, DO NO RE-ENCODE THE VIDEO TO h264 JUST TO HAVE A MP4 AND TO SAVE SPACE, THIS WILL TAKE MUCH MORE TIME AND DRASTICALLY REDUCE THE QUALITY!!!

[BladEra123]

Thanks for your reply
What do you think about XviD4PSP? I have 6.0 version of that and used to use that some while back, would that program help in converting the MKV files to lossless AVI files? I need to play them on Sony Vegas, so if that program would help, can you please tell me what settings to put it on before starting my encoding? Thanks once more, hoping to hear soon.
By the way, if you think that program won't help then I'll gladly download AMV pack, but I already have the resource of XviD in my laptop so I was thinking to give that a shot first.

[l33tmeatwad]

That is not a great option, you have little control on how it handles color space conversion and other options, only allows you to use built in codecs, and eliminates any options you have for filtering to footage to clean it up if you need to.

[BladEra123]

Alright, so I just encoded my episodes to MP4, but I'm questioning myself if I should convert it into lossless AVI instead or if I should just stick with MP4, I don't notice any quality loss at all but what do you think about it? What would you recommend me, the file size is reasonable as well in MP4.

[l33tmeatwad]

Did you actually re-encode it or did you use a recontainering method? If you re-encoded it, while you may not notice it, there is always quality loss and since you will be encoding it again after you edit it will be further degraded. For those that have spent lots of time cleaning up footage and looking for visual flaws, it starts to become more and more obvious where the quality loss occurs and the more you work with footage the more you will notice. Working with AVI is always the best option as it's the most frame accurate way of handling footage, however if you need MP4 and you recontainer you still will avoid the quality loss you would get from re-encoding the footage to a lossy format.

[BladEra123]

Sorry for being a little confusing, I actually re-contained it, using the FFMpeg tool you have had in your blog, the file size is similar to the one in MKV and same with total bit-rate too; the quality looks very great and I think none of the quality was drained since you have also said that containering will prevent that from happening. Thank you for your help

[l33tmeatwad]

You're welcome. The tool probably makes it confusing too since you have to click the "Encode" button, however it's just copying the data exactly how it is, kinda like pouring water from a cup to a glass.