MKV Optimizer

MKV Optimizer is a simple yet handy application that enables you to remove data that is unnecessary from MKV files, such as audio tracks, subtitles or metatags information. With its help, you can easily strip down your videos to reduce their size and thus share them easier.

The first thing you need to know about MKV Optimizer is that it cannot work unless MKVToolnix is installed on the system. The presence of the latter is detected automatically but if MKVToolnix is not found in the usual folders, you will be prompted to specify its location.

To begin, you need to specify the location of a folder to scan for MKV files. MKV Optimizer starts an extensive search, including subdirectories and displays all the detected MKV videos in the table below. You can filter the results by specifying the minimum number of audio and subtitle streams.

Before proceeding, it is advisable you navigate to the application’s settings to configure its behavior. MKV Optimizer can be instructed to clean up the metatags of the input files, such as the title, tags, track statistics, attachments, and the names of the subtitle, the video and the audio tracks. Provided you have ffmpeg installed, you can also recode the audio track.  

Forced subtitles can be kept if you want to and, what’s more, MKV Optimizer can reorder the track IDs (video, audio, subtitle). The timestamp of the file, its date and the time, can be preserved.

One feature worth mentioning is that MKV Optimizer can eliminate the read-only state of a file.

MKV Optimizer is an interesting application for video processing, which allows batch operations on MKV files to eliminate data that is not required. For instance, you can use this application to remove subtitles in any other language than yours, which reduces the size of the file. This allows you to share files easier with others and it saves you some storage space.