14 DAY TRIAL // Moritz Bunkus released today, January 22, 2017, a new stable release of his popular, multiplatform, and open-source MKV (Matroska) manipulation utility for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
There are a bunch of exciting new features added in the new MKVToolNix 9.8.0 release, which comes three weeks after the previous version, namely MKVToolNix 9.7.1, but first we'd like to inform package maintainers about an important change in the build system as parallel builds are now enabled by default.
The included version of the "drake" build tool has been removed," said the developer in today's release notes, which we've attached below for your reading pleasure. "Since Ruby 2.1 rake has supported parallel builds, too. The MKVToolNix build system has been adjusted to enable parallel builds by default."
Here's what's new in MKVToolNix 9.8.0
Prominent new features of MKVToolNix 9.8.0 include support for reading DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) subtitles from both Matroska (MKV) files and MPEG transport streams, and a workaround for MPEG TS files where timestamps are way off from the video and audio ones despite the fact that subtitle packets are multiplexed properly.
For Matroska source files, MKVToolNix 9.8.0 implements the ability to delay the track's codec if set via the JSON identification result. Other changes include the addition of the "qad" and "qaa" ISO 639-2 language codes for French speaking users, as well as support for creating and using default indexes for VobSub tracks that are read from MKV files without the CodecPrivate element.
All these goodies have been implemented in the mkvmerge components, but it looks like MKVToolNix 9.8.0 also improves the graphical user interface (GUI) with the addition of checks for various common problems with the installation, which will be run automatically when the GUI starts, reporting possible issues to the user.
Other than that, MKVToolNix 9.8.0 addresses various bugs reported by users since the previous release of the software, which you can read in the changelog below. In the meantime, we recommend updating your MKVToolNix installation to version 9.8.0 by downloading the packages for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows systems right now from our website.