Muxing out subs & audio tracks increases file sizes?

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Flyentologist
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Mar 28, 2019 1:24 pm

Muxing out subs & audio tracks increases file sizes?

Post by Flyentologist »

I’ve recently started nearing my storage limits and before buying new drives I thought it prudent to take proactive action and go through all my media and mux out audio and subtitle tracks I have no need for. However in almost every single case, stripping foreign subtitles, audio tracks, and commentaries tend to increase file sizes by between 500MB-2GB when using MakeMKV.

My main question is, why? Is there a lot of decompression happening? Even just rewriting the media file with no changes at all leads to larger files.
Woodstock
Posts: 9912
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:21 pm

Re: Muxing out subs & audio tracks increases file sizes?

Post by Woodstock »

There is no need to use MakeMKV to just remove tracks from your existing MKV files; mkvmerge from mkvtoolnix can do it.

However, just removing audio and subtitle tracks is not going to make much of a dent in your file sizes, as they're rarely more than a percent or two of the overall size. Using a tool like handbrake to compress the video better will make a HUGE difference... And it can leave out tracks you don't want.
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