Help with VirtualDubMod

Can anyone give me a step by step tutorial on how to convert an ogm to avi and mkv to avi and keep both audio with using VirtualDubMod please? I tried to find everywhere but I couldn’t, I really need to convert a lot of my files!

Thank you!

You have to be careful when transcoding from ogm to avi or mkv to avi. It will only work if the video and audio are each supported in avi. Here’s some examples where it might not work: AC3 audio, VBR (variable-bitrate) audio, ogg vorbis audio**, video codec with B-frames (for example some flavors of h.264, like x264). In some cases you may have multiple audio tracks, and “generic”* avi supports only one, so you’d have to pick one.
In any case, if you have something really simple, open it with VirtualDubMod, then click video, direct stream copy. Then click file, save as (you may or may not have to pick direct stream copy again), and pick your container. I don’t have a video with multiple audio streams to tinker with at the moment, so I don’t know what would happen in that case, but I don’t think it should be too hard to figure out.

* It’s possible to have multiple audio tracks in avi (as for example in videos produced by nandub), but it’s a rather ugly hack.
** you can have ogg audio in avi, but that’s another ugly hack

Finally I want to point out this thread, (which actually points out my out-of-date knowledge of matroska). The idea is there’s probably more up-to-date tools for processing matroska than VirtualDubMod. You can find some of them listed on this page http://www.matroska.org/downloads/ (after picking your platform, scroll down to find editors)

I should add... If transcoding (meaning losslessly copying the audio and video stream from one container to another) doesn’t work, you always have the option of re-encoding the stream you can’t copy. (ogg vorbis to CBR mp3 for example)