A Muxing Question

What does it mean when a fansub is "Muxed"? For example:

{HorribleSubs} Hanamaru Kindergarten - 11 {480p}-muxed.avi

I've been seeing this term lately but I have no idea what it means. Does it matter? Am I better off with 'muxed' fansubs than 'unmuxed' ones? Thanks for your help.

Muxed is short for multiplexing. see wikipedia entry for details.

In short, it is a combining of multiple digital and analog data streams up within one 'container' or .AVI file.

OGG and MKV files are also muxed files, but not as tightly which means that you can selectively turn off or disable the audio or subtitle stream.

The use of the 'muxed' term in your example above is a bit redundant, but what they were probably trying to communicate is that a MKV source file has been muxed down to a bundled AVI file.

Edited on 03/26/2010 01:18 PM.

Thanks. It sounds like this is entirely about how the data is transmitted to me, not the finished product. If Multiplexing has been around since the days of telegraphy, I'd be surprised if it is only now coming into use on the internet.

HorribleSubs doesn't release AVI files (they don't support standalone DVD players). So if a release is tagged as "HorribleSubs muxed-AVI" then someone other than HorribleSubs took their release, demuxed the streams from their MKV container and re-muxed them into an AVI container. The tag is to show that HorribleSubs didn't release this file (and won't support it) but they created the content (i. e. the subs resp. rips); the releaser doesn't want to "steal" this release (and publish it under his own name, albeit even such groups do exist...) but make it available for users who can't use the original file format.

Remuxing a file may or may not include re-encoding the video using some codec that a normal DVD player supports. HorribleSubs creates H.264 video streams which can be put into AVI containers but won't be played by most DVD players (while video player programs on a PC will support these if a H.264 codec is installed); pure remuxing without recoding would not make a lot of sense because of this. The same goes for certain audio codecs. So prepare for any kind of surprises here: "Remuxed to AVI" is a variant where nothing should be taken for granted. (XviD and MP3 as codecs would be reasonable but you never know.)
There is a third parameter relevant for most DVD players, and that's pixel per line. Standard DVD players support a maximum of 720px width, and the HorribleSubs releases for Hanamaru Youchien are 1280x720px resp. 864x480px, neither of which would play on a normal DVD player (without HD support). So the video would have to be downscaled to, say, 720x400px... which implies a full recoding (resulting in a quality loss).

If you watch your anime on a (not too old) PC then the MKV version (with H.264 video and switching option for subtitles plus possibly more than one audio stream) is better (and perhaps even smaller to download as H.264 compresses more efficiently than older codecs). If you watch on a DVD player the remuxed version is very similar to the conversion you would manually do anyway to play this stuff. The remuxed version would only be for people who can't remux themselves and can't play the original release for whatever reason (no H.264, PC too slow, width too large etc.).

Edited on 03/29/2010 04:39 PM.

Thanks. Almost everything I watch is watched on a DVD player, and I prefer fansubs that are already in AVI mode to begin with. This is because AllToAVI cannot handle more than one set of subtitles running simultaneously (people talking or a song playing in the background, for example) as it transforms an episode from MKV to AVI, so it switches back and forth between conversations, showing a line of dialogue only until the next one (in either conversation) comes along. Thus lines appear briefly and are a mix of the two different conversations, which is highly confusing. If two lines appear simultaneously, apparently one doesn't get shown at all. So I prefer AVI fansubs which don't have this potential problem.

Anyway, I treat muxed fansubs the same as any AVI one, and haven't noticed any problems so far. Even fansubs which started out in AVI have to be run through the AllToAVI conversion process once to ensure that they will play on a DVD player. Maybe I'm duplicating some process which I was doing already, but AllToAVI doesn't complain, and if it doesn't, I won't either.