If you want to compile the tools yourself then you must first decide if you want to use a 'proper' release version or the current development version. As both Matroska and MKVToolNix are under heavy development there might be features available in the Git source code repository that are not available in the releases. On the other hand the Git source code repository version might not even compile.

Download

Either download the release 12.0.0 (GPG signature) and unpack it or get a fresh copy from my Git source code repository.

Note that I sign my released source code tarballs with the same GPG key I use for email and my Debian/Ubuntu APT repositories: sub-key ID 0x74AF00AD F2E32C85 of key ID 0x0F92290A 445B9007. Commits in Git are not signed.

Requirements

In order to compile MKVToolNix you need a couple of libraries and programs. Most of them should be available pre-compiled for your distribution. You can find the up-to-date list in the README.md file.

Building and installing MKVToolNix from source

Instructions for building libEBML, libMatroska and MKVToolNix itself are part of the README.md file. You can either build from a release tarball or from the current sources in my Git repository.

Building a DEB package for Debian/Ubuntu

Building binary packages for Debian and Ubuntu either from my Git sources or from a release tarball is pretty easy. The following steps assume that you're not root but may use sudo.

First install a couple of packages needed for building MKVToolNix:

sudo apt install build-essential fakeroot debhelper ruby \
  libbz2-dev liblzo2-dev zlib1g-dev libmagic-dev \
  libflac-dev libogg-dev libvorbis-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev \
  libboost-dev  libboost-filesystem-dev \
  libboost-regex-dev  libboost-date-time-dev libboost-system-dev \
  nlohmann-json-dev qtbase5-dev qtbase5-dev-tools qtmultimedia5-dev \
  pkg-config po4a docbook-xsl xsltproc

Note that the package nlohmann-json-dev is only available on newer versions of Debian and Ubuntu. If it isn't available for installation, then just proceed without it.

Next download either a release tarball or get a development snapshot from my git repository, rename one of its sub-directories, call a helper script and lastly build the packages themselves. For a release tarball, e.g. v12.0.0, you have to do the following:

curl -O https://mkvtoolnix.download/sources/mkvtoolnix-12.0.0.tar.xz
tar xJf mkvtoolnix-12.0.0.tar.xz
cd mkvtoolnix-12.0.0
mv debian-upstream debian
dpkg-buildpackage -b -rfakeroot -uc -us

For a development snapshot from my git repository the steps are the following:

sudo apt-get install autoconf automake git
git clone git://github.com/mbunkus/mkvtoolnix.git mkvtoolnix-12.0.0
cd mkvtoolnix-12.0.0
git submodule init
git submodule update
rm -rf .git
mv debian-upstream debian
./autogen.sh
cd ..
tar -c -f - mkvtoolnix-12.0.0 | xz > mkvtoolnix_12.0.0.orig.tar.xz
cd mkvtoolnix-12.0.0
dpkg-buildpackage -b -rfakeroot -uc -us

Afterwards the two new packages mkvtoolnix and mkvtoolnix-gui will have been built in the same directory the source code directory (mkvtoolnix-12.0.0) is in.