[Matroska-users] Re: [Matroska-general] mkv and DVD/DIVx player

[Christian HJ Wiesner]

Marlene,

i am sorry to say that there is no way to play matroska files on DVD 
standalone players, and no easy way to play them on DivX players. Main 
reason is, that a single MKV file can contain MANY different audio, 
video and subtitles tracks using VARIOUS different compression methods. 
Here a short list ( not complete ) :

Video :

MPEG4 ( DivX 4/5, XviD, 3ivX, etc. )
Realvideo ( RV9/10 )
Quicktime video
MPEG1/2

Audio :

MP 2/3
AC3
Vorbis
AAC / HE-AAC
FLAC
Wavpack
Realaudio

Subtitles :

SRT
SSA/ASS
vobsubs
USF

You get the idea ? Normal DVD players can only play MPEG1 and MPEG2 
video, in combination with AC3 and MP2 audio. So-called 'DivX Players' 
extend this to MPEG4 video and MP3 audio, and thats it. Even when a MKV 
file would contain only MPEG4 video and MP3 audio, the standalone 
manufacturers had to add special support to be able to 'read' the MKV 
file structure, before these units can actually play the files.

The only possible way was to add MKV reading support to MPEG2 encoding 
tools like the famous TMPGencoder, so that people could easily create 
DVDs and S-VCDs from MKV files. This was working at one time with a 
former matroska DirectShow splitter we had, and for some strange reason 
has now recently stopped working ( we dont know why, but are 
investigating ). In any case, during this kind of conversion you will 
likely loose all subtitles in the MKV file, and we dont know a way to 
fix this yet.

We do understand that many users have problems understanding, why 
release groups are using MKV instead of well known AVI container. Well, 
please understand that we did not 'invent' matroska to give anime 
release groups a better container for their ( sometimes illegal ) file 
releases. Our aim is to replace the old, outdated AVI container from 
Microsoft with something better, more modern, as a general use video 
file container with great flexibility. We honestly didnt expect the 
impact our project would have on the file sharing scene, and are even 
very surprised that MKV has become the preferred container for anime 
releases today. The reason this is is more the weakness of the other, 
competing formats ( like MP4, the real, official container for MPEG4 
video standard ) than really matroska's strength for content distribution.

However, we do understand that many users do have huge problems to deal 
with matroska, and therefore i am currently concentrating on finding an 
easy way for MKV-to-DVD conversion, to make things much easier for the 
general user.

I hope this explains a few things

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org




Marlène Kopp schrieb:

> is it an easy way for the most popular dvd/divx home player to play 
> mkv file ?
> I searched the web. I found:
> Extract files from mkv
> Pass from .rm to avi
> With all the problems and quality looses that comes with
> I ask for myself but also for many people on the web who search an 
> easy solution to take an .mkv and play it with a dvd/divx player.
> Thanks