Front Row & MKV files ... an unhappy marriage

Question

Level 1

5 points

Front Row & MKV files ... an unhappy marriage

Hi All

I have a bunch of files that I encoded on my PC a while back when I first heard about HD etc that are in the MKV container. I have since then found the wonders of the Mac and I <3 my MBP specially the Front Row app. I have moved all my movie files to an external HD and using the mac as a media player however the MKV files are all choppy. I can play them fine on VLC and QT they play ok as well (though they do not load fully buffered much like a wmv file in QT with perian)

My question is does anyone have a solution to enable smooth playing of MKV files through Front Row? or is it just better off going to plex?

Cheers
Rey

Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Apr 15, 2011 7:09 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Klaus1

Level 9

52,749 points

Apr 17, 2011 2:08 AM in response to Reynastus

It could be a 'difficult' form of Matroska files. FYI Matroska is just a container like MOV or AVI, and some mkv have the video encoded with Real Video Codec (RV9 RV10). Perian+QT can't decode this, but VLC will play .mkv files just fine on OS X, as long as they don't use H.264!

It's a bit of a lottery until Matroska decide to support the Apple platform. I have found this:

http://mkv4mac.free.fr/index.php?lang=en&p=lec

which may help.

But there may be another workaround: 1. Get Info the mkv file

2. Change to extension to wmv. Save as wmv and that could work better.

Or this link may be helpful:

http://www.squidoo.com/mkv-converter-mac

Recently, a poster (ZachP14) suggested this:

"There's a program called Plex that runs .mkv files awesome on my 2.0 ghz macbook."

http://www.plexapp.com/

Maybe worth a try?

More information here:

ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska

Reply