.mkv - what is that?

[aslan]

I have a movie file with the ending .mkv.
I guess it's some kind of hd quality movie. I can see the movie with very good quality on the VLC player, but usually I want to watch the movies on my TV, which by the the way don't support HD, and I only have a dvd player with div-x reader. So if I now want to read the movie in my dvd player, is it posible to convert it to divx?

Simply what is .mkv?

[redwudz]

From our Glossary:

Matroska, MKA, MKV, MKS
A new video and audio container format similar to AVI but with several new features like support for OGG audio, Variable Framerate Video.
Matroska File Formats:
.mkv : Generally video files, as well those containing audio ( movies ) or video only
.mka : audio only files, can contain any supported audio compression format, such as MP2, MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AC3, DTS, PCM and soon MPC ( musepack )
.mks : a so called 'elementary' matroska stream containing any subtitles stream
For more info, see http://www.matroska.org

MKV can be a pain to convert as it's a container and can use different formats or codecs. You may need to extract the audio and it can take a bit of work to convert a MKV to another format. It was created as more of a 'end' format and not something to be converted or edited.

But we have a few tools to work with it: https://www.videohelp.com/tools?toolsearch=mkv&Submit=Search&s=&orderby=Name&hits=50&co...uthorfeatures= And Gspot or MediaInfo may tell you more about what's in the container.

[FulciLives]

XVID4PSP can open most MKV files. There is an option to convert to NTSC DVD or PAL DVD. Perhaps not the "best" solution for such a conversion but it should work with minimal input from you. Oh and you can also convert to XviD format which should work with a DivX capable DVD player.

Another option is ConvertXtoDVD which again can open most MKV files and convert to standard NTSC DVD or PAL DVD (no other formats though) and it is even easier to use I think than XVID4PSP although the quality of the output is sometimes not that great but on a SDTV (Standard Definition Television) you likely will be happy with the output if you are looking for a simple no brainer conversion program.

I'd try XVID4PSP first though.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[note-2-tom]

My freeware solution is a two part conversion. I use MKV2VOB and transcode to Xvid, which leaves the video in its original HD format. The program does have an "automatic" setting which would skip the transcode if the video is recognized, but that hasn't happened for me. The second step is to take the resulting AVI and run it through AutoGK, setting the screen width to 720 and use the Xvid code. True, there's quality loss with a double transcode, but the quality is still excellent. The down side is that it takes me about 2 hours to run the conversion for a 1 hour video. So far the process has worked every time.

If you want to go the shareware route, Ojosoft has some inexpensive solutions (Total video converter), and they are working on their Matroska converter to output to Xvid next month. Price difference between the two packages is roughly $6.

Good luck.

[KBeee]

or you could try AllToAVI - also freeware