Why are there so many .mkv files out there?

[Onceler2]

what is this file format good for?

[redwudz]

MKV is a container format. It can contain several different codecs, both for audio and video. Video is often H.264, a very efficient and compact codec, moreso than Divx or MPEG-2. It can also contain more than one audio stream. The downside is that it takes a fair amount of computer power to process. If you are seeing large MKV files, they are likely high definition, longer videos. Try MPCHC for playback, but VLC should be able to play them also. http://www.matroska.org/

[jman98]

Some years ago some people decided that it would be a very good idea to create a container format free of patents and royalties. AVI had kind of been a standard, but technically it belongs to Microsoft and may be covered by patents still in effect in the USA and other countries. Plus AVI has some limitations because it's pretty old and it was designed to meet the needs of the time in which it was created. So Ogg and MKV got created by different groups of people. I think that what ultimately happened is that MKV reached maturity quicker than Ogg and became the de facto standard for a free container format.

MKVs easily hold multiple subtitle and audio files along with video and its lack of patent and royalties has made it into essentially a standard. So that's why people use it - it's free and it's well supported. No manufacturer of a playback device (media streamer, DVD or BluRay players, etc.) needs to pay any money to support it. They just have to have a decoder chip and firmware that understands it.

[mh2360]

A couple of years ago you would be hard pressed to find a hardware device that supported MKV, but now that is changing. Media players such as WDTV and quite a few bluray players support MKV, and i'm sure we'll see many more players with MKV support in the future.

[SatStorm]

All the nmt-based solutions (Popcorn hour, WDTV, eGrate, etc) supports the mkv container.

It is a container that simply works and support various things: Multiply audio / video files, subtitles, fonts for subtitles, infos, chapters...

I end up becoming very font of mkv.