AVC vs mkv

[Strawson]

What is the difference between AVC and mkv? Often I saw videos on the internet in which they are both 1080p, but say one saids blu ray AVC and one is blu ray 20MBit+ mkv. Which has higher quality? What are the differences? But both are crazy huge in file size and I'm just wondering which is better. Thanks.

[guns1inger]

MKV is a container for video/audio and other bits and bobs (subtitles, stills etc). AVC (Advanced Video Codec) is a strand of the mpeg-4 family, also known as H.264. H.264 is the codec de jour at the moment, being used for Bluray discs as well as a lot of online streaming. It provides good quality at bitrates lower than the competition (mpeg-2, mpeg-4 - Divx/Xvid). A lot of the current mkv files are encoded using AVC, but 720p and 1080p videos still clock in at 4GB and up.