How To Open MKV Files
Has anyone ever sent you a link to a “really cool video!” only once you downloaded it, the video was in some weird format your video player couldn’t play?
Among the video formats there are a few, such as MPG, AVI, WMV and MOV that pretty much everyone recognizes and knows how to play. There is one, however, that seems to be gaining acceptance and use, known as Matroska Video, with MKV as its extension.
So let’s say a friend sends that same download, and what you eventually get is this:
Really_Cool_Video.mkv
First, what is Matroska video? Matroska (MKV for Video, MKA for Audio) is an open standard free Container format. That means, first of all, that it isn’t a codec. It’s not like Divx or H264. You don’t encode using the Matroska codec. You encode using Divx or H264 and then house it in the MKV/MKA container. Why use Matroska instead of Avi? Because the MKV file format is able to hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file. That means you don’t need to attach a subtitle file; MKV can store the file internally, along with multiple audio tracks, chapters and more. The stated goal for MKV is for the file format to become the universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows. Matroska is similar in conception to other containers like AVI, MP4 or ASF, but is completely open source.
With that out of the way, let’s answer the important question: What do you do with it? If you’re a typical computer user, you’ll double-click it only to find that Windows Media Player doesn’t know what to do with it, and neither does QuickTime Player (if using a Mac).
Still, there are a couple easy solutions.
The simplest, no matter what platform you’re using (Windows, Mac or Linux), is to install one of the do-it-all video players, such as VLC or MPlayer, or one of their variants.
VLC is one of my favorites (mainly because I like how it works in Linux), and in my experience will pretty much play everything I throw at it. MPlayer is good too, although I don’t like how the standard MPlayer looks in Linux. To combat this, I use a frontend to MPlayer known as SMPlayer, which also works in Windows.
You can download and install those players at these links:
VLC: http://www.videolan.org/
MPlayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
SMPlayer: http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/
There is also the option to provide playback capabilities to an existing media player. Many Windows folks are happy with Windows Media Player (just as Mac folks are happy with QuickTime Player and Linux folks might be happy with Totem), and for those people, there exist ways to add Matroska support to their favorite players.
For Windows users, it’s as simple as adding the CCCP media playback addon. CCCP, which in this case stands for Combined Community Codec Pack. For Mac users, a Quicktime Component called Perian is available. And if you use Totem (in Gnome Linux) or Kaffeine (in KDE Linux), you have options as well, such as adding more GStreamer support or the extra Xine libraries.
These add-ons typically add support for a myriad of extra codecs not generally included. These may be as simple as adding Divx support, all the way to more esoteric formats for phone cameras and such. Installation procedures differ for each, but here are links to the Windows and Mac options mentioned above (Linux users, check with your distro for installation particulars).
CCCP: http://www.cccp-project.org/
Perian: http://perian.org/
Once you’ve installed any of these players (or are using your old player with an add-on), you should be able to open up a MKV file simply by right-clicking it to bring up a contextual menu, then selecting the “Play With…” option (or the “Open With…” option, depending on your operating system). In fact, some video players, when installed, will simply go ahead and make themselves the default player for all media types they support. If so, you can just double-click to open.
If your player supports MKV files, but isn’t the default, you can make it the default for that type fairly easily. In Linux, simply choose the Properties option for a file, then go to the Open With tab and select your favorite player. This will change not only the individual file, but all files of that type. The process is similar in Mac OS X and Windows, although you may need to choose the “Get Info” option instead of Properties. As is often the case, the process is similar, but the terminology is different.
So now you know!
