MKV

This page relies entirely on facts. Fact Cat knows this because of his learnings. Sorry for the lack of dick jokes.

MKV, or Matroska (as it is known to the chimps that developed it), is a Media Container which is used to share movies online by incompetent fools. Unlike the superior MPEG4 container, MKV Specifications do not list which codecs can be used, which prevents manufactures of hardware-based players from actually providing real support.

Streams placed in this container magically become smaller.

Even if a device "supports" MKV, there is no guarantee that any particular file will play back. Despite not even being recognized as a media file on the latest versions of Windows and Mac OS X, MKV still enjoys the support of pirates due to a number of myths (see below).

The .mkv format is seen by the community as being "cool" and a mark of a clued up user. This is mostly because it is less widely supported, and can be harder to use than mainstream container formats. In communities like the movie/episode piracy community, technical merit is only one of two requirements for a technology - the other is community perception.

Playback

A traffic cone and a media player have so much in common.

Unlike other containers, MKV files don't play back, out-of-the-box, on Windows or OSX. Their playback requires the installation of the Crap Crap Crap Pack or a media player that's stuck in 1995.

MKV Myths

MKV Files are smaller and have the best quality

The most persistent myth are thanks to uploaders who create crappy 350 MB rips. Of course, these are, nonsense because MKV is a container— the file size is determined by the video and audio bitrate. The same h.264 streams can be muxed to any container with the exact same file size as an MKV container.

MKV can hold an unlimited number of streams, other containers like MP4 and ISO don't

The ISO spec does not, and for a good reason— these limitations are put in place for manufactures of hardware-based players and are of no concern to the user. In the rare case that you need more than 1MB of streams you can simply ignore the ISO spec and have an unlimited number of streams.

MKV supports any codec, other containers like MP4 don't

No, the ISO standard does not (Ogg). But there is nothing stopping me or anyone else muxing said formats in. This nonsense is contently thrown around as a feature, it's not; it's actually an anti-feature, because it completely abandons hardware support by having updating the "standard" continuously instead of in revisions.

MKV is better because the tools are free

Nothing special there. Free tools exist for other containers.

MP4 doesn't support embedded subtitles

Or, as a butthurt faggot put it:

	“	The bitch who wrote all the above is obviously a monolingual Amerifag who doesn't even know what subtitles are for. He also fails to understand the term "open standard". Therefore, he could never acknowledge the convenience of the MKV format. Please ignore this page.	„
	—Yoshinatsu - being an utter twat

Actually, MP4 supports embedded subtitles, known as MPEG4 Timed Text in the standard.

Please god make it die

Unfortunately at the present time there is no way to ram this information into the skulls of the chimps that upload these files. However, MKV can be converted into a universally playable MPG/MP4 file in seconds using the appropriate software. Both MKV2Vob and Yamb are perfectly capable of doing this.

Let's face it: DRM-protected files have more hardware support than MKV; and while it's completely unintentional, MKV is to movies as DRM is to music.

MKV is part of a series on Softwarez Visit the Softwarez Portal for complete coverage.