Do you really need mkv on mp4 players?

rowwor · **Posted:** Fri May 28, 2010 5:57 am

Well, saw some people having trouble to play their mkv file on the latest device whatever it says it's supported. To me, I don't really need it to play on the mp4 players because of the size and it's capabilities tbh.
I've tried to convert a DVD rip to a mkv for testing purpose. it looks the same, why will i just keep the Dvd rip to watch instead of mkv? to me, it's the same quality.

I just wonder why people have to have mkv? Do you really need it?

Matt · **Posted:** Fri May 28, 2010 6:13 am

You're misunderstanding what MKV is. It is not a format, it is a container. As it stands at the moment it is the very best container around. It can hold any kind of video, audio or subtitle stream. This makes it very powerful and flexible.

If you rip a DVD straight to MKV all you're doing is taking the data that is in the VOB streams (contained on the disc) and re-packing them. This is handy for archiving and playing on home theatre systems, but not practical for portable players. The archive quality MKV file can be encoded down (typically to h264 video with aac audio) to produce a very high quality/small file which is suitable for portable players.

As for why we need MKV? AVI is old and barely supports any formats, the formats it does support are awful quality/compression wise (DivX and XviD I'm looking at you). MP4 containers while newer than AVI have a more limited feature set than MKV. We need MKV because it's the future.

You can do more reading here: http://www.matroska.org/technical/whatis/index.html

Some things that make MKV awesome:

Quote:

* Fast seeking in the file
* Chapter entries
* Full metadata (tags) support
* Selectable subtitle/audio/video streams
* Modularly Expendable
* Error resilience (can recover playback even when the stream is damaged)
* Streamable over the internet and local networks (HTTP, CIFS, FTP, etc)
* Menus (like DVDs have)

rowwor · **Posted:** Fri May 28, 2010 6:17 am

ok, maybe I am, from that dvd rip to mkv, it's the same size, but how about blue ray rips? what's the result of it? mkv with h264? acc? I bet the size will be crazy huge.

Matt · **Posted:** Fri May 28, 2010 6:24 am

rowwor wrote:

ok, maybe I am, from that dvd rip to mkv, it's the same size, but how about blue ray rips? what's the result of it? mkv with h264? acc? I bet the size will be crazy huge.

If you rip a DVD straight to MKV it'll be the same size as the DVD. The same applies to Blu-Ray. If the main movie is 30gb then you get a 30gb MKV file.

Once you have the archive quality MKV file the fun begins though. With the new advances in the x264 encoder (the best h264 encoder on the market right now) you can take the size of the movie down around 40% without really seeing any quality loss. If you're willing to resize the blu-ray rip from 1920x1080 to 1280x720 you can take it down even more.

This of course has nothing to do with MKV, other than the fact that it's the container the video/audio/subtitle streams are in.

It's important to note that when a player says it "supports MKV" it doesn't mean anything. Supporting a container doesn't mean you support the streams inside it.

rowwor · **Posted:** Fri May 28, 2010 6:29 am

Thanks Matt, it seems a lot of people have mkv contains huge files not ripped from dvd. That makes me wonder why they need that big size in the small mp4 players whatever it says supported but they are suffering with it.

The Warrior Poet · **Posted:** Fri May 28, 2010 6:29 am

Excellent explanation Matt. You know a hell of a lot more than I do about it.

rowwor · **Posted:** Fri May 28, 2010 7:04 am

Thanks you Matt, just in case you haven't see this. And also the latest makeMKV has different result here.

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