Am Thu, Feb 20, 2025 at 11:14:19AM -0700 schrieb Mark Knecht:

On Thu, Feb 20, 2025 at 11:01 AM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:

Howdy,

I downloaded some really new videos the other day, .mkv ones. Nothing I had would play them, mplayer or mpv based players.

Convert them using handbrake. Probably saves you a bunch of disk space also

Matroska is just a container format – as its name implies from the Russian dolls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll

MKV is simply one of the *the* best container formats out there right now.
It is open and supports many many different types of media streams inside (video, audio, subtitle, metadata, attachments, chapters). It possibly
became very wide-spread through its use in the movie ripping scene, but by know is also supported by the corporate world. Even my Sony TV can play them natively from a USB device (well, it’s Android after all).

If you really want to use a different container (maybe mp4), then convert it without re-encoding:
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0 -c copy output.mp4

`-map 0` means copy every stream from the input file, not just the first of each type
`-c copy` means copy the streams without re-encoding

But it won’t make any difference to the player. Unless you disabled the mkv use flag, that is. ^^

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