MKV

What is MKV?

A .mkv file is a Matroska video/audio multimedia file. It is a container like MOV and AVI, providing support for a huge number of different video, audio and subtitles compression formats. It is not really intended for media content distribution on a large scale, but is achieving it anyway. MKV's popularity is partly due to its incredible support for several subtitle formats including SRT, SSA and USF text subtitles, or VobSub streams coming directly from the DVD. The team is also currently working on a DVD-like menu structure for the format.

Formats

Matroska file extensions are .MKV for video (with subtitles and audio), .MK3D for stereoscopic video, .MKA for audio-only files, and .MKS for subtitles only.

Codec

Rather than being designed around a particular format's capabilities, Matroska's container simply provides a framework to mux and interact with audio, video, and even subtitle streams. Video commonly found in the Matroska container includes RealVideo, XviD, and more recently AVC. Audio ranges from Vorbis (OGG) to MP3 or even the original AC-3 audio from a DVD. Matroska files will sometimes have an extension of .MKA instead, indicating an audio only file - typically encoded in the Vorbis format.