MKV file not working..

[looklemonade]

I've been trying to watch an MKV file for a while, and it hasn't worked. With the Core Media Player I can get audio but no video, and the VLC media player doesn't work at all. The strange thing is that originally, I've been able to watch these files on the VLC with subtitles and it all works dandy, but one day it just didn't anymore.

I got VideoInspector, and it says I need these codecs:

Code: V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Full name: MPEG4 ISO advanced

and

Code: A_MPEG/L3
Full name: MPEG Audio 1, 2, 2.5

Does anyone know where I might be able to find these codecs, or what packs I could get that have these? Even if you don't know that much, if you could just help me figure out how to get my MKV files played I would be very grateful. Thankyou.

[Hiko96786]

Aloha,
Check out this website in ref to .mkv files. Hopefully an answer will be there for you. If not just repost.
Mahalo,
Edward

[looklemonade]

I've been looking around, but I can barely find a thing about mkv files - and it's never anything that really helps me. I just need to find those codecs (according to VideoInspector), and google search just sends me to pages talking about the codecs, but there's nowhere to download them.

[Hiko96786]

Sorry I forgot to put the links in...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKV
and
http://www.matroska.org/
On this one go to the FAQs and Guides.
Edward

[|_NiGhTmArE_|]

mkv and mka are only containers developed by matroska... so the problem is the codec... AVC (or H264, it's the same) is a proprietary video codec... to encode and decode those video on linux we use the x264 library (that is free)...

now Linux mint is shipped with all codec (x264 included) and I can play correctly AVC video file with totem... if you want, vlc does the same (you already know... try to reinstall it or to upgrade to the dev version) or mplayer...

said that I have also found a lot of "unstandard" avc that cause Totem to crash and that produce a lot of garbage in vlc or mplayer (so it may be the file you have)

[looklemonade]

Thanks for the help you guys, but after some more searching on the web I found out the problem.. It turns out that for some reason, with VLC, if there are a lot of mkv files in the folder of the file you're trying to play, it won't work. o_o So I just moved most of the mkv files somewhere else, and it works now. *headdesk* Thankyou anyways!