.mkv videos

[mememe]

Does anybody know of a media player i can get with linux mint 17(cinnamon) that will play .mkv videos?

I've been binge watching game of thrones recently as I only ever watched up to the middle of season 4 and have been meaning to catch up for ages. Had no problems with the first 4 seasons, but for some reason most of the more recent seasons seem to be mostly uploaded in .mkv format. I downloaded the whole of season 5 only to find out afterwards that it was .mkv and nothing seems to be able to play it. It says that if I update vlc then that should play it but when I went to update it said I already had the most up to date version, yet it won't play them. I tried mplayer and that's no better. None of the media players I can find that supports .mkv seems to have a linux version.
Thanks.

[phd21]

Hi mememe,

Welcome to the wonderful world of Linux Mint and its excellent forum!

See this post
no X-Vid codec - Linux Mint Forums
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=269658&p=1471434#p1471434

Hope this helps ...

[mememe]

yeah thanks phd, i was reading that just now. which video converters do you recommend? i think converting to mp4/avi might be a better option for me.

[Hoser Rob]

So you mean mplayer or smplayer? Anyway, SMplayer is just a front end for mplayer or mpv, which is a fork of mplayer. And both include all those codecs,, as does VLC, out of the box. Here's a list of formats supported by mplayer out of the box:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/codecs-status.html

ANyway, the fact that a file has a .mkv extension tells you nothing about what type of video is in there ... you can put most any common formats in it, it's the most versatile container. There's a lot of confusion about codecs versus containers.

The most common video format is x264/AVC though HEVC is catching on. Playing a .mp4 file with x264 format video is no different from playing a .mkv with the x264. And I've been using Linux exclusively for a few years and have never had this problem.

You should still install mint-meta-codecs. You should also post some useful system info ... copy/paste this to the terminal and copy/paste the text output here:

Code: Select all

inxi -Fxz

Also, install mediainfo-gui, open a problem file with it, switch to Text view mode, and copy/paste that here.

[kukamuumuka]

VLC, gnome-mplayer, SMPlayer, ... etc.

[phd21]

Hi mememe,

You are welcome...

If the video files are in good shape, not corrupted, then your system should be able to play the "mkv" video formatted files. I have no problems playing or creating mkv video files.

My favorite multimedia converters so far are "FF Multi Converter" and "Curlew", but I have most Linux multimedia converters installed. Keep in mind, converting videos is time-consuming and hardware intensive. "Avidemux" AppImage is good for some things as well, and most video editors can also convert one video format to another.

...