Yes, if you don't watch on a computer, you're in trouble if your other hardware doesn't support it.

You might want to look into MKV to MP4 converters. AFAIK, most hardware devices support MP4 files, and since MKV usually contains H264 video, the conversion would not involve re-encoding and would be a matter of seconds. Well, theoretically. I didn't try it myself.

Saying that MKV files are "better" depends on your definition of "better".

Upstairs I have a DVD player for the kids that has a USB port on the front. You can put movies on a USB stick, insert the stick into the DVD player, and watch movies from the stick. The DVD player will play WMP files and AVI (divx/xvid) files. It will not play MKV files. For that player, MKV is not better.

My car now has a head unit that plays DVDs. Like the above DVD player, it'll play WMP, DIVX and XVID files. It won't play MKV files. For my car, MKV files are not better.

A few years ago I bought a Boxee unit to stream video to my living room. It won't stream MKV files wirelessly (N) without stuttering and buffering. It plays all the other formats just fine. For Boxee, MKV is not better. From what I understand, streaming wirelessly to the PS3 has the same issue.

MKV may be the superior format, but if nothing I own other than my laptop will play the files, it's not "better" for me.

The whole Xvid vs mkv argument erupted seven, eight years ago in the anime fansub community (http://forum.minitokyo.net/t24906?page=1) and I vaguely remember having to play damage control when the translation / release group I was with made the move themselves... Out of all the arguments I heard (and that thread sums up a few that are on the line between somewhat coherent and barely literate), the only valid ones I encountered were -

1) Xvid was for a non-mp4 format, supported on a much larger number of hardware playback devices than mkv

2) Codec packs are required for playback (on Windows systems)

3) The format wasn't (at the time) well established and prone to feature creep as well as without a finalized codec format.

4) Multiple hard coded audio and subtitle tracks weren't completely necessary, and pick up of .txt subtitle tracks wasn't (at the time) fully supported.

5) A 1.5+ ghz CPU and 2+ gigs of ram are rec. for smooth playback (basically makes PIII and early PIV systems incapable of acting as media centers)

About a month into responding to these issues via e-mail, everyone on the team updated their filters to send anything with .mkv and xvid as part of the subject, to their respective /dev/null folder. On the larger internet and internally within release groups, this entire argument has been beaten to death multiple times. Honestly, only a few people (mainly ones who burn and/or play on hardware) noticed the change over and we did receive positive feedback from foreign language viewers who were glad that they didn't have to hunt down a norwegian, german, or french specific release of the video.

Retro

Then what are people bitching about? I've put the rest of the Internet into TIME-OUT until this is resolved, Nikos.

Videos in MKV files are just as big as in other containers. If someone provides both an XVid version and an MKV version of the same thing, but the MKV is 3GB bigger, then I guess people didn't read the release tags:

xvid.480p.avi
h264.1080p.mkv

1080p tends to be a tad bigger than 480p [img]http://www.joltcountry.com/phpBB2/images/smiles/icon_mrgreen.gif[/img]

When using the same resolution, H264 actually turns out to be smaller than XVid. Just look at some anime releases, where the XVids come at 250MB while the MKVs are something like 170MB.

(Please fix the smiley tags :-P)

[quote="RealNC"]Then there's the issue of "but I'm used to Windows Media Player and AVIs!" Well, people were used to MS-DOS too and said that Windows was a turd pile. I guess they're still fiddling with CONFIG.SYS or something.[/quote]

There were significant hardware upgrades coming from Cyrix, Intel and AMD that allowed the larger resource footprint of Windows to not be such a big deal. I think the issue people are having with MKV is that there aren't exciting new things to do if you run out and get yourself a brand-new computer. You can only get to where you're watching the same TV shows and movies you were a month ago.... again. :(

Well, multiple channel streams (select between DTS, Dolby, Stereo, or different languages), embedded subtitles, chapter selection, support for various formats (AAC, MP3, Vorbis, PCM, whatever.)

Furthermore, you can stream it. I usually download MKVs on a server machine (100mbit box) and simply open them in SMPlayer at home.

There's one problem with MKV though: Microsoft doesn't want to support it. If they don't want to support it due to politics, I say fuck them. I simply use a real media player, like SMPlayer on Linux and the CCCP on Windows 7, which homes with Media Player Classic Home Cinema by default.

Then there's the issue of "but I'm used to Windows Media Player and AVIs!" Well, people were used to MS-DOS too and said that Windows was a turd pile. I guess they're still fiddling with CONFIG.SYS or something.

Well, what makes it better in your opinion?

This reminds me of when the MAME idiots pulled the samples out of Asteroids in order for their first pass at emulation of the sound. Sure, it sounded like buzzing, rotting garbage but it was more "accurate". What good is a video codec if it runs like shit?

MKV is the best container format actually. I'm getting annoyed when I find something that *isn't* H.264 inside an MKV.

XVid is as old as Windows 95 and the AVI container format sucks balls. Good riddance.

World Rally Championship. Sebastian Loeb has made some unholy deal with the devil to be the the king of going sideways in the mud between trees.

What sport was that?

[i]"What was it??"[/i] -- Rudy, Funhouse

Yeah I know nothing about any of that actually. I was just trying to watch a 30 min video that was ONE POINT THREE FUCKING GIGABYTES and it seems instead of using all that space to store less compressed data someone used it to ask my computer "If God is all-powerful can he make a rock so big he cannot lift it?" and then kissed the girl and rode off into the (digital) sunset.

The normal h.264 stuff actually plays totally fine, looks better, and is a smaller file size so I got no problems with that.

Just don't try to follow a sport that doesn't appeal to encoding nerds I guess.

Seems stupid. If it's not the format you want... find another one in the format you do want. Might have to look harder, but shit man come on.

News article: http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirates-go-nuts-after-tv-release-groups-dump-xvid-120303/

It's not a machine issue for me, but a bandwidth one. When you get two or three wireless devices trying to stream HD video from a single server via wireless connections ... it sucks.

The warez groups decided to go to a shittier format, Pinner. Hey, nice job troll-shitting all over this thread, though. Nice job, Spunky. Nice to meet you, Chucky. Hey slick, you can have it back.

I don't understand anything that was said here.

Remember when 2D graphics were a performance feature agonized about in The Yellow Pages of computers? Well, thank to NERDS that time is now back amongst us!
"Hello I am a ONE JIGGOHERTZ PROCESSOR" "Nice to meet you, I am 300 MILLION TRANSISTORS BACKED BY AN ENTIRE JIGGOBYTE OF RAM"

"Together... we can [i]render a simple 2D video[/i]"

"Not so fast!" says .mkv, while it wipes nowhere near all of its filth off on a dakimakura...