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Nergol · 10:15 AM

Posted in reference to this ancient thread...

MKV sucks bad. It's a buggy resource hog that can't render subtitles worth a damn. For some reason, some anime fansubbers are in love with it and keep trying to ram it down the throats of the anime community, who keep responding by downloading the .avi versions of series over the .mkv versions at a ratio of about 3:1. Their attitude seems to be something like "The whole world thinks my format sucks. What's wrong with the whole world?"

analogika · 10:16 AM

Well, for one, the whole world's a year ahead of you ~~and let this thread die a graceful death so long ago that it's basically decomposed by now~~.

But other than that...

mduell · May 3, 2008, 12:20 PM

Poor MKV performance is pretty unique to OS X and the video players for it; I'm not sure why, but it may be the result of some fundamental OS decisions.

The same 720p MKV (H.264 and 2-channel AC3, I think) will play fine on my 1.8Ghz Pentium M WinXP box (~80% CPU usage), but choke horribly on my dual 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo Leopard box (100% CPU usage, dropping frames, etc), with the same player (VLC).

The upsides to MKV are that it's incredibly flexible (any combination of audio/video codecs, lots of streams allowed for each) and completely open (free as in speech and beer standard, no patents). It would be nice to see mainstream adoption, but the major OS vendors would rather push more limited/closed/expensive containers that they have a stake in. If Apple started using it they could address the OS or app issues that lead to poor playback performance on Macs.

Nergol · May 3, 2008, 12:43 PM

analogika;

With apologies, so long as people keep posting great numbers of fansubs in .mkv format, the world isn't ahead of me. Of the .mkv fansubs I have downloaded, I've had precisely one not give me any trouble (and that one, I might add, elected not to use soft subs). All the rest rendered subtitles on top of each other in clunky fonts, or sucked up every last bit of CPU power I had, or crashed VLC, or just plain ol' refused to work. And many seem more, not less keen on trying to see it get adopted.

mduell;

From my own perspective, I've never seen any advantage to .mkv that I considered the slightest bit important that wasn't implemented better by .mp4.

Generally, I agree with what Segan said here:
Kill the Stupid Media Formats - Reviews by PC Magazine

Chuckit · May 3, 2008, 01:30 PM

The advantage to MKV is that it's free while MP4 is not. That's it. Quite frankly, I kind of understand how people feel in that I think it's stupid to have to pay for the right to format your data a certain way.

And in my experience, the only option for playing it is Mplayer, which works pretty well for that. It's the only reason I keep Mplayer around.

JellyBeen · May 3, 2008, 01:32 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

The advantage to MKV is that it's free while MP4 is not. That's it. Quite frankly, I kind of understand how people feel in that I think it's stupid to have to pay for the right to format your data a certain way.

And in my experience, the only option for playing it is Mplayer, which works pretty well for that. It's the only reason I keep Mplayer around.

Ditto!

Koralatov · May 3, 2008, 02:50 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

And in my experience, the only option for playing it is Mplayer, which works pretty well for that. It's the only reason I keep Mplayer around.

I watched an MKV on my brand-spanking new MacBook Pro—sorry; couldn’t resist—and whilst it played fine (no dropped frames or audio sync issues) it turned the underside of the laptop into a hotplate, and the fans started going crazy after watching about five minutes of it. I used VLC, which is normally fantastic (I’ve used it to watch DivX/Xvid AVIs on a G3 iMac without any issues). Overall, whether it’s Apple, the software or MKV’s fault, I’m going to give it a miss—the higher-def wasn’t worth cooking my laptop for.

Overall, whilst I agree to an extent with the open-source ideals of MKV, I think implementation of it is somewhat lacking (the same file also murdered my Dell), and that’s too high a price to pay for ‘freedom’.

silver · May 3, 2008, 03:51 PM

MKV's play fine no problems here, my machine (specs in sig) doesn't get hot or anything.

I don't use VLC though as it renders out subs horribly on MKV's. My weapon of choice is Perian/Quicktime plays everything and the subs look great.

What I do notice with MKV's is a vastly better picture quality than AVI's. Although that could be from my preferred video size 1280x720MKV.

I tested with the Gundam 00 series and Macross Frontier MKV's and AVI's.

analogika · May 3, 2008, 05:01 PM

Originally Posted by Nergol

analogika;

With apologies, so long as people keep posting great numbers of fansubs in .mkv format, the world isn't ahead of me.

That was in reference to resurrecting a year-old thread, not to the subject at hand. I see ghporter's taken care of that, though, so carry on.

mduell · May 3, 2008, 06:39 PM

Originally Posted by Nergol

From my own perspective, I've never seen any advantage to .mkv that I considered the slightest bit important that wasn't implemented better by .mp4.

Chapters, subtitles, and multichannel AC3+AAC come to mind.

JellyBeen · May 4, 2008, 12:27 PM

What I do notice with MKV's is a vastly better picture quality than AVI's

Wel that's cause your MKV is using H264.

silver · May 4, 2008, 10:15 PM

Originally Posted by JellyBeen

Wel that's cause your MKV is using H264.

I know that, I was just saying that it's better. I know that MKV's are just a container for what ever is inside.

Tomchu · May 5, 2008, 01:15 AM

Originally Posted by silver

I know that, I was just saying that it's better. I know that MKV's are just a container for what ever is inside.

So an AVI container with H264 at the same bitrate would look identical.

Weyland-Yutani · May 5, 2008, 10:50 PM

Ugh there is something so geeky and ugly about matroska and yes it doesn't play well on Macs. I never download matroska files, I just hope it fades into obscurity.

badidea · May 6, 2008, 04:16 AM

The only MKV files I ever had problems with are the ones with DTS audio!
12870x720p with AC3 is perfectly fine but DTS is choppy...well, at least it used to be (?) - the latest VLC version was supposed to address this problem but I didn't check yet, since I played the problematic MKV movies with Quicktime Player and Perian.

Nergol · May 6, 2008, 05:52 AM

mduell;

Keep in mind that most of my video downloads are anime fansubs. That said:

I really don't need chapters that much in a half-hour fansub.

All the fansubs I've seen in .avi and .mp4 had subtitles. If you mean the ability to do soft subs, I'm not impressed. Soft subs render like crap, and I personally see no use for them - if I didn't want subtitles, I wouldn't be downloading an anime fansub.

Better audio is good. But it doesn't offset all the stuff that makes .mkv a pain in the butt, and I know a better solution than .mkv can be found.

And as for the fact that it's open-source, well, sometimes you get what you pay for.

mduell · May 10, 2008, 03:06 PM

Originally Posted by Nergol

Better audio is good. But it doesn't offset all the stuff that makes .mkv a pain in the butt, and I know a better solution than .mkv can be found.

And as for the fact that it's open-source, well, sometimes you get what you pay for.

Your problem (causing that "pain in the butt") is your platform, not the MKV standard.

Sometimes all paying gets you is ripped off.