# MKV Player



## supanatral (May 6, 2008)

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a player I can use that will play *.mkv files. Upto now, I've used VLC Player but the video I have that I'm trying to play is a 40min file and its 7.5GB because its 1080p. When I play the movie, the error that comes up is that the computer is too slow.


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## fryke (May 6, 2008)

I'd say the computer's too slow, then. (Never underestimate the power of an error message. Why *shouldn't* it actually tell the truth, we're not talking Microsoft Windows error messages here, after all.)

With Perian, Quicktime should be able to play .mkv-files as well. MPlayer does them, too. But 1080-files _are_ a bit of a heft, of course.


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## supanatral (May 6, 2008)

Even though I'm playing it on my last generation macbook pro with 2.2GHz? The reason why I think its the program is because VLC player is not the smoothest program I've ever used. It still has many bugs which even causes it to crash every once in a while on a bunch of different macs i've seen. I may be wrong though, but thats why I've concluded that its a program. I do agree though that it would take a good processor and video card to play a massive 1080p video, but it should in theory be able to do that because its not like I have an old computer either.


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## Mikuro (May 6, 2008)

MPlayer can play them as well, and in my experience it's a bit faster and smoother than VLC. The problem is that the MPlayer GUI is not very reliable, and often doesn't work at all. I actually compiled my own MPlayer command-line version from source, and I use that frequently now. If you have Apple's developer tools installed, it's really not hard.

I've heard that VLC and MPlayer (and I suppose Perian, since it's based on the same core) do not use multiple threads for video decoding at this point. That means the second core of your processor would basically sit idle. (That could be out of date or just plain wrong, though; can't say I've ever tested it.) Apple's H.264 decoder is threaded, but I don't think there's any way you'll be able to use it with an mkv. Hmm.


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## supanatral (May 6, 2008)

Nevermind, I just found out that if you install Perian (which I had) you can play High def mkv files in quicktime


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## liquidforce5010 (Mar 4, 2010)

i have a 933 mhz powerpc g4 and im running mac os 10.4.11 and im trying to play an mkv file ive tried using vlc and it only shows a blank screen and plays the audio. The new divx7 is not supported by my processor and ive downloaded perian and it is installed but i cant figure out how to play the file using it and quicktime.


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