Windows 10: MKV support out of the box

John Pombrio said:

None of my .mkv files work but I downloaded one of the "test .mkv" files from the article and it works.

Hi John,

I work at Microsoft, specifically, I drive requirements for MKV support.

MKV is a container specification, and wraps tracks made up of various codecs (H.264, MPEG4, AAC, DTS, Dolby, etc.). The MKV work done to date provides general container parsing, seeking, and basic metadata support. However, the new MKV code does not parse the compressed audio or video frames. These frames are passed on to a decoder for the specific codecs (if it is installed).

Even within a particular codec, there are variances in the encoding settings: some are generally supported, some are not. These are sometimes grouped together and called Profiles. We support the most common profiles of H.264, however, there is a gap in 10bit color depth support in H.264. Similarly, some codecs require royalties to be paid to the intellectual property holders. I'm not the codec guy, but suffice to say that some media will simply not work because it can't be decoded. If that same media was in an MP4 container it would still fail to play natively.

It is likely your media is failing because it uses an unsupported codec. You can run the tool mediainfo:
MediaInfo - Download
To see that your MKV files are composed of.

Generally speaking, the support within MKV for Windows 10 Technical Preview currently matches that of Xbox One for codecs. You can see the Xbox One support for MKV here:
MKV Support | Xbox One

Kind regards,

-Nick
Please don't post identifying information, nor filenames, etc.

unifex said:

... Currently the most common one is H.264 and it seems that Microsoft does not support it natively in Windows.

Hi unifex,

I work for Microsoft building support for MKV. While I can't speak to the nuances of H.264 encoding, I can certainly confirm that it is supported natively. There is a gap for support of 10bit color depth in H.264, which some users are hitting. More often, however, it is DTS audio codec support which fails the playback.

You can run the tool mediainfo: MediaInfo - Download
To see what your problematic MKVs are composed of.

Regards,
-Nick

Hi there

Not sure what the problem is here --VLC media player works just fine - it plays nearly every AUDIO and VIDEO codec you can think of (and probably those you can't think of too !!).

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Not sure what the problem is here --VLC media player works just fine - it plays nearly every AUDIO and VIDEO codec you can think of (and probably those you can't think of too !!).

I invite you to read their legal disclosures, and make your own conclusions:
VideoLAN - Legal

Hi there

Raises an interesting point -- If "Software" is not "patentable" in France under French Law - presumably that means anybody in France is quite legal if they were to "Reverse Engineer" Windows and sell it say under the name Fenetres or something -- the Name Windows is obviously protected by law world wide as a Trade mark.

Where the Law of Patents might come into conflict with the Copyright treaty to which FRANCE (and the EU) IS a signatory is where COPYRIGHT legislation rather than PATENT LAW is used.

Lawyers fest on that one -- over to you guys -- meanwhile I'm going to CONTINUE to use and enjoy VLC to play any media I care to chose on WHAT devices I want to -- things like regional coding etc are actually RESTRICTING the user from properly enjoying a legally purchased product --more court cases pending on that one too --but with things like streaming etc that type of physical media (DVD's, Blu Ray etc) will probably be long redundant before the court cases have all passed their hideously expensive way through the legal systems in a lot of jurisdictions.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

Raises an interesting point -- If "Software" is not "patentable" in France under French Law - presumably that means anybody in France is quite legal if they were to "Reverse Engineer" Windows and sell it say under the name Fenetres or something -- the Name Windows is obviously protected by law world wide as a Trade mark.

Where the Law of Patents might come into conflict with the Copyright treaty to which FRANCE (and the EU) IS a signatory is where COPYRIGHT legislation rather than PATENT LAW is used.

Lawyers fest on that one -- over to you guys -- meanwhile I'm going to CONTINUE to use and enjoy VLC to play any media I care to chose on WHAT devices I want to -- things like regional coding etc are actually RESTRICTING the user from properly enjoying a legally purchased product --more court cases pending on that one too --but with things like streaming etc that type of physical media (DVD's, Blu Ray etc) will probably be long redundant before the court cases have all passed their hideously expensive way through the legal systems in a lot of jurisdictions.

Cheers
jimbo

Agree 100%!

lehnerus2000 said:

NickDrouin said:

lehnerus2000 said:

The problem is that some videos can't be fast forwarded (playback speed, chapters or dragging the progress bar) without the playback stopping for up to 5 minutes (or more)!
Those same videos don't have that issue in VLC.

Hi Lehnerus2000,
I work at Microsoft, specifically, I drive requirements for MKV support. Problems seeking are usually due to a missing CUE section in the media, or missing/bad timing information. I'm interested in tracking down and prioritizing work on problems encountered by users.
Would you be willing/interested in turning on advanced logging while trying to reproduce the issue you described on your Win10 machine? Send me a PM.
Thanks,
-Nick
Please don't post identifying information, nor filenames, etc.

Hi NickDrouin

This issue I describe is not related to Windows per se.
It is a MPC-HC issue.
I'm not sure that it is an mkv issue either, although the majority of my video files probably are mkv.

Since I mostly use W7 that is where I have definitely seen the problem occur.
As I posted previously that is why I have VLC and MPC-HC installed.
If one player is being recalcitrant I use the other one.

As a rule, when MPC-HC won't advance (using the progress bar) I try VLC.
VlC normally has no issues with the same file.

I think that VLC builds its own cue file.
I received a message to that effect (a few days ago) related to a dodgy avi file.

I do not know how WMP responds.

I avoid activating WMP since an incident when I was testing the W7 betas (2009).
WMP12 helpfully screwed up the metadata on 25% of my music collection.
I definitely had the "update media info" option turned off!

Hi there
@ Lehnerus2000,

That just shows how HIDEOUS WMP is for media stuff. Any decent media system should maintain its own Meta data in its OWN library system / database and if required can take the user tags etc from the users files and update those where necessary IN ITS OWN data base.

Altering user data is BAD practice and should be avoided at all costs --it's up to a USER application to update the USERS SOURCE files. The SERVER should just do that - Serve up the files from the user source and add itself any extras that it needs such as transcoding / additional tags etc. Those actions can be saved in the Servers own DB for use another time so the data doesn't have to be re-retrieved or re-processed.

The user can re-tag his own data via mp3tag or all sorts of other programs and IMO it's up to the USER to do this as the USER DATA is really like Master data. Inline updating of metadata is "Transactional data" and can be kept easily in the Servers DB.

PLEX and MEZZMO are two video servers I use - MEZZMO in Windows and PLEX on Linux (although it also works on Windows and is FREE unlike MEZZMO) and they both maintain meta data etc in their own data bases - so I can switch the source files to either my Linux or Windows server at will without any problem of "media contamination".

I wouldn't advise though running BOTH servers concurrently from the same Host computer sharing the same Source files -- it can be done - but use a different volume / storage space if you want to run both servers at the same time from the same Host computer -- they actually have different strengths - PLEX seems to handle more formats and transcodes quicker while Mezzmo is superior with sub titles.

Cheers
jimbo