Is MKV the new DIVX/XVID ??

[raksrules]

Quiet recently i have seen many of movies that are found on various torrent sites are of average size 400 MB and are in MKV format. I downloaded a few and their quality seems to be really good for the size.

Is MKV the new DIVX/XVID.
Is it pitted to take over these formats in terms of size/quality ratio ?
Do we see MKV playing capabilities in future standalone DVD players ??

[jal_desai]

before the mod sees... remove first two lines. else u may fall in trouble.
As far as the question goes.. MKV is just a container format... imagine a big box, u place in it an audio file, a video file , a subtitle file and close the box.. That box is MKV. when similar to the AVI format (which is also a container format).. as far as the sizes are concerned, MKV hardly decreses the size.. it does but very little. Moreover it is not similar to DivX/XviD... those are compression methods while MKV is just a container format. it does not alter the video/audio file 'internally'.

You ur self can make an MKV file. Get MKVMerge software and drag some avi files and subtitle files, merge it and u will get ur MKV file. when u play it, those subtitles will show up automatically.
by the way MKV format is a Matroska File Format. it is slowly getting popularity. so dont be surprised if one day u see a MKV compatible standalone DVD player

[Pathik]

MKV and RMVB are very popular these days. I would prefer RMVB though.

[MetalheadGautham]

MKV is just the container, so a better term would be that MKV is the new AVI.

MKV is prefered mostly because of fast seek times, support for chapters and menus, tiny overhead, multiple tracks in one file, and, most important of all, the fact that it supports almost all codecs.

This means you can have xvid video with ac3 audio, xvid with vorbis audio, h.264 video with vorbis audio (most popular ever for top quality), <random-video-codec> with speek audio (small size) (for movies with only voice, no music), etc. You can also have an mka audio file with flac tracks of an album stored within as chapters, so that a whole album is stored in one file.

XviD continues to be the most popular codec for fast encoding of clear quality video playable on dvd-players, and is better in quality compared to DivX.

H.264 has one issue - higher cpu usage while playback and longer encoding time. this in exchange for hiiiiigh quality.

PS: holy sh!t!!! I forgot to mention VP7, ~~:_:THE:_:~~ best video codec ever, which lacks support in many places and hence I skipped.

[manishjha18]

all the hd videos now come mostly in mkv format--

[MetalheadGautham]

Originally Posted by manishjha18

all the hd videos now come mostly in mkv format--

Thats due to a very good reason. For HD Videos, 5.1 channel audio is prefered, for which, most people prefer AC3. And only two popular codecs exist for HD Video which can be accelerated by GPU - H.264 and VC/1. Both these are top notch codecs and offer high quality to size ratios. And any combination of these three needs MKV.