I often get asked "How do you play MKV files on your iPhone or PS3?" or "How do you use the MKV files in Premiere Pro?" and the answer is...you can't. Not natively. Yes, iPhone has apps such as GoodPlayer that are capable of playing MKV files, however it is unable to play MKV files using hardware decoding, which means that the video will suck as it'll be choppy, especially as the majority of the time, it would be playing HD content.
Please note that we use "Scene" as a nickname for the standard MKV TV encode that you may find on the internet, convert to or something else.
The problem?
The "MKV" container is not compatible with these devices or software. This is mostly because it was designed as a "can contain all" container, including codecs that are not compatible with the devices so in most cases, it is just easier to block it off.
The solution?
For most cases, you can simply change the container to "MP4", which is more limited for what it can contain, but is compatible with pretty much everything out there.
You cannot simply just change the file extension from .mkv to .mp4.
Why does this work?
A video file contains tracks. Usually, these tracks consist of 1 video track, 1 audio track and sometimes, 1 subtitle track.
The codecs used for the usual mkv are h264 for video and ac3 for audio. These are allowed in both mkv and mp4, thereby allowing you to simply "take them out of one, and stick them in another." The codecs may be different.
Please note that all iDevices are incompatible with AC3 audio in mp4 containers. You will need to convert the AC3 to AAC, which is detailed later.
How do I do it?
There are a few ways to do this. Some require you to do it manually, others less so. At the bottom, there's a short list of software that can help you accomplish this. I can do a guide for these if I am requested to do so, but here is what I have found one of the easiest ways to do it, especially because this program is awesome enough to be able to do it in batch.
