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Dirk, thanks for the upload, however Im having trouble playing the video of Alice.

Im using vlc player, when i open the video im faced with a grey screen. The video is playing because i can kind of see shapes moving and get the odd flicker of the normal picture as it should be but apart from that its not watchable.

Can you help?

Ive attached a screen shot to show you what im faced with when the video is opened.

Ok for some reason the attachement didn't work so ive uploaded it to an image host....

Well, I'm not up on the mechanics of the Matroska Codec, but I think it's one of those codecs that VLC struggles with, unless you have the MKV codecs installed.

Try installing the codecs and see if it will play then!

Or you could Download the new Divx Player, which has the MKV codec built in.

But Dirk, could probably explain the Matroska codec better than me, as I find it a bitch to get the settings right, when encoding.

I recognise this is the Alice Night Caps and Vids thread, but bear with me for a bit as some people have raised questions over the vids I post...

All the videos I produce are provided as MKV, which is just a "container" for the audio and video. Matroska is just a wrapper in effect.

VLC can and should play all content just fine through it's inbuilt DLLs etc (assuming you're on Windows - DLL's don't really exist in Linux)

So what actually are my MKV files - the audio is AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) version 4, and the video is x264 Mpeg-4 AVC (Advanced Video Codec). I encode the video in the High Profile (not main) and ensure it is fully DVD / TV compliant to all the relevant profile standards etc. This means things like ref-frames etc are correct and should mean you play this on your computer but also most media players.

Anyway, if VLC can not play the file (works fine for me on a default install of Windows XP and Vista, and also Ubuntu), then I suggest (as did aceman65) you install a Codec Pack, but try one that only has playback codecs so as to not mess about too much with your system. Then try VLC again, or indeed MPC (Media Player Classic).

An example of a suitable codec pack I personally use with no issues or adverse affects (I'm not endorsing this, just giving it for reference) would be something like Shark007's pack. Check out http://shark007.net/index.html for more information.

I use MKV as that is the best way to keep x264 content, and I like to support open and free standards.

for completeness, here is VLC with the same video you have/had issues with (914-EliteTV-20100730-AliceGoodwin-Coat.mkv) - this shows the vid does work okay in VLC...

I don't normally have any trouble playing .mkv files with linux. I've only ever had one mkv vid that would not play with VLC, but that was with Ubuntu 8.04 which uses an old version of the VLC player.
It played ok on a different computer using Mint OS which uses a newer version of VLC.

The title explains all guys. I downloaded a few mkv files and none of them would play on my new laptop (worked on my old one fine). Hopefully one of you can help me out here.

Either update your video codecs or download VLC player

Thanks Josh

hello

how can i watch mkv files with windows media player? they wont work currently