What is good about MKV video format?

A modern digital world provides a huge number of ways to get high-quality content. Of course, most of the ordinary users are not too interested in this, but even a person far from the computer could notice that the number of new formats of audio and video files has increased significantly. In particular, the MKV format has gained immense popularity in recent years. Speaking more scientifically, this is a special container file.

As you can understand from the title, this file serves to store information in a "packed" form. Most video files are not particularly compact, so for convenience of use they are compressed using special codecs. It is the quality of this compression is largely characterized by the MKV format mentioned by us.

Back in the early 90-ies the computer industry began to take the first steps in this direction. In particular, it was then that Microsoft created the extremely popular AVI (Audio Video Interleave) to this day . And for its time this discovery was a huge step forward, but to date the capabilities of the old codec are clearly insufficient. For example, in such a file you can not fit a lot of additional information about the movie. But the MKV format of similar possibilities contains in excess.

By the way, he was created by our compatriots. They tried to provide for those requirements that will be presented to the video in the coming years. As a result, a new container appeared, which received the name "matryoshka". By its designation it is already possible to imagine its internal structure.

But still, what is so good about the MKV format? Firstly, it can store several audio tracks in different languages at once, it is possible to create separate chapters and even a full menu. In addition, if necessary, you can easily "pull out" the sound and video from it. But the main difference from the old AVI is that viewing MKV format even in the form of files a few gigabytes in size will never bother with "sagging" and slowing down.

Of course, this is true only for relatively powerful machines, because on old computers your favorite movie can turn into a real slideshow. In addition, for a comfortable viewing it needs a normal video card.

So, let's summarize and briefly tell you about the most important advantages of the new format.

First of all, it should be said that even advanced users consider MP4 files as the main contents of the container, although this is not true. The following types of audio and video files can be packed into the "matryoshka": MPRG, H264, AVC1, WMV, etc. It should be noted that the program used for the MKV format (multimedia player) should perfectly support them. For this purpose, VLC, KMP and Totem are excellent (for .nix systems). However, in recent years, support for MKV quickly acquire other types of players.

Another nice innovation was the excellent stability of the "matryoshka" to errors, the constant updating of the format by the community of developers, as well as the openness that allowed even the lobby of the creators of proprietary codecs, who until the last opposed the introduction of support for the MKV format in modern Blu-ray players.