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VLC, mkv and Leopard


MiJKa
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After interminable hours of reading, clicking, reading, re-reading and a fair amount of dejection and cursing, I have come to the conclusion that the software crashes I've been experiencing while trying to watch certain .mkv movie files in Leopard are not the software's fault. They're Leopard's. Per say. (It has to do with the way the sound is compressed in the mkv container. Something Leopard seems unable to overcome. If I understand correctly, it's got something to do with an incorrect reporting, on the part of the file, of the number of audio channels involved. They are, in fact, 5.1, but the file seems to report to the OS that there are 0 and in trying to deal with that, the OS just kills the app. --sadly, this is not a problem I've encountered in Windows, which played the selfsame files. Go figure :/)

 

Case in point. I have installed VLC. Most .mkv files it plays wonderfully. It creates joy in me and makes me happy. Some files, however, it does not play wonderfully. It crashes. I'm not sure if it's after a certain period of time or at a certain point in the movies.

 

Thereafter I downloaded Perian. Which I then installed. I opened Quicktime to play the aforementioned offending .mkvs. There was no sound. (I was doing something else at the same time and absentmindedly hit the cancel on the link to the homepage which might, though I doubt it, have held an extra codec? Meh.

 

Then, I bit the bullet and as a long time *nix user, went for the coup de grace. I installed MPlayer. The player that plays EVERYTHING, regardless of race, creed or operational platform.

 

And was met with the EXACT same :D error. The movies crashed. Same as with VLC. It was not fun.

 

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I have yet to come across any other way to play .mkv files in OSX (with a decent chance of working, in lieu of the above).

 

 

And then I was thinking... Is it possible that, running DarWINE and VLC under darwine (with the differentiated libraries? Grasping at straws here?) might circumvent the problem.

 

I'd try it myself, but I don't have the X11 framework installed. For obvious reasons. And while I plan on installing it, the 1.1GB d/l is something I can't do just now. (My bandwith is otherwise occupied by the younger sibling with whom I share the line.)

 

In any case, it's just a thought about one of the few, annoying little bugs still floating around in my Leopard installation and a possible workaround for a $#!%LOAD of people on Leopard that are unbelievably depressed at the lack of ability to play some .mkv files.

 

 

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EDIT: I've read the wiki that says that you can't install vlc0.8.3 --Don't know if anyone's tried a later version, or possibly the standalone Media Player (which works) and some form of codec, or codec pack. (klcodec seems to do wonders in windows.)

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Hell, consider yourself lucky you can even open mkv in quicktime, I have never been able, just tells me its not a movie file. I really hate mkv files both on Windows and OSX. I also cant play a lot of them in VLC, and the ones I can play always shoot out stupid error pop ups, theres also a good chance that the player will crash if I skip around in the timeline too much.

 

MKV + OSX = hell

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lol ...sorry if I sound ungrateful idividebyzero. I suppose it's just that, having gotten the damn things to work with little or no problem on three other OS platforms (FreeBSD, ubuntu and The Devil known as Windows. Vista and XP, so, technically, I guess, four OSes. Sort of...) it struck me as ...at the very least, strange that I'd encounter an insurmountable problem watching a multimedia file in OSX.

 

That's all.

 

 

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FruitSerial, I tried that, actually, but I'm under the impression that I may have incorrectly removed the normal (stable?) version, because when I installed the latest version, I couldn't get it to play...well, anything. At all. It was sad. (Though, on the other hand, the stable version managed to crash at just the same time as VLC, so no big gain there, either...)

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I was able to play high bitrate 720p H264 within a ts and mkv in Parallels (just) or VMware Fusion (easily) on a Core2duo @ 2.8ghz and Geforce 7300GT. I was booting a plain XP SP2 installation and using the latest Cyberlink PowerDVD (and Haali media splitter with Media Player 11 for mkv). I only checked some 1080p content and it was pretty close in Fusion, with some tweaking probably workable.

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Hell, consider yourself lucky you can even open mkv in quicktime, I have never been able, just tells me its not a movie file. I really hate mkv files both on Windows and OSX. I also cant play a lot of them in VLC, and the ones I can play always shoot out stupid error pop ups, theres also a good chance that the player will crash if I skip around in the timeline too much.

 

MKV + OSX = hell

 

MKV+OSX+VLC+Perian=heaven :(

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WELCOME my friend - so I see that you also have come to the conclusion that mkv SUCKS .

 

Yes not Leopard but mkv. Why are people using this video format anyway ???

 

What you got to do is simple:

 

CONVERT your mkv movies to mp4 H.264 - thats the best format out there.

 

What i really hate is that some die hard mkv fans are putting HD movies out in mkv format - it takes my Core 2 Duo e6600 about 2-3 days to convert a single High Def movie in mkv to mp4 H.264 (I was also downscaling the video size) - after converting 2 of those bastards I swore never to download any mkv files, ever again .

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I haven't found a decent converter that supports .mkv files yet. I need to get my act together and d/l the latest version of VirtualDub and update the codecs on the Windows box though, in hopes that that'll work. If I manage to get anything done with that, I'll let you know darthosx86. If nothing else, the assembly optimization making everything else work should make things considerably faster.

 

 

Point of order though:

 

As I said above, it's not the .mkv files. (I think container files are rather stupid, but other than that, I have no qualms about them.) It's apparently incorrectly encoded sound.

 

If that justification doesn't do it for you, then the fact that, out of 40 hdrips floating around on one of my HDDs, it's only the 2 or three with AAC audio codec that create problems. And I'm not sure if it's the people ENCODING the damn things that don't know what they're doing, or the .mkv container format screwing everything up.

 

I'm tempted to say it's people not taking the time to learn how to back up they're HD-DVDs properly. Same thing as when DVD-Rip backups first popped into existence. No one took the time to read what the codecs did and how, why to use one and not the other, etc etc etc. Completely farked everything up. Lead one to do his own backing up, as it were.

 

But I digress.

 

 

I also take it there's no news on light at the end of the tunnel yet, then, eh?

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On a related note: There's an even WORSE format. .wmv <-- Some SICK, sick, SiCKsickSICK bastid somewhere, who couldn't do ANYTHING but point and click went and FOISTED this horrendous format on HD-RiPs as well. It's terrible. It plays...but it's the devil. All the artifacting, the crappy seaking etc. It's all there. In an HD-RiP. :)

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I think the movie ripping scene has proven that they really dont know what the hell they are doing. Most are still clining onto the vcd days, trying to compress 2 hour movies to 700mbs, then theres the people who do the opposite, make MKV files with 3 different languages which practically doubles the size of the movie file. Most releases are pretty jacked up, plus theres never any 1080p releases. The anime ripping scene used to be really good before going to MKV, original res and dvd quality avi's at really small sizes without any BS, although there were dumbasses who refused to use the same codecs as everyone else and forced people to find some obscure codec for just one file.

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vlc will play anything, but its {censored} when its mkvs (at least in osx). jumping to another part of the movie will crash on a regular basis, and in quicktime with perian, it wont even play audio for some of these audio codecs that x264/mkv ppl are using.

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MKV "works" in VLC for me. It just doesnt work well, it crashes all the time if you try to skip around to find a specific scene. Its much more stable in WMP. Just because MKV is possible in OSX doesnt mean it works good, its unstable and buggy and you have to use the annoying VLC with its stupid popups.

 

Mplayer might work but its too damn ugly

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a real mac doesnt fix vlc problems with mkv. it will still crash while skipping to certain scenes. a proper hackintosh is the exact same as a real mac.

 

i used to be a mplayer fan back in 2001-2002 and i just tried it again and it plays mkvs with x264 amazing compared to VLC. skipping around to certain scenes is instant and it doesnt crash at all.

 

also in mplayer, if you go to prefs and set the renderer/display driver to quicktime, it will use all your cores (only tested this for a few seconds).

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I originally encountered the problem of VLC crashing when trying to play HD mkv files and after hours of playing around with it i found the solution to be that the files you want to play need to be on the same drive that VLC is installed on. I have a lot of mkv files in both 720 and 1080 HD and they work perfectly. I get perfect 5.1 channel audio via the digital output and VLC never crashes. I'm not sure if this will help but i can assure you there is nothing in Leopard stopping it from working.

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a real mac doesnt fix vlc problems with mkv. it will still crash while skipping to certain scenes. a proper hackintosh is the exact same as a real mac.

 

i used to be a mplayer fan back in 2001-2002 and i just tried it again and it plays mkvs with x264 amazing compared to VLC. skipping around to certain scenes is instant and it doesnt crash at all.

 

also in mplayer, if you go to prefs and set the renderer/display driver to quicktime, it will use all your cores (only tested this for a few seconds).

 

Finally someone is trying it out...I wasn't kidding, it works really well!

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I originally encountered the problem of VLC crashing when trying to play HD mkv files and after hours of playing around with it i found the solution to be that the files you want to play need to be on the same drive that VLC is installed on. I have a lot of mkv files in both 720 and 1080 HD and they work perfectly. I get perfect 5.1 channel audio via the digital output and VLC never crashes. I'm not sure if this will help but i can assure you there is nothing in Leopard stopping it from working.

 

all my MKVs are on my same drive.

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  • 1 month later...

hi all,

 

what about playback of matroska files in frontrow? i have added the QT component, but the files won't even open them. has anyone solved this?

 

i have tried playing mkv files in osx-XBMC 0.1 aswell, the video seems to work fine there, but I am having issues with sound; sounds like a hissing helicopter when i open the files with sound on.

 

 

:|

gus

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