Anyone have trouble with high definition/MKV files?

silvine

I bought a new iMac in June and it seems to have trouble with large MKV files e.g. high definition films.

They either take ages to load fully in Quicktime or cause VLC to crash if I jump around the file a lot.

Anyone else have this problem? I thought Macs were the king of video!

J-blk

Yes, .mkv is very difficult to play on a Mac - both VLC and QuickTime have issues playing them. I've heard MPlayer is meant to be better, but frankly it's even worse for me. The one solution is to use Plex:

http://wiki.plexapp.com/index.php/Downloads#Current_Version

I have all my .mkvs on a server and play them over 802.11n with no problems at all - Plex has a customizable buffer setting and does a great job playing the files back smoothly. A 4MB buffer is enough for just about anything but you can go all the way up to 32MB if needed...

pleasant Co.

Movist should play them without a problem....errr....then again I've used VLC to play 1080p x.264 sans problem...

J-blk

Mactard wrote: »

Movist should play them without a problem

Thanks! Never heard of "Movist" before but played around with it real quick and it looks to handle the files better than VLC - nice to have an alternative to Plex for just quickly opening a file... I'll need to try it out a bit more long term though.

pleasant Co.

It's solid in terms of video playback, but there are certainly some niggling non-video related issues that I won't mention because you might not even notice them and it hasn't been given an update in quite a while...the last update was either june or august...I forget...but I hope that isn't indicitive of ZERO development since...

It's a nice lightweight player, i'm using it as standard nowadays with VLC on the side just in case....I'd be using plex, but I really don't need what it offers yet.

J-blk

I love Plex and use it exclusively for media center purposes but sometimes you just want to quickly open a file, get a screengrab or something like that - and for some reason VLC can't handle my .mkvs over the network smoothly, even smaller 25 minute clips. I like what I'm seeing so far with Movist .

big_moe

i watch 720p mkvs all the time with vlc on a new (aluminum) iMac without issues

adam

J-blk

Are your files stored locally or played over a network? I think VLC works fine if you just play a file off your local drives and sit down to watch it. The problems begin if you move around in the file a lot, skip forward/backward or - as in my case - you're streaming it from a network source. VLC never works 100% for me in those cases.

big_moe

ah yeah maybe thats the problem, mine are all either on the local hard drive or a firewire drive connected straight to the imac

adam