Matroska video (MKV)

MKV stands for Matroska Video, a container format available for free. It is a flexible container format for video and audio. Video files have the extension *.mkv, audio files have the extension *.mka.

MKV is compatible with almost all video codecs such as WindowsMedia Video(WMV), MPEG-2, MPEG-4, RealVideo, H.264, DivX and Xvid and some others and allows embedding foreign container formats. In terms of audio codecs, Advanced Audio Coding( AAC), Audio Code Number 3( AC-3), Digital Theatre Sound( DTS), Waveform Audio File(WAV), Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Free Lossless Audio Codec( FLAC) are supported by Matroska.

The Matroska format is based on the Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML), a variant of the Extensible Markup Language(XML). MKV files have a structured content in which titles can be called up with search functions. Several audio tracks are available. The call of titles is menu-driven and via the subtitle streams or the audio streams. The MKV containers consist of a header, a data part for subtitles and the media data for video and audio. Another field offers the possibility to insert an audio stream in a second language.

Matroska files are supported by various audio compressions and video compressions. Therefore, it is superior to Audio Video Interleave( AVI) and MP4, especially since these have been used for many years. The maximum file size of MKV files is 72 petabytes( PB).

File extensions for Matroska files are *.mkv and *.mka.