Information about Matroska

Matroska (Матрёшка)
File extension:	.mkv .mka
MIME type:	video/x-matroska audio/x-matroska
Developed by:	Matroska.org
Type of format:	Container format
Container for:	Multimedia

The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free Container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file.^[1] It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows. Matroska is similar in conception to other containers like AVI, MP4 or ASF, but is completely open source. Matroska file types are .MKV for video (and audio) and .MKA for audio-only files.

Matroska is an English word derived from the Russian word Матрёшка (transliterated as Matryoshka). Which is pronounced as: mat + ros (as in albatross OR as in metros) + ka (as in Alaska). Simply stated, the term Matroska means 'nesting doll' (the common eastern European egg shaped doll within a doll). This is a play on the container (media within a form of media/Doll Within a Doll) aspect of the Matryoshka as it is a container for visual and audio data.

History

The project was announced on December 7 2002 as a fork of an earlier container format project, but after disagreements with that project's creator about the use of the Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML) instead of another binary format. The founders of the Matroska project believe that the use of EBML brings them a number of advantages, including making it easier to extend the format for decades into the future as new developments occur and or as the project goals change.

Goals

With Matroska's roots in EBML it has been designed from the ground up for longevity and extendability (unlike formats such as AVI). The Matroska team has spoken openly on Doom9.org and hydrogenaudio.org about some of their long term goals to create a modern, flexible, extensible, cross-platform multimedia container format that can:

• develop robust streaming support.
• develop a 'DVD-like' menu system based on EBML.
• develop a set of tools for the creation and editing of Matroska files.
• develop libraries that can be used to allow developers to add Matroska support to their applications.
• work with hardware manufacturers to include Matroska support in embedded multimedia devices.
• provide native Matroska support in various operating systems.

Software support

Listed below is software that has native Matroska support.

• BS.Player
• CorePlayer Mobile
• GOM Player
• HandBrake
• jetAudio
• Media Player Classic
• MPlayer
• PowerDVD
• The Core Media Player
• The Core Pocket Media Player
• The KMPlayer
• Totem Movie Player
• VLC media player
• VSO Software
• WinDVD
• xine
• Zoom Player

For Windows also DirectShow filters like Haali Media Splitter can be used which allow playback of Matroska files in all DirectShow based players.

For Mac OS X users, Perian can allow playback in QuickTime Player.

License

Matroska is an open standards project. This means for personal use it is absolutely free to use and that the technical specifications describing the bit stream are open to everybody, even to companies that would like to support it in their products. The source code of the libraries developed by the Matroska Development Team is licensed under GNU LGPL. In addition to that, there are also free parsing and playback libraries available under the BSD license, for proprietary software adaption.

See also

• LiVES
• Comparison of container formats
• Open source codecs and containers
• Combined Community Codec Pack

References

External links

• Official Matroska Homepage
• Technical specifications for the Matroska Container Format
• Proposed RFC
• CoreCodec – Official Matroska Developer Project Home
• Matroska QuickTime Component For Mac
• Haali Media splitter
• Project Announcement on Doom9 forums
• Parser, de-/muxer and player
• Linux and Windows tools for Matroska
• The XviD-Ogg-MKV Walkthrough – Step-by-step instructions for MKV encoding in Microsoft Windows

•  • [ e] Multimedia compression formats
Video compression formats	ISO/IEC MJPEG MPEG-1 MPEG-2 MPEG-4 ASP MPEG-4/AVC ITU-T H.261 H.262 H.263 H.264 Others AVS Bink Dirac Indeo MJPEG RealVideo Theora VC-1 VP6 VP7 WMV
Audio compression formats	ISO/IEC MPEG-1 Layer III (MP3) MPEG-1 Layer II MPEG-1 Layer I AAC HE-AAC HE-AAC v2 aacPlus v2 ITU-T G.711 G.722 G.722.1 G.722.2 G.723 G.723.1 G.726 G.728 G.729 G.729.1 G.729a Others AC3 Apple Lossless ATRAC FLAC iLBC Monkey's Audio μ-law Musepack Nellymoser OptimFROG RealAudio SHN Speex Vorbis WavPack WMA TAK
Image compression formats	ISO/IEC/ITU-T JPEG JPEG 2000 lossless JPEG JBIG JBIG2 PNG WBMP Others BMP GIF ILBM PCX PGF TGA TIFF HD Photo
Media container formats	General 3GP ASF AVI DMF DPX FLV Matroska MP4 MXF NUT Ogg Ogg Media QuickTime RealMedia VOB Audio only AIFF AU WAV
See for methods and for codecs