Playing MKV files?

Questions
1

Hi — can VDMX5 play mkv files? I’m new to the program and all i’m trying to do is mix different mkv files live. But I can’t see them in the file browser, and when I drag them into the video bins, they don’t show up.

Thanks!

2

Is this a stupid question? I understand mkv is just a wrapper, and that I should probably re-encode all my files to HAP or whatever – but shouldn’t it be at least possible to play an mkv file as-is? I have a large library of mkvs, and re-encoding everything would be a massive pain. I’d appreciate any kind of help, even if it’s a dumb question. Thanks everyone!

3

It depends. As you mentioned .mkv files are a wrapper, so some will play fine in VDMX, while others will not. Some you could batch convert the ending of the file to .mp4 or .mpeg and see if it plays as normal. The problem with many .mkv files is that they are actually highly compressed H.264 files which are not ideal for live performance playback and remixing, many will not play in reverse with out massive CPU loss.

Some codecs such as AV1 are not compatibile with the latest Mac OSX, so they won’t work properly in VDMX. Matroska media files are a bit all over the place.

4

Thanks! I figured out that for my purposes, it’s easiest to play the files in VLC and then use window-in and crop it to get the video into VDMX.

5

There’s also VLC Syphon if you want to skip a step:

https://github.com/rsodre/VLCSyphon

1 Like
6

if you get to a place that you want to convert the mkv - i use https://www.ffworks.net to convert mkv files to other formats. you can also just convert the container without reencoding any of the video/audio.

my usual use case is recording streaming sessions in obs to mkv, and then convert those h264 recordings to mp4. (though the latest obs will convert them automatically)

1 Like