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UPDATED – Making MKV files play nice in WMC with mkv2vob.

It is known that MKV files sometimes have issues playing inside of WMC and have even more issues on lower powered machines. They don’t show up inside of Windows Media Center by default, you have to install codec packs or other utilities to get them to work at risk of messing up your HTPC. Adam laid out a pretty nice tutorial on how to convert your files from MKV to WTV files which work on any windows machine. It is a bit complex though as it involves multiple programs to get it up and running. Recently Adam told me he started to use mkv2vob to convert all his files. This program is just great, not only will it convert your MKV files to MPG which work perfect in Media Center, but it will also automatically convert DTS audio to AC3, which is the only format that Media Center can work with. On top of that it will also take subtitle files and hard sub them into the video!

So here are the steps:

  1. Download mkv2vob Mirror: Downlaod from DMZ
  2. Install the program and then go to the Configuration Tab and setup defaults, here is what mine looks like:
  3. UPDATED – Making MKV files play nice in WMC with mkv2vob.
  4. If your file has a subtitle track you can turn it on by setting these defaults so they get encoded in the video:
  5. UPDATED – Making MKV files play nice in WMC with mkv2vob.
  6. Now go ahead to the Add File tab and select the MKV file you wish to convert
  7. Go ahead and setup a Destination Directory which is where the file will be put when it is done.
  8. Go ahead and hit Add File and it will start converting.
  9. You can also add an entire directory as well which is nice.

UPDATE 11/23/10:

After a few comments I have gone back and discussed improvements to the settings that I have posted above. It seems although it is better to set Video Transcoding to “Automatic” and the Output File Extension to “mpg” or “m2ts”. This will drastically increase your processing time as there is no reason to transcode a H.264 to an H.264 video stream:

UPDATED – Making MKV files play nice in WMC with mkv2vob.

UPDATE 5/14/2013:
Added a download mirror. Also it is recommended to use .m2ts as the container format.

That is it you are done! Enjoy.

-By James Montemagno from RevoHTPC.com
UPDATED – Making MKV files play nice in WMC with mkv2vob.

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