Xbox 360 .mkv playback
 

Just wondering if it can play .mkv files? I don't think it can, but I was curious.

Not directly, but if you use something like TVersity, you can use it to transcode mkv on the fly to a format the circlebox will play.

I'm not sure of the name, but I'm aware that there's applications to unpackage the video file out of the .MKV container and turn it into a WMV, which will then play on the 360. I imagine guides can be found online for such things, and I know a mate of mine has a set up that detects MKVs and unpacks them automatically.

Yeah, no dice on MKV unfortunately. I sure hope this is on their to-do list because it's really annoying.

Other than TVersity (which is too intense for my crappy PC), the best software I could find to convert MKV to something the 360 would eat was GOTsend which converts it to MP4, which also works. It's not ideal but it's better than nothing.

TVersity is a bit unstable. It's a nice idea, as long as it works for you.

Yeah, I should have mentioned that. It seems everyone but me has problems of some kind with it, but I've not had any single issue I didn't find an easy solution for. I guess I got lucky. *shrug*

It's the first solution I thought of that didn't involve manual unpacking though, although I'm sure there's plenty of others.

Thanks. See I have a really old computer (AMD Athlon 64 3000+) that doesn't have enough power to play 1080p videos... and since I was planning on maybe getting an Xbox 360, I wanted to know if it would be able to play .mkv as most of the 1080p torrents I've found use that format.

Is there anything better than GOTsend out there to convert the MKV into something the 360 will play? It does play .avi right?

Hey, don't you go to McGill?

Yeah, kind of sucks the power you need for tversity. I had a p4 3.0, and could only convert videos at 400*300 res from MKV files to have smooth playback on my 360. Otherwise buffering would occur every 30 seconds.

But I upgraded to a Q6600. I think the programmer of tversity made use of the multiple processors, because I have no issues of playing 720p/1080p mkv files on the fly on the 360, playing at the original resolution. It does take around 50-60% processing power of the CPU. So I think you will need a "newer" generation CPU to even play 720p/1080p videos (MKV to WMV on the 360)--at least a core duo or equivalent is required..maybe (?).

MKV is just a container of a "standard" format. The 360 doesn't recognize it, but the PS3 (got this baby today) can play MKV files, and recognizes it as a standard format (MPEG 2/4) file but if it has subtitles or whatever then that won't get displayed.

So I think the best way (for anime and you have a 360)is to go to Tversity, or convert. Otherwise if you want to play MKV files with no subtitles..you can always get a ps3. or if you can spare MORE money buy a new PC. I got my Quad core (completely loaded minus the monitor and VC), a dell, for 300 dollars back in November, but it was during one of those hot deal days.

And the standard formats for the 360s are the following: avi/xvid, H.264 files but in Mpeg-4 format, WMVs, and normal mpeg files.

MKV2VOB? If that's the one you're talking about then it's never worked for me. Apparently it works for a lot of people but I can just never get it to work. Each time I get a new problem with it, it either converts a couple seconds or minutes of the video or sometimes it's without any audio.

So as long as I get something to convert from .mkv to .avi, I'll be able to play things on my xbox 360?

Oh yeah. The 360 plays most formats other than MKV.

Interesting topic.

I used to convert my mkv files to avi with a video format converter and then playback on my xbox360.

However yesterday on another forum I was told it was able to play mkv file on xbox360 with the codec downloaded.

Can you?

MKV isn't a video format, it's a container like a lot people here have mentioned.
The best way to do it is to install haali media splitter (you probably already have it in some way or sort).
Get mkvextract.exe, there should be a gui version of this too.
Then re-mux them with something like mp4box (for mp4 of course). I don't have a 360 so I don't know what's the mp4 support on that. Also I am not sure what kind of codec 360 actually support. But I'd imagine most of the common profile should be supported.
Also doing it this way will not change the video/audio quality at all because you are doing nothing to the a/v stream, instead you are just changing how they are packaged.
One problem is that MKV support a lot more "softsub" format than MP4.

What you suggest works, but it's a lot of extra fuss every time you download some animu.

Actually I find that to be the easiest =(
Since you can easily script these things to process the entire directly at once with a single command line entry.
The usual GUI "freeware" I see that does it not only botch a lot of things, it's also way more cumbersome to process many files at once.

Really now? I find the easiest to be transcoding and streaming on-the-fly. It requires no real prep-work. Admittedly I use my PS3, but... there's no reason it can't work on the 360. I didn't find TVersity all that great, so instead I'm using Playstation 3 Media Server (PMS) but despite the name it also kinda works on 360. I dare say it will work better as more time passes.

Well, I don't want to get into an argument of what's the defacto easiest way to do this, since it varies from person to person.
I haven't visited gamingforce for nearly 8 years =P. Lets start by playing nice!

Anyways I only have a PS3 also. I find transcode on the fly and stream is a significant quality loss issue. Also it requires you to have a reasonably good PC which the OP doesn't have. My method include no need for re-encoding anything, it's just copying the stream out of a wrapper and putting it back into another wrapper.

The method might have a deep learning curve for some, but in the end. All you need to do to convert a full directory of mkv file to mp4 is simply type mkv2mp4 *.

Well for everyone there is a "best" way to do things for many things. and that way can be very different for each individual. As a video enthusiast I love messing around with these things so I guess by already have went over the learning curve to operate these tools, maybe it's best for me =)

I am playing nice, I'm just considering the alternatives. I can see the basis of what you're saying, but for me a solution where you don't have to do anything other than specify which folders are going to be shared satisfies the definition of 'easy'. For someone who doesn't have a good PC, I admit it's not going to work so well.