.mkv on running on mac OSX

[guest]

hello,
I've been using VLC for a while now (It's my Mac defult player) and it's been amazing. I've run into some trouble though but it seems like something someone probably has a fix for somewhere.

I'm trying to play a .mkv file, running OS X panther and I'm getting the video and patchy audio. The accompanying instructions directed me to download and install Motraska and ffdshow (codec support?) but of course they are windows .exe files and I didn't find any other formats on either's website. I searched the old posts and in reference to the thread... viewtopic.php?t=3297&highlight=matroska+mac, the video stream is using the Xvid codec (guess that's why I see the video), the audio is mp4a through 6 channels, the subs are spu codec (there are multiple sub tracks, which I can't see either but I can get ahold of a .srt file from a 2ndary source).

Am I up the river?... it seems like I'm just a download or button click away from a smooth file. Any ideas?

Thanks,
A very gratefull VLS user!

[Tr909]

Just giving this a bumb because i ran into a MKV (matroska) today which has the exact same specs and very sloppy playback. Video stalls every 12 frames or so, regular 5 second no vido warning dialog and disabling audio only brings down cpu usage only marginally. Every other XVID (.avi) plays fine, only not in a MKV (MacOS X 10.3.8 / VLC player 0.8.1

Is there a magic spell or something to either make MKV play better in VLC or can we extract the streams (convert) and make a (better) supported container???

[dionoea]

some important work is underway concerning mkv support. You can try nightly builds ( http://vthr.videolan.org/~videolan ) and give us feed back

[Tr909]

Hey, thnx for the quick response. I tested the latest build and on first hand it looks a lot better (les stutter). But as soon as you open the MessageWindow or info-window it stutters a lot again. When i disable the audio, ActivityMonitor says 55% to 70% but with audio 84% to 106%
Here are some specs (G4/733Mhz/768Mb)

-Stream0/Codec:XVID/Lang:und/Type:Video/Res:672x288
-Stream1/Codec:mp4a/lang:Chinese/Type:audio/Chan:6/srate:22050
-Stream2/Codec:spu/lang:English/type:subtitle
-Stream3/Codec:spu/lang:Chinese/type:subtitle
muxing app: libebml v0.7.2 + libmatroska v0
writing app: mkvmerge v0.9.6 ('Every Little K

And what is this message:
main debug: thread 43780608: secret message triggered at src/misc/block.c:227 (Operation timed out)

Thanx for looking into this,
Tr.

[The DJ]

The audio is taking so much CPU because it is 6 channel audio and will probably need to be downmixed to stereo. Basically i think this is just a very strong XviD encode and therefore just takes a lot of CPU to decode as well.

People often seem to think that if you can run one XviD/DivX/Mpeg 4 that you can run them all. This is absolutely NOT true. I myself recently experienced that even though i had been able to watch EVERY xvid on my G4/400 Mac so far. I suddenly ran into Stargate SG1 episodes that wouldn't run for the life of me on my old mac.

Investigation proved that this file was using more advanced features of Xvid that normally are not used and it indeed therefore took double the CPU to decode the file.