The VideoLAN Forums

I'm trying to play a mkv file but all I see is the slide bar moving quickly from start to finish and nothing else. I go to Stream and Media Info -> Advanced information and see that there are numerous streams with a mixture of mpgv and mpga codecs. Is there something in Preferences that I need to set in order to view the file? Or is there something wrong with the mkv itself?

MKV is a container and it does rather depend on what is inside. In this case it's a MPEG 1 or 2 (both audio & video) file which I have never seen in a MKV container. Everything is supported and Messages may shed some light here. From the audio MPGa it seems that the video would be MPEG 1, but who knows what people do or experiment with without regard for compatible files or even if they check their work.

In general when supported formats don't play indicates a problem with the file and not the player. I may be wise to get a second opinion with another player. But on the surface (without some research), I would tend to believe that another player is going to fail playing MPEG 1 or 2 in a MKV container. Gabest's MPC would be a logical choice for this test. Another would be MPlayer, but this player is not Windows friendly, unless you have lots of time to spend.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried mplayer, mpc and zoom, none of them can play that mkv, so that file's busted. I guess I'll have to go find a way to extract from that mkv instead.