The VideoLAN Forums

So like, i have an MKV file here that supposedly i can use VLC to run. However, the video uses the RV40 video codec, which, as i'm told, is proprietary and will never be supported by VLC.

It belongs to Real Player.

Well, five minutes and one install of Real Player 10 later, i find out that Realplayer doesn't support .mkv files.

So now, the question is, what's the problem here? Why is a video stream encoded using RV40 but the player which supports RV40 can't play the file in which it was made?

Isn't that technically impossible to do?

Did i miss something?

OS: Windows XP SP 0
VLC Ver.: 0.8.1

yes, you did miss something. But what you missed isn't here. Look elsewhere.(I think "real-alternative" is a keyword)

Hah. It plays the video with no audio.

Presently playing the audio in VLC and the video in RA and enjoying my movie ^_^

Gotta love it -- that's what happens when you mix containers (.mk4, .asf, whatever) with CODECs (RV40, MPEG4,...) -- if the person generating the video isn't careful, it's easy to come up with a non-standard mixxture of items, that normal players cannot decode.

mkv+rv40 is very very common. mkv has defined how such a stream should be. And it can only (afaik) be played back with RA

RA whines about not having an audio codec, so maybe it's just a matter of downloading the appropriate codec.

Here's a readout:

Stream 1

Media Type 0:
--------------------------
AM_MEDIA_TYPE:
majortype: MEDIATYPE_Audio {73647561-0000-0010-8000-00AA00389B71}
subtype: Unknown GUID Name {8D2FD10B-5841-4A6B-8905-588FEC1ADED9}
formattype: Unknown GUID Name {B36E107F-A938-4387-93C7-55E966757473}
bFixedSizeSamples: 1
bTemporalCompression: 0
lSampleSize: 1
cbFormat: 3978


Media Type 1:
--------------------------
AM_MEDIA_TYPE:
majortype: MEDIATYPE_Audio {73647561-0000-0010-8000-00AA00389B71}
subtype: Unknown GUID Name {CDDCA2D5-6D75-4F98-840E-737BEDD5C63B}
formattype: Unknown GUID Name {6BDDFA7E-9F22-46A9-AB5E-884EFF294D9F}
bFixedSizeSamples: 1
bTemporalCompression: 0
lSampleSize: 1
cbFormat: 24

Says it can't find a connectable filter.