Windows 8.1 video app has built in mkv support

[Deihmos 147]

Is it possible to add direct play to the win 8 app?

[bennymac 47]

Good question. I'm curious too?

 

This out of the box support for mkv is huge imo. I know a lot of Surface 2 (Win RT) users that will be very happy.

Edited December 10, 2014 by bennymac

[Luke 37114]

It's being looked into, yes.

[jhoff80 87]

Keep in mind though that you don't get subtitles in the Windows 8 app.  DTS soundtracks are also not supported at all.  Still, the built-in MKV support is a great first step.

[7illusions 1249]

Sorry to let you know that this is not a OS support for mkv.. It's only supported within their app. We'll see what happens down the road, but this might be to test out their MKV solution prior to the Win10 release (Which will have native support)

So, at the moment we can't directstream mkv.. (It's still being looked into though)

[jayTcold 8]

Why is it that Microsoft has not added .MKV support to their OS's, going all the way back to Windows 7?

 

Is it licensing, does Microsoft have to pay the .MKV consortium a licensing fee for each Windows installation?

 

I'm not a Microsoft hater, but I think they could've done themselves a big favor and win brownie points with consumers by supporting .MKV out-of-the-box, as opposed to users having to deal with codecs, etc.

[jordy 284]

@@jayTcold more than likely to protect their own .wmv format.

[techywarrior 688]

I don't think it's actually that simple. MS probably doesn't want to rely on someone else's codec so if they add MKV support it won't be just them slapping in a generic codec pack. Next they have to make sure that any codec they add as part of the OS doesn't interfere with any other codec in the OS. And most importantly they need to add it to their test suite to make sure that future updates don't break it and there are no major incompatibilities with third party software.

 

There very well may be political reasons behind them not including it in the past but I bet it's more to do with user usage, testing, and possible licensing (not monetarily since MKV is free but what the license requires them to provide etc.)

 

It is understandable that Win7 didn't have MKV support since it was developed before MKV was widely used. It's still not widely used if you consider the total amount of video legitimately being played by the general public but it is gaining momentum.

 

I don't think it has anything to do with WMV because it's not like they don't support MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG2, AVI, and other formats. Some are containers like MKV others not.

 

I just don't think that decisions like these can be made easily/quickly.

 

Hell, just look at them dropping DVD playback support in Win8. Before it came out some people were questioning it but there wasn't really much of an uproar because most people just simply don't stick a physical DVD into a computer anymore to watch a movie. Some of us rip the movies, most stream from Netflix, Amazon, UltraViolet, etc.

 

Hopefully this "new" MS will be more agile in supporting new formats/technologies since there have been rumors about the speed at which Win10 will be getting updates and if there will be more functionality updates in the small patches versus larger point releases or service packs. It's nice to see MKV and FLAC being added to Win10. Lets hope it's the start of things to come and not a one time thing.

[gcoupe 63]

Native support for MKV comes in Windows 10:

 

http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-10-gets-native-support-mkv-and-high-efficiency-video-coding-hevc