1. cio_cio's Avatar
    Hello.İs there any mkv player for playbook?i can find a few player (Vplayer,clickPlayer) howerver they don't work.
    02-27-12 06:21 PM
  2. jostnyc's Avatar
    mkv player?? good luck bud.
    02-27-12 07:37 PM
  3. rfig's Avatar
    If you had done a search on the theme of playing .mkv files in the Playbook you would have found your answer.
    Anyway, I'll tell you about it. mkv is nothing but a container file, and it can contain different video and audio files in different formats. If the playbook supports the codecs for those video and audio files contained in the .mkv then the mkv will play. A lot of mkv files contain AC3 or DTS audio which are not supported by the Playbook. Such mkv files won't play, regardless of the player used.
    Check out this page for information on what formats are supported:

    http://docs.blackberry.com/en/smartp..._(English).pdf

    I have played several mkv files in my Playbook without problems, but they had AAC audio.

    An option here is to take those mkv files and convert them to something the playbook will handle, using a program like Freemake.

    Hope this helps!!
    Last edited by rfig; 02-27-12 at 07:54 PM.
    02-27-12 07:51 PM
  4. cio_cio's Avatar
    but it takes long time.
    02-28-12 02:59 AM
  5. Bakamushi's Avatar
    A lot of mkv files contain AC3 or DTS audio which are not supported by the Playbook.
    And why on earth are they not supported by the playbook ?

    Are those eccentric, rarely used codecs ? I don't think so...
    02-28-12 03:04 AM
  6. Jethro-Ten's Avatar
    And why on earth are they not supported by the playbook ?

    Are those eccentric, rarely used codecs ? I don't think so...
    Because of the cost of licensing them most likely.
    Possibly political? but probably cost.

    J
    02-28-12 03:31 AM
  7. cio_cio's Avatar
    And why on earth are they not supported by the playbook ?

    Are those eccentric, rarely used codecs ? I don't think so...
    i agree with u.also android and ios have a lot of video player.why blackberr hasn't ?
    02-28-12 04:50 AM
  8. rfig's Avatar
    but it takes long time.
    LOL. I know, but that's why you do it overnight. You can set a queue of files to be converted and let the computer do it while you sleep!!
    02-28-12 07:19 AM
  9. rfig's Avatar
    Because of the cost of licensing them most likely.
    Possibly political? but probably cost.

    J
    I also think DTS and AC3 are more complex formats that might require more computing power to decode, but I'm not 100% sure.
    02-28-12 07:22 AM
  10. cio_cio's Avatar
    LOL. I know, but that's why you do it overnight. You can set a queue of files to be converted and let the computer do it while you sleep!!
    .yes but i want do it every time
    02-28-12 07:43 AM
  11. GaiusPrimus's Avatar
    Main reason why these codecs aren't available is due to licensing issues as Rim got sued early last year by Dolby. There are sideloable android apps that will play MKV's and AC3 files with the codec packaged into the application.
    Majestic Lion likes this.
    02-28-12 08:11 AM
  12. kenneth2008's Avatar
    Main reason why these codecs aren't available is due to licensing issues as Rim got sued early last year by Dolby. There are sideloable android apps that will play MKV's and AC3 files with the codec packaged into the application.
    Would you care to name a few? I've tried a couple of players but neither have worked

    Thanks in advance.

    K.
    02-28-12 05:34 PM
  13. peter7tam's Avatar
    Try out DicePlayer. I haven't tried it on a PlayBook yet (still waiting for it to arrive), but it plays such files just fine on my Android phone.

    The app is free by the way.
    02-28-12 05:45 PM
  14. triplealiali's Avatar
    MKV is supported on the 2.0 operating system. It has been confirmed and tested by myself!
    02-28-12 06:52 PM
  15. CrackBook77's Avatar
    Who uses mkv with AC3 files?.....People who steal movies, If you want to play your movies BUY THEM!!!! There, an easy fix for ya.

    Option 2 would be....since your googling for illegal movies why not throw in AAC into the search field, heck why not just search for a compatible file format?

    I'm not trying to sound righteous about the downloading of movies but come on, you could've found the movie in a compatible format faster than complaining in this forum.
    02-28-12 08:01 PM
  16. navyet3's Avatar
    Who uses mkv with AC3 files?.....People who steal movies, If you want to play your movies BUY THEM!!!! There, an easy fix for ya.

    Option 2 would be....since your googling for illegal movies why not throw in AAC into the search field, heck why not just search for a compatible file format?

    I'm not trying to sound righteous about the downloading of movies but come on, you could've found the movie in a compatible format faster than complaining in this forum.
    @crackBook77

    A lot of people use .mkv format. It is a super format to save copies of your blu-rays on an external hard drive. I have over 200 blu-rays, yes I buy them, and then copy them to an external hard drive. Then I have that hard drive hooked up to my NAS and can watch all the movies in HD without having to constantly go to my stack of movies, pull them out, load them into a blu-ray player, do all the waiting and then watch the movie.

    Since I do a lot of traveling, I use the MacBook Air as my travel laptop. Kind of hard to put a DVD or BRD in an air and watch it on the plane. The .mkv format allows me to put a few movies on the Air and watch while I'm flying and also while I'm in the hotel.
    I have XBMC and VLC and MacBluerayPlayer loaded. So I never have any issues watching the movies I want to see. Plus, using the .mkv format allows "Lossless" formatting. Which means you get all the great stuff the blu-ray disc give you, including all the surround sound options, PLUS all the audio encoding you need.

    Since I do you Mac Products, I use StreamtoMe and let me niece stream movies to her iPad and iPhone. I couldn't do that with some of the other formats.

    I believe, that we should buy the movies, once owned I have no issues copying them over to .mkv format and watching them how I want to. I don't believe in pirating movies, so those that do, that is just a shame that they are that type of person.

    But before you start going on a rant about buying the movies and all is good. Take your PB and see if it has a way to stuff a disc into it. Then let me know how it plays....
    If you can make that happen, you are a better person than I am. But until there is a drive slot, I will continue to use the .mkv format to watch movies on every single piece of equipment I own. And that is: HTC EVO 4G; 64GB PB; 3 MacBook laptops; Apple TV

    So before you start sounding all righteous, I suggest you actually do some research on why the .mkv format is so wanted and also all the various ways it can be utilized in our ever increasing world of technology.

    Just my thoughts!
    carlos318i, jerybis and duhoh like this.
    02-29-12 09:38 AM
  17. CrackBook77's Avatar
    In all honesty you should have chosen a more widely available format to package your copied Blu-Rays and I wasn't being righteous and technically copying your Blu-Rays is illegal in the way you are doing it. You can make a backup only as a replacement IF something happens to the original. Not that I disagree with what your doing personally. You must have missed my point tho.

    The fact is (I don't use a Mac so forgive me if I'm wrong) Most OS's out of the box don't support MKV nor do most portable devices. Just package it in something compatible. It's just not worth complaining about

    Put it this way, I love Linux OS's and I like to game as well, unfortunately 99% of games don't get released for Linux not that I'm complaining, I just use windows because that is what works and it works well.

    All the copying software I've used and it's been quite a few over the years have allowed me to do all the custom settings. So people need to stop complaining and just use what works. Tablets are NOT PC's and all of them are inherently limited in many ways. Please just do what the device can handle and get over the fact that when you started copying movies you made the wrong choice for your future needs
    03-08-12 06:50 AM
  18. navyet3's Avatar
    @crackbook77,

    First off, you are correct about the Mac. It doesn't support MKV format. That is why I have to use VLC or XBMC players.

    Secondly, you are correct that we do need to format what ever we are using to the device we are using. There is a reason why programs work better in different formats than other on certain devices.

    I think that the biggest thing is, that people make a copy of their DVD's or Blu-Ray's in the MKV format because it can hold every codex out there. But they don't want to have to re-encode the movies just so they can watch them on a portable device. I like others would love to just take the MKV's of the movies I have copied and drop them onto the Playbook. It does give us an AWESOME movie experience. Plus when I go over to my friends house I can take a movie and just HDMI it up on his big screen.

    I use Pavtube to copy my Blu-Ray's to the proper Playbook code. It comes with a preset so I don't have anything to worry about. So if there is a movie that I will want to watch during lunch time at work, then I can just make me a copy, watch it and then delete it off when I'm done. So in the end I have to make three seperate copies of the movie. One is the back up, two is the MKV and three is if I want to watch it on the PB. So if the PB could handle MKV's then I would only have to make two copies.

    As far as my future needs, MKV is that format. I can just use the free VLC and XBMC to watch it. I can save smaller lossless copies on an external drive and stream directly from my home server. I don't need as much space as the other formats. It is, in my opinion, better than any other format out there.

    Now, having said that, I will agree that there is a codex that is perfect for every device and we should try to use that as much as possible. While I have no issues in copying my movies in the proper format for the devices I'm using, I know that we as a people have gotten super lazy.... It is easier to drop a MKV to the PB than to reformat it correctly.....

    Thanks for the great rebuttal. And I hope that some people are learning from this.

    Byron
    03-08-12 08:21 AM
  19. soaman's Avatar
    It is also a great format to convert your HD movies filmed by personal camera (my Canon eats 200MB per minute!!!)..
    03-08-12 10:03 AM
  20. pauldriver's Avatar
    Converting an AC3 MKV to AAC goes quickly, just don't convert the video.

    Set your transcoder to copy the video stream and convert the AC3 to AAC stream only.

    Handbrake is popular and works, I like XviD2PSP under Windows because its got an acceptable user interface, simple batches, and it was the first one I found that my 70yr old Mom could run for herself

    Mom don't understand it, but she knows what buttons make DVDs that she can watch on her Hauppauge MediaTV HD and Playbook.

    I also have found, most noticeably when HTTP pseudo streaming over a connection with say twice the purported bit-rate as the media, say 10MB Ethernet, or Wireless G (distance reasons on both and Wireless G on a good day breaks even with 10MB wired) or even over a internet connection, that the MKV container has more latency then MP4s, and I have been converting my MKVs to MP4s by directly copying the video and audio

    You don't gain anything, you don't lose anything, it's the same raw data, I just find MP4 to have better response to IP transmission then MKV, it may have to do with the years Apple spent tweaking QuickTime for IP transmission before it became the MPEG4 Transport Stream container, or it may have to do with the MKV being a generalized container format, that can hold anything (like the Amiga's IFF) or it could be implementation issues, with the way that the data is muxed into the MKV files.

    An example of that is the old NAN-Dubed AVI files, that had a large chunk size, optimized around the amount of data a Linux computer could pass in a single DMA request. This did maximize harddisk playback performance on those machines, and made it suck on other systems or worthless for streaming, until re-muxed.

    The MKV over IP issue sucks, because I have years worth of media in MKV containers, that I am slowly transferring to the MP4 container.

    Hopefully if WEBM takes off (which is doubtful even with Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, Google backing it) as it's a royalty free format based on a specific Matroska profile with VP8 video compression and Vorbis audio compression, the experience will trickle-back to Matroska.

    I'm betting that even with the licensing costs, MP4 wins over MKV/WEBM.
    03-08-12 11:56 AM
  21. poesy700's Avatar
    Main reason why these codecs aren't available is due to licensing issues as Rim got sued early last year by Dolby. There are sideloable android apps that will play MKV's and AC3 files with the codec packaged into the application.
    Can you please tell me which ?
    08-17-12 10:25 AM
  22. Yamcha's Avatar
    What you can do is before downloading an mkv format is to change the file extension to a supported format and it should play the majority of mkv videos..
    08-18-12 06:04 AM
  23. Sonic-NKT's Avatar
    the mkv container is not the problem. my pb plays them just fine. the problem is the audio codec. just renaming the container wont fix that. i hope someone ports something like vlc or mplayer in the future.
    08-18-12 11:33 AM
  24. Wolfgan's Avatar
    Rumors say that bb10 supports ac3 audio codec natively...
    08-19-12 08:51 AM
  25. FF22's Avatar
    Rumors say that bb10 supports ac3 audio codec natively...
    Really? Rim is going to pay the licensing fee to Dolby? Is there a legal workaround that is used by the those various desktop alternatives that can play ac3?
    08-19-12 10:07 AM
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