User Guide / Disclaimer for the installation of the matroska filter playback packs

In principle you can play matroska files on almost every Mediaplayer on Windows if you install this playback pack, as most of these players are based on Microsoft DirectShow (TM). Examples for these basic players, relying on DirectShow only, are

Windows Mediaplayer 6.4/7/8/9
BSPlayer
Radlight Player
Winamp 3

This installer pack was very well tested on many different computers and setups, and was proven to work fine for most of the testers. However, we have been informed that the pack has caused problems on the machines of some users, maybe caused by incompatibilities with other installed filters, especially if so-called 'codec packs' were installed before. Microsoft's DirectShow can be tricky sometimes, so please understand our warning in this respect. For this very reason, we can't take any responsibility for this kind of incompatibilities, nor can we accept any compensation claims if the installation of the playback pack leads to problems on your machine. If you have doubts here, try to use Xine or VLC ( see links below ).

Players with advanced Matroska support :

Meanwhile there are several very good players who can make more than just support basic playback of matroska files on Windows, but also offer specific support for the more advanced features of it, like

- switching of audio streams without the need for 3rd party filters like Morgan Stream Switcher ( it can be installed as an option here with this pack, but can cause problems in combination with other filters )
- automatic Aspect Ratio Correction for anamorphically encoded movies
- Reading/Writing matroska tags
etc.

The Core Media Player

The Core Media Team are great supporters of matroska , and they invested a lot of time to help one of our team members, Jory 'Jcsston' Stone, to add specific matroska support with a so-called CDL plugin. Of course, its coming with a built in audio stream switcher.

Using this plugin the users can currently
- read/write all the available tags in matroska audio and video files, such as title, artist, creation date, etc.
- automatically correct the display aspect ratio depending on the values stored in the video track header, for anamorphic encodings ( like DVDs, SVCDs )
and there are are even more functions planned for the future.

Media Player Classic

Gabest, the subtitles wizzard, has made a Mediaplayer of his own based on DirectShow also, and he recently added matroska support to it with a self made DirectShow parser filter that will work on all other players named above also, but does allow a few specific functions in conjunction with his player, like switching audio streams, etc..

VLC ( Videolan )

It was a big honour when Fenrir from the Videolan team added matroska support to this player, and more or less over a ( looong ) night. VLC has great streaming possibilities, as it can act as a streaming server also, and is not based on DirectShow. Because of that, it doesn't need installation of any other filters or codecs, as its coming with support for the mostly used video and audio formats already built in. We strongly recommend this player if you don't want to mess with installation of any codec packs or the like, just to be able to play a matroska file a friend has sent to you ;-).

Zoomplayer

Blight, who made his hobby a profession and is coding this player for his living, recently added specific matroska support to his player ( since ver. 3.30 ), using the possibilities that the newest matroska splitter filter offers via a special, extended 'track info interface', created by Toff from the CorePlayer team. His player now supports AR correction, and has a built in audio stream switcher. Zoomplayer is DirectShow based, like TCMP.

Xine

This great Linux player has matroska support meanwhile, thanks to the hard work of thibaut, and is available as a Windows compile also.

Foobar2000

Peter Pawlowski, a former member of the winamp development team, has created his own audio player project, and already a huge group of fans meanwhile. His player has support for almost all existing audio compression formats, can transcode from one audio format to another, and was one of the first apps that supported the new matroska tagging system.

Additional Information for this installer pack :

matroska files can contain a big number of different audio and video compression formats. We are trying to list the most used formats here, and also give links to the necessary decoder filters you have to install to be able to view your movies :

DivX Video : The installer will enable this via FFDshow, a great opensource project for a free MPEG4 decoder filter.

XviD Video : Same as for DivX Video.

AAC Audio : This great new audio compression standard is covered with an opensource decoder filter called CoreAAC

Ogg Vorbis audio : The Xiphophorus people gave a great free and patent free audio compression standard, called Ogg Vorbis. Vorbis audio can be stored fine in matroska files, and for playback we install the great CoreVorbis decoder filter

Multichannel ( 5.1 surround ) audio : Both AAC and Vorbis audio can be true 5.1 Digital surround also. The two decoder filters mentioned above can play this fine, but need some help if you don't have a 5.1 capable soundcard. The installer will add the great matrix filter to allow automatic downmixing for Stereo cards.

General sidenote about playback of audio and video in matroska files :

Thanks to the so-called 'Video For Windows' ( VfW ) compatibility mode of matroska it is possible to store and play every VfW video codec in it, and the same is valid for ACM audio codecs ( only CBR ). Just install the codec on your Windows PC, and VirtualdubMod will be able to open any AVI video using this codec and mux it into a .mkv file. For playback the normal VCM decoder, or DirectShow decoder filter will be used from the matroska DirectShow parser.