The modern digital world provides a huge number of ways to get high-quality content. Of course, most ordinary users are not too interested in this, but even a person far from the computer could notice that the number of new audio and video file formats has increased significantly. In particular, the MKV format has gained immense popularity in recent years. Speaking more scientifically, this is a special file container.
As the name implies, this file is used to save information in a "packed" form. Most of the video files are not particularly compact, and therefore, for ease of use, they are compressed using special codecs. The quality of this compression is largely characterized by the MKV format we mentioned.
Back in the early 90s, the computer industry began to take its first steps in this direction. In particular, it was then that Microsoft created the extremely popular AVI (Audio Video Interleave) to this day . And for its time this discovery was a huge step forward, but today the capabilities of the old codec are already clearly insufficient. For example, in such a file it is impossible to fit a lot of additional information about the film. But MKV format of such features contains in abundance.
By the way, it was created by our compatriots. They tried to provide for the requirements that will be imposed on the video in the coming years. As a result, a new container appeared, which received the talking name "matryoshka". Already by name you can imagine its internal structure.
But still, what is the MKV format so good for? Firstly, it can store several audio tracks in different languages at once, it is possible to create separate chapters and even a full menu. In addition, if necessary, sound and video can easily be pulled out of it. But the main difference from the old AVI is that viewing MKV format even in the form of files of several gigabytes in size will never be annoying with "sagging" and slowing down.
Of course, this is true only in relation to sufficiently powerful machines, since on older computers your favorite movie can turn into a real slide show. In addition, for a comfortable viewing, you need a normal video card.
So, to summarize and briefly tell you about the most important advantages of the new format.
First, it must be said that even advanced users consider MP4 files as the main contents of the container, although this is not so. The following types of audio and video files can be packed into a nested doll: MPRG, H264, AVC1, WMV, etc. It should be noted that the program used for MKV format (multimedia player) must perfectly support them. VLC, KMP and Totem (for .nix systems) are great for this. However, recently, other types of players have quickly acquired MKV support.
Another pleasant innovation was the excellent resistance of the “nesting doll” to errors, the community of developers constantly updating the format, as well as the openness, which even allowed the lobby of the creators of proprietary codecs to oppose the implementation of MKV format support in modern Blu-ray players.