Once upon a time, before my wicked bad home cinema setup, I struggled long and hard to find a solution to play MKV video files on my television. Aside from the TV, the only bit of kit I had hanging off it was my beloved XBOX360.
After much research, I found out that I didn’t actually need anything else at all! With the help of this nifty bit of software, you can ‘remux’ a MKV video into something the XBOX360 will decode straight out of the box, the trusty MP4 video format.
The software is called XenonMKV. Readers of my blog will probably know I’ve written about this software before. I have much love for it. It’s simple to use, pretty quick, and gets the job done. Seeing as all the software is doing is stripping the video and audio out of it’s MKV container, it’s far, far quicker than conversion.
Sadly, there is a downside, although strictly the fault of Microsoft, not XenonMKV. All video files (besides WMV) are restricted to a 4gb maximum file size. Though XenonMKV caters for this by offering the option to break movies down into 4gb bite site nuggets, it’s still a royal PITA. The other downside is that audio is reverted to 2.1 stereo. Bye bye DTS track. The optimist inside of me wonders if Microsoft will ever unblock these features. The realist inside guesses probably not.