Bigscreen Videoplayer not working with MKV?

[hexenfree]

Title, trying to play MKV files on the video player, but it just gets stuck on loading video. I downloaded the codec from the microsoft store and it still isn't working

does it just not like MKV videos?

[Peregrine]

It's most likely due to an incompatible codec. Bigscreen does not ship with any codecs or filters built in, but instead makes use of what your operating system supports.

On PC, video codecs supported include DV Video, h.264, h.263, MJPEG, MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 v1/v2/v3, and WMV. Audio codecs supported include μ-law, ADPCM, AAC, MP3, GSM 6.10, and WMA. Additional codecs may be supported depending on what codec packs you have installed.

[TorMazila]

There are no "MKV videos" - MKV is just a container, similar to AVI, which can contain multiple video, audio, subtitles tracks. Those tracks can have any codecs used to encode streams - which includes situations where the "installable" codec, suitable for your OS just doesn't exist. Players like VLC have a gazillion of codecs built-in and don't rely on OS - it's easier to port such apps to a different platform as you only need to pay attention to program interface, opening/reading a file, displaying output and playing sound - no "use OS-provided codecs" part (as sometimes there's no API in the OS for that anyway).

Devs, t's responsibility of the player to determine which codec to use and display some sort of error message - preferably with a proper explanation to the user. And having an option for log file creation doesn't hurt either

[hexenfree]

Originally posted by TorMazila:

There are no "MKV videos" - MKV is just a container, similar to AVI, which can contain multiple video, audio, subtitles tracks. Those tracks can have any codecs used to encode streams - which includes situations where the "installable" codec, suitable for your OS just doesn't exist. Players like VLC have a gazillion of codecs built-in and don't rely on OS - it's easier to port such apps to a different platform as you only need to pay attention to program interface, opening/reading a file, displaying output and playing sound - no "use OS-provided codecs" part (as sometimes there's no API in the OS for that anyway).

Devs, t's responsibility of the player to determine which codec to use and display some sort of error message - preferably with a proper explanation to the user. And having an option for log file creation doesn't hurt either

Thanks for all the info, I thought these codecs were exclusive to MKV for some reason.

And yeah it'd certainly be nice to know from bigscreen what codec the player is having trouble with as it's basically had to be trial and error with handbrake.

It definitely doesn't like x265 video wise and audio wise I think it's not working with AC3

I've re-encoded one video that didn't work in bigscreen or windows 'movies and tv' video player (uses same codecs as your pc same way bigscreen player does so assumedly should be same result) one video with AC3 that didnt work there is working re-encoded with AAC LC. But I've yet to test these directly in bigscreen to fully confirm just yet.

I'm unsure if I can just download AC3 codec for my system?? but regardless that seems to be it mostly. Confusing for me lmao.