Matroska

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**Matroska (Матрёшка)** <tr><td style="text-align: center;" colspan="2">Image:Matroska-logo-128x128.png</td></tr> <tr><th style="white-space: nowrap;">File extension:</th><td>`.mkv .mka`</td></tr><tr><th style="white-space: nowrap;">MIME type:</th><td>`<code>audio/x-matroska` `video/x-matroska`</code></td></tr><tr><th style="white-space: nowrap;">Developed by:</th><td>The Matroska Project</td></tr><tr><th style="white-space: nowrap;">Type of format:</th><td>Container format</td></tr><tr><th style="white-space: nowrap;">Container for:</th><td>Anything</td></tr>

Matroska (common file extensions being .mkv and .mka) is a project to develop an open source multimedia container format similar to Apple's QuickTime, MPEG's MP4 or Microsoft's Advanced Streaming Format. It is named after the Matryoshka doll. The Russian матрёшка would be transliterated into the Roman alphabet as Matryoshka. The official playback solution for the Windows operating system is the Combined Community Codec Pack.

The project was announced on December 7 2002 as a fork of the Multimedia Container Format project, after disagreements with that project's creator about the use of the Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML) instead of another binary format. The founders of the Matroska project believe that the use of EBML brings them a number of advantages, including making it easier to extend the format in the future as new developments occur or as the project goals change.

The project has a number of goals:

create a modern, flexible, extensible, cross-platform multimedia container format that allows streaming across the Internet, fast seeking within a file and DVD-like menus
develop a set of tools for the creation and editing of Matroska files, licensed under the GNU General Public License
develop libraries that can be used to allow developers to add Matroska support to their applications, licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
work with hardware manufacturers to include Matroska support in embedded multimedia devices
native Matroska support in various operating systems including Windows through DirectShow, Linux through the GStreamer multimedia framework and Haiku through its Mediakit.

[edit] See also

Comparison of container formats
LiVES, an open-source video editing program which can encode to Matroska format.

[edit] External links

http://www.matroska.org - Official webpage
http://corecodec.org/projects/matroska/ - Official Developer Project Home
http://www.cccp-project.net/ - 'Combined Community Codec Pack' all you need to play Matroska files on Windows
http://haali.cs.msu.ru/mkv/ - alternative matroska splitter
Matroska in Hydrogenaudio.org wiki
Project Announcement - on Doom9 forums
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/ - parser, de-/muxer and player
http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/ - Linux and Windows tools for Matroska
The XviD-Ogg-MKV Walkthrough - Step-by-step instructions for MKV encoding in Microsoft Windows.

Multimedia compression formats
Video compression formats	ISO/IEC	MPEG-1 \| MPEG-2 \| MPEG-4 \| MPEG-4/AVC	ITU-T	H.261 \| H.262 \| H.263 \| H.264	Others	AVS \| Dirac \| Indeo \| MJPEG \| RealVideo \| VC-1 \| Theora \| VP6 \| VP7 \| WMV
Audio compression formats	ISO/IEC MPEG	MPEG-1 Layer III (MP3) \| MPEG-1 Layer II \| AAC \| HE-AAC	ITU-T	G.711 \| G.722 \| G.722.1 \| G.722.2 \| G.723 \| G.723.1 \| G.726 \| G.728 \| G.729 \| G.729.1 \| G.729a	Others	AC3 \| ATRAC \| FLAC \| iLBC \| Monkey's Audio \| Musepack \| RealAudio \| SHN \| Speex \| Vorbis \| WavPack \| WMA
Image compression formats	ISO/IEC/ITU-T	JPEG \| JPEG 2000 \| JPEG-LS \| JBIG \| JBIG2	--	--	Others	BMP \| GIF \| ILBM \| PCX \| PNG \| TGA \| TIFF \| WMP
Media container formats	General	3GP \| ASF \| AVI \| FLV \| Matroska \| MP4 \| MXF \| NUT \| Ogg \| Ogg Media \| QuickTime \| RealMedia	Audio only	AIFF \| AU \| WAV	--	--