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Flame Artist by day. Proud Dad by, uhm, the rest of the time. Lover of everything Apple. Hater of everything Microsoft. Except for the Xbox 360 of course.

Sep 11, 2009

Quicktime X and MKV files

I was a little bit disoriented with Quicktime X, to be honest. What, no export preferences? Only Sharing to iTunes? The UI looks very nice and the promise of GPU-accelerated playback is theoretically good, but what about 1080p MKV files playing natively? Quicktime X doesn’t recognise anything besides MP4 or iTunes’ M4V files. Perian was a constant presence in Leopard but a second-tier citizen with 10.6. Until now!

Thanks to the info in this thread on the cocoa forge board and the latest version of Perian, this utility will let Quicktime X recognise and play .mkv files. Front Row will happily play AVI files (as long as you have Flip4Mac installed) and SD MKV files but not 720p or 1080 movies unfortunately.

Of course, there’s always Plex which plays all movie codecs flawlessly without the need for Perian.

Category: Apple, Film, Mac, Media Centre, OSX, Snow Leopard

Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

  • http://iguide.travel iGuide

    Great article, thanks. By the way, anyone know how to work a more elegant solution to this, one which doesn’t require adding a dummy app? For example, how to exit QuickTime X’s preferences to accept MKV files?

  • http://haniblog.com Hani

    I did some digging around trying to find what the Perian – Open in QT Player app does and according to this site it updates one of Snow Leopard property list files to accept mkv’s as acceptable audio-visual content. The utility is a run-once and forget solution, until Apple update the OS of course!

    Quicktime X’s behaviour can’t be tweaked in Snow Leopard but there is a freeware PrefPane that’ll let you tweak aspects in QTX.

    Hope this helps!

  • AdamF

    THANK YOU! Wow I was so sad until now my front row and everything back with MKV files you guys are the S__T!

  • http://haniblog.com Hani

    Glad I helped and enjoy Front Row!

  • alex

    This appears to be broken with 10.6.2 and Perian 1.2.2

    can anyone confirm this?

  • http://haniblog.com/ Hani

    I tried this on 10.6.3 and scrubbing seems to be sluggish but it still works. Let me do some digging around and see what I can find.

Hi. I'm Hani and this is my blog. I also have some photos on Flickr, bookmarks on Delicious, tweets on Twitter and generalities on Facebook as well. Most of the time I can be found at Prime Focus in London, crafting commericals using Flame.

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