Maximum PC

What I mean to ask is.....movies that are in the .mkv format look great at only 700mb whereas .avi files look like hell at 700mb. You need double that for the same great appearance.

2 hour movies I download have to be 1.4 or more gigs to maintain HD whereas 700mb .mkv files seem to maintain that fine but with half the size???? I know .mkv is open source, just curious if there was something special about the .mkv format.

You would need to find out the codec used to encode the file - MKV is just the container really.

Yeah, I've been reading all over about Matroska. Very interesting story and very cool that it's open source. Seems like all the best stuff is open source. I love Firefox which is an open source browser. Blows away IE AND it showed how Microsoft does what they always do.....buy up someone else's ideas and call it their own. Firefox invented tabbed browsing and after they did of course, Microsoft soon followed. They're followers, not leaders.

There is no magic behind mkv that makes it look better. There are a few things likely to explain it though:

1) mkv is a more techincal/nerdy format - the people using it are much more likely to know wtf they are doing and produce the best encodes (if you've ever messed with video encoding you'll know its easy to produce a file 3x larger than another file that looks the same in terms of quality).
2) mkv is newer and supports more advanced video compression algorithms. the avi you downloaded off kazaa 10 years ago of pee-wee hermans awesomely gay adventure was probably encoded using divx3 or some other horribly unsophisticated codec. The mkv you just downloaded of the same file was probably encoded with h.264.

It takes at least 350mb to get a decent looking .avi file of a 1 hour tv show (usually they are 43 minutes without commercials). The more mb's you get the better quality download your .avi file will be. I have season 4 of Star Trek: Enterprise and every episode is only 100mb in .mkv format and are 3 times the quality of their .avi counterparts. They look almost like HDTV.

It's obvious in this situation that .mkv is quality over quantity. Just hoping someone could explain in more detail how/why.

Is my post invisible?

Google any terms you don't recognize and learn. I spelled it all out for you clear as purple crayon.

Taken from here.

And:


It is the encoder/codec, not the container, that determines the image quality. Some popular ones are DivX, Xvid, WMV, and the many varieties of H.264.

Oh yeah I keep forgetting... people don't know about containers.

Huh? Wait, what happens if I rename the extension of my .avi to .mkv, will it become 20x better??

Actually, Opera had tabbed browsing back in 2000 (version 4); Mozilla 1.0 wasn't released until 2002. Galeon, which is another OSS browser built on top of Mozilla, was the first OSS browser (AFAIK) with tabs. I actually used this browser on Linux back in the day. The first popular browser to use tabs was actually IE, sort of, via the Netcaptor shell way back in 1997.

Although the idea preceded the implementation, the first application to use "tabs" was a version of Gosling Emacs developed by NeWS.