MKV on JVC Blu-ray Player

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The fight for dominance in the living room continues apace, with a large number of contenders and no clear cut leader at the moment. Everybody wants their device to be the central hub for delivering content, both local and Internet-based to the masses on their couches. The major players remain:
  • Cable Set-Top-Boxes
  • Gaming systems (PS3, Xbox 360)
  • Stand alone devices (Roku, Tivo, AppleTV, etc.)
  • Digital Media Adaptors (Popcorn Hour, DLNA devices, etc.)
  • Networked HDTV’s (DLNA, widgets, etc.)
  • Blu-Ray devices with extended functionality
  • Home theater PC’s (Windows Media Center, Mac Mini w/ Boxee, etc.)

All of the above have both positive and negative aspects, and none of them have really taken off enough to be considered a mainstream success, at least in the context of advanced content delivery. Cost and complexity are probably the biggest hurdles to wide acceptance for all of them, but we are seeing some interesting moves to increase attractiveness to consumers.

Richard Lawler on EngadgetHD has reported that JVC’s US Blu-Ray player debut will be the first such device to playback Matroska (.mkv) files. The move to support codecs and file formats beyond those required for the official player specifications developed on standard definition DVD players in 2003 and then really took off with the growth of DivX certification thereafter.  Clearly JVC is trying to differentiate themselves from their Blu-Ray player competitors by appealing to a subset of consumers that are downloading Blu-Ray rips but would like to watch them on devices other than their PC’s.  Also interesting is that JVC is not working with DivX to do this, in fact they explicitly say “DivX files” are incompatible. These moves by JVC is interesting for a few reasons.

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5 thoughts on “MKV on JVC Blu-ray Player”

  1. Makes sense to me, and a great move. With things like WD TV, Roku, AppleTV and countless others… the threat to a disc based format is clear. I don’t have a BluRay player yet, and no longer use DVDs, other than to RIP them into my media player. The JVC is the first BluRay player that caught my eye.

  2. Because they specifically exclude DivX, I doubt they are using one of two most common Sigma chips (ones inside Sage HD, WD TV, PCH, and pretty much all standalone boxes) but rather some other solution (Broadcom?) that supports MPEG2 and MPEG4 but doesn’t do DivX/Xvid variants.

    Either way, I think we will eventually see a merger of Blu-Ray players with full-blown media extenders, it just makes too much sense. It’ll be similar to how most DVD players now can play media files.

    P.S. Aside from Blu-Ray rips, MKV is also a de-facto standard for HD TV rips (1 hr show is 1.1-1.2 Gb) and is popular for anime stuff since you can put audio, video, and subtitles in one file. Another cool thing about MKV is ability to have multiple audio/video/subtitle streams, so most Blu-Ray rips have multiple languages for subtitles and some even include commentary tracks.

  3. Ivan is right to point out that MKV’s are used for HDTV rips. I should have been more clear about that. In any case, neither are “legitimate” legally speaking of course.

  4. Hi, considering Stand alone devices, I may be wrong, but sooner or later some solution wil pop-up, and it will be doing the job. I’m thinking about solutions like popcorn with NMT and the lastest, BLOBbox by TVBLOB. This one seems able to do the things I would expect from a media center, like streaming, pocast and torrent. It doesn’t sport a blue ray player and has a small hd, but I’d like to have a huge NAS disk, and actually I’m not renting or buying DVDs since 2007…

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