Matroska multimedia container video file
File type: Digital video and movie file
Files with mkv extension are videos in the open source Matroska Multimedia Container format. You can open it and play it with pretty much every multimedia player.
File type category:
Digital video and movie file
Date updated: July 13, 2025
File extension mkv is used for Matroska Multimedia Container, an open standard free Container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file.
MKV file format is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows. Matroska is similar in conception to other containers like AVI, MP4 or ASF, but is completely open source. Matroska file types are MKV format for video (and audio) and mka format for audio-only files.
Matroska is using EBML language. EBML is acronym for Extensible Binary Meta Language. EBML specifies a binary and octet (byte) aligned format inspired by the principle of XML. EBML itself is a generalized description of the technique of binary markup. Like XML, it is completely agnostic to any data that it might contain. Therein, the Matroska project is a specific implementation using the rules of EBML: It seeks to define a subset of the EBML language in the context of audio and video data (though it obviously isn't limited to this purpose). The format is made of 2 parts: the semantic and the syntax. The semantic specifies a number of IDs and their basic type and is not included in the data file/stream.
Almost any modern media player supports MKV format. You can open and play *.mkv video files in any media player from the list of associated applications.
MKV is common format, so most current video converters are able to convert this fiel format.
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