Howdy folks...

I have a P4 2.0Ghz, 768MBs RAM, and a 256MB AGP nvidia video card. I have a media center that is running LinuxMint at the moment though I have had the same issue with a few other distros as well. I am able to play xvid, avi, and divx files perfectly in both Mplayer and Xine. When I try and play .mkv files the audio plays fine, but the video is slow. You can watch the time stutter as it's playing. I really have no idea what else to do with this. Any ideas?

MKV support is not very good at the moment, probably the best you'll get is with VLC Player. I have had the same problem, but VLC is what I usually use to get around it.

On of the odd bugs that I've ran into is that my video will stutter if I have a graphics intensive desktop enabled, ie) Beryl, or Compiz Fusion. I believe it has something to do with the gstreamer, although it was so long ago that I had the problem that I can't be sure. Try knocking your Window Manager back to something like Metacity, or something.

Funny you mention VLC...out of the 3 players it is the worst one to use to watch MKV files on. I'm using XFce and i went and turned everything off... Suppose i can install say fluxbox or something along those lines and see what happens...if that doesn't work...guess i can do a basic install of an OS with no GUI and then build it that way...

Installed Fluxbox and it works much better. Still have the minor issue wth playback, but the system doesn't stutter as much as it did. It's been so long since I used Fluxbox on a system I forgot how to change stuff on it. The screen is set to 1360X768 and man is the writing small as hell in say Opera...Have to work that stuff out still...either way it's much better

Good to hear. I don't watch MKV's very often in linux, and when I did, I believe VLC had the best support. Things change though.

Glad to hear you're working now.

If i was able to get something other then mkv files to watch then i would have...It's unfortunate that they are doing the encoding in mkv and wrapping it as an avi. I suppose the other issue i have with the system really isn't that big of a deal. i don't really use it for anything but watchin stuff on...

Well back to the drawing board. It all worked for a short while then things started to go wrong with the OS...Decided to try Arch Linux which failed to boot, though it installed n my laptop perfectly fine, and Ubuntu server alternative CD which installed, but every package I add fails to install...ahh well as usual nothing ever seem to go easy...

I wonder if this mkv file is complete.
Do you have this problem with all the mkv files?
why not try mplayer ? It's a nice player which support most of the video formats

I had the problem with all mkv files no matter what player i used. I had tried xine, vlc and mplayer and hey all played the same way...once i get a working system up and running i'll be going through this all again and hopefully the next time i get it going i'll have a report that says everything works fine.

I had a problem playing back mkv files with vlc. I'm using Ubunto distro. I found that if you change the access filters in vlc dump from 32mb to a way higher value (i did 512mb) the slow video playback issue resolves and the high resolution mkv files i play 1080p/720p have no more problems. Sometimes you need to play around with the default preferences to get the best result!

BTW if you think you have any problems with your vlc and if it is compiled correctly just visit the www.videolan.org(I'm in no way connected to them!) site. They have linux support for alot of distro's