I've never used these before and I'm having trouble playing a video that is an mkv file. Whenever I try to view the video through BS Player, it stutters and freezes. Is there a specific codec I need for these files? I tried using GSpot but it doesn't recognise mkv files. Thanks for your time.
Try to first use VLC or Media Player Classic. If it doesn't work after these, download this: http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/codecs_and_filters/matroska_splitter.cfm
Thank you for replying. MPC has never worked on my PC; whenever I open it, I select 'file' and it freezes up. I downloaded the Matroska Splitter but I have no idea what to do with the files? I'll look into it while I await your reply and see if I can figure it out via google and wiki.
mplayer or VLC should work out of the box. No need to install any extra decoders or splitters. Thought that latest GSpot handled mkv's?
I tried to play it through VLC, it was the first prog I used as it's always worked perfect (and as you said, no codecs were ever required), but it was giving me the same problems. I then posted on a torrent forum that had the same video file available for download, and I got replies saying that VLC is crap compared to BS player, and that I should switch to BS. And with GSpot I am indeed using an older version (not too old I thought), I'll get the latest v and see what comes up. Also, I couldn't find any info on how to use the Matroska Splitter, but it does seem that I should copy paste the files into the BS directory........yeah? No? Thanks for helping.
The splitter is a directshow filter. BSPlayer is a dshow player. Could be that you have high resolution AVC video and your CPU isn't up to the task. If you are just going to use ffdshow for decoding then using BS Player won't help (ffdshow uses libavcodec same as VLC, VLC should still be faster (mplayer>VLC>ffdshow)). If you were to use say CoreAVC, it is faster.
I have just the thing. I wrote just a while ago about How to set up MPC to play Matroska files without problems, so I'll just copy/paste most of what I said there: (*Note - You can skip the part about changing the audio default language to Japanese if you want; I had put that in there because someone asked to have the Japanese audio stream play first or only)