Mkv files on iPhone app

I’ve seen some old posts about this but no answers.  Has anyone been able to watch .mkv movie files throught the iPhone My Cloud app?  mp4’s seem to play fine, but .mkv’s don’t do anything.  My .mkv’s play fine when viewing with my WD TV Live Streaming Media Player.

There’s been plenty of answers.   No, you cannot watch MKV files natively in the iDevice app.

“No” is likely an appropriate reply, although there are a few, very few, options.  Up until last week when the app, VLC for iOS was updated, they legally had to remove playback of AC3 audio, and today when I played an mkv with this app, the video was fine and the audio was absent.  Who knows if it can ever play AC3 audio again.

Nevertheless, I have another app called VLC Streamer, and it played the mkv onto my iPad fine.  The issue with this app is it has a small cost, it needs to have VLC player running on a computer and by using the companion app on an iDevice, most any video can be played to iDevices, e,g, mp4, mkv, iso and even a DVD playing on the computer’s DVD player can be streamed to the iDevice.  The app really taxes the computer’s CPU, so a dual core PC struggles.

Best to do what many of us do – convert your favorite videos to an mp4/m4v file and play those on your iDevice and Androids, too…  The free program Handbrake helps you do this.  A bonus of this is that the mp4 file is many gigabytes smaller than an mkv, so it takes up less disk space.

The trick is, it’s still not “native playback.”  

You have to Download the entire file and “Open In…” another app.

If you’re on a network connection that’s just barely fast enough to stream a video in real time, the download itself will take as long as watching the video.  So you have to plan ahead.  :smileyvery-happy:

VLC is back on the App store?   Need to go check that out.   It was gone for the longest time…

Agree, native is the key factor. Although, mkv’s from DVD can stream well threough my network using VLC Streamer app. Those made from BD really struggle or hardly play at all.  It is kind of handy that it can stream DVDs and/or ISO files, too.

Yes, VLC was updated a week or so ago, I was notified by app store, and got update.  They made mention in the update about AC3 issue like it was “news”.  I wish I had not updated!

Like I said above, just convert movies for tablets/phones into mp4 for good results.