How To Play MKV Files On Xbox360
MKV on Xbox 360
Although the PS3 has a few technological advances over the XBox 360 (BluRay for one), they are both amazing media players, capable of showing HD content on your TV as well as playing great games. Since BluRay is very popular now, there are lots of people asking how to play MKV files on their XBox 360.
MKV is the Matroska video container format for HD films if you download them from the internet or rip legal copies of your existing HD disks. The MKV format is a wrapped that contains the video in x264 format and the audio in AC3 format.
All you need to do to get it to play on the Xbox 360 is to break down the MKV format and "re-mux" the audio and video back into a format that the XBox 360 understands. So all we are really doing is taking it out of the MKV "box" and putting it back into an MP4 or AVI "box" that the 360 will read.
Here are the simple steps to get this working
What you will need:
And that is all! Well, apart from an MKV file and an Xbox360 of course...
Step 1
- Download XenonMKV from the authors website. The file will most likely come as a RAR file format, so you will need WinRAR or something similar to open it.
- Extract all the files to a folder on your hard disk.
Step 2
- To run XenonMKV, double click the file highlighted in the screenshot below.
Step 3
- You will be prompted to install the Nero AAC audio converter if it is not already on your PC.
- Just click OK to proceed.
Step 4
- Click the icon on the top right hand corner and browse your computer to the MKV file.
- Double click the file to choose it and you will be returned back to the XenonMKV screen.
Step 5
- Click the icon underneath this and choose the place where you want the file to be located.
Step 6
- Click Start!
- XenonMKV will then do it's business and spit out a working AVI file that you can either put on your memory stick or write to a CD/DVD to play on the Xbox360.
Notes
- For this tutorial, I was using XenonMKV build 20090330_36
- There is no loss in quality and the process takes a few minutes.
- I tested it for this tutorial using a 750mb MKV file and it took around 4 minutes, and that also included the file residing on a memory stick too, so it will be faster if the files are accessed direct from your hard disk.
- The PC I used is a 2ghz Pentium 2, running Windows 7 with 2gb of RAM. It is not a new machine by any stretch of the imagination, so those of you with better hardware will see quicker conversions.
- If you are looking for the PS3 version of this Hub, check here: http://hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Play-MKV-Files-On-Playstation-3
Success? Failure? Let Us Know here...
THIS DOES NOT HELP ME WITH SUBTITLES
Thank you Satsuma Pottery. It worked perfectly. I am now watching a MPEG-4 file on my XBOX 360 which was converted from MKV file.
Took about 15 minutes to convert. I am using OS XP sp3 with 2.5GB of memory, and after a few updates it was easy peasy.
Nice explanation with visual snaps. But I were used Video Converter for mac to convert and play on almost video players. What do you think about http://www.videoconverterformacosx.com ......
I have a slower computer so it did take a while but it was definitely really easy and worked great! thanks a lot
The video formats that xbox 360 supports are .wmv, .avi, .divx, H.264, MPEG-4 an so on.
If you got a MKV video file and want to convert and put it to your Xbox 360 for playing, you have to use a MKV decoder to transcode video files to a xbox playable video formats, like WMV, WMV HD.
The program I am using is Aunsoft MKV Converter which is able to convert your video to xbox WMV flawlessly.
More info: http://www.aunsoft.com/mkv-converter/
Hope it is useful.
Thanks for the help, but I'm still having some problems...
I get this error which says :
Exception fired : The conversion of FVR to Double is not valid,
Hi, thanks for the guide, I ran followed the instructions and it gave me 3 mp4 files, but when I try to play them on the Xbox 360 I get a message saying that the format isn't supported. It's connected to Xbox live and, as far as I'm aware, it's fully updated. Any ideas why?
Thanks, Fred
Hi Fred,
Try changing the file extensions to .avi instead of .mp4, it shouldn't affect the file itself but the 360 should recognise it.
You can put mp4 files on a usb stick and the xbox will play them and some mkv files ....dont ask me why it can,or why ....heres a link to show ya..found it today.
You can put mp4 files on a usb stick and the xbox will play them and some mkv files ....dont ask me why it can,or why ....heres a link to show ya..found it today.http://www.se7ensins.com/forums/topic/379192-how-t
converted a mkv and it made 2 parts of 1 movie. the first part about 45 minutes into it loses sound and at the same time it stops playing on the 360 and gave me some unsupported error. Mind you this was after playing 3/4 of it already. The second part played just fine. However I missed 10 minutes right in the middle of the movie. So there must have been some failure in the conversion at that point. The original plays fine on my pc too
thanks works great :)
This is really the end of a journey on this topic...kudos to you, it has saved me a lot of headache and money!
MKV Converter 2 years ago
MKV Converter is really very powerful software which is efficient enough to converter MKV file formats to other file formats. Thanks for this wonderful software.