Matroska (styled Matroška) is a project to create a

container format A container format (informally, sometimes called a wrapper) or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Nota ...

that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks in one file. The Matroska Multimedia Container is similar in concept to other containers like

AVI Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram (given name), Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail (name), Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (author ...

MP4 MP4 (formally MPEG-4 Part 14), is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows ...

, or

Advanced Systems Format Advanced Systems Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format, Active Streaming Format) is Microsoft's proprietary digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media Streaming media refers to multimedia de ...

(ASF), but is an

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to ...

. Matroska file extensions are ''.mkv'' for video (which may include

subtitles Subtitles are texts representing the contents of the audio in a film, television show, opera or other audiovisual media. Subtitles might provide a transcription or translation of spoken dialogue. Although naming conventions can vary, caption ...

or audio), ''.mk3d'' for

stereoscopic Stereoscopy, also called stereoscopics or stereo imaging, is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stereoscopic image is ...

video, ''.mka'' for audio-only files (which may include subtitles), and ''.mks'' for subtitles only.

History

The project was announced on 6 December 2002 as a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods either to h ...

of the

Multimedia Container Format Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms, such as writing, audio, images, animations, or video, into a single presentation. This is in contrast to tradition ...

(MCF), after disagreements between MCF lead developer Lasse Kärkkäinen and soon-to-be Matroska founder Steve Lhomme about the use of the

Extensible Binary Meta Language Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML) is a generalized file format for any kind of data, aiming to be a binary equivalent to XML. It provides a basic framework for storing data in XML-like tags. It was originally designed as the framework language ...

(EBML) instead of a binary format. This coincided with a 6-month coding break by the MCF's lead developer for his military service, during which most of the community quickly migrated to the new project. In 2010, it was announced that the

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML video and the HTML audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored by ...

audio/video format would be based on a

profile Profile or profiles may refer to: Art, entertainment and media Music * ''Profile'' (Jan Akkerman album), 1973 * ''Profile'' (Githead album), 2005 * ''Profile'' (Pat Donohue album), 2005 * ''Profile'' (Duke Pearson album), 1959 * '' ''Profi ...

of the Matroska container format together with

VP8 VP8 is an open format, open and royalty-free Video coding format, video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008. Initially released as a Proprietary software, proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released a ...

video and

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder ( codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most comm ...

audio. On 31 October 2014,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

confirmed that

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. The successor to Windows 8.1, it was Software release cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on July 2 ...

would support

HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In co ...

and Matroska out of the box, according to a statement from Gabriel Aul, the leader of Microsoft

Operating Systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

Group's Data and Fundamentals Team. Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 9860 added platform level support for HEVC and Matroska. In October 2024, Matroska was formally specified in and published as .

Name and logo

"Matroska" is derived from ''

matryoshka Matryoshka dolls (), also known as stacking dolls, nesting dolls, Russian tea dolls, or Russian dolls, are a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. The name ''Matryoshka'' is a diminutive form of ''Matryosha'' (), i ...

'' ( ), the Russian name for the hollow wooden dolls, better known in English as Russian nesting dolls, which open to expose another smaller doll, that in turn opens to expose another doll, and so on. The logo writes it as "Matroška"; the letter š, an "s" with a

caron A caron or háček ( ), is a diacritic mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation. Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer ...

over it, represents the "sh" sound () in various languages.

Design

The use of

EBML Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML) is a generalized file format for any kind of data, aiming to be a binary equivalent to XML. It provides a basic framework for storing data in XML-like tags. It was originally designed as the framework language ...

allows extension for future format changes. The Matroska team has expressed some of their long-term goals on Doom9.org and

Hydrogenaudio Hydrogenaudio is an online community of audio enthusiasts, including some software developers. It is known for its blind listening tests and scientific mindset. It has a website with forums featuring discussions about all kinds of audio reprodu ...

forums. Thus, the following are "goals", not necessarily existing features, of Matroska: * Creating a modern, flexible, extensible, cross-platform multimedia container format * Developing robust

streaming Streaming media refers to multimedia delivered through a network for playback using a media player. Media is transferred in a ''stream'' of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downl ...

support (both this format and the

subset are streamable) * Developing a menu system similar to that of DVDs based on EBML (, there is only a mostly empty draft) * Developing a set of tools for the creation and editing of Matroska files (

MKVToolNix MKVToolNix is a collection of tools for the Matroska media container format by Moritz Bunkus including mkvmerge. The free and open source Matroska libraries and tools are available for various platforms including Linux and BSD distributions, ma ...

, for example) * Developing libraries to allow developers to add Matroska support to their applications (made open source by Matroska developers) * Working with hardware manufacturers to include Matroska support in embedded multimedia devices

Development

Matroska is supported by a

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

organization registered in France. It is a

royalty-free Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales. Computer standards ...

that is free to use, with the specification being freely available for both private and commercial use. The Matroska development team licenses its libraries under the

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

, with parsing and playback libraries available under

BSD licenses BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lice ...

Support

Software supporting Matroska include all

ffmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing vide ...

libav FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing video ...

-based ones, including, notably,

mplayer MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application. It is available for Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Versions for OS/2, Syllable Desktop, Syllable, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are also available. A ...

, mpv,

VLC VLC may refer to: * Variable-length code, a code which maps source symbols to a variable number of bits * The Very Light Car, prototype vehicle * Visible light communication, a communications medium using fluorescent bulbs or LEDs * Victorian Landc ...

Foobar2000 foobar2000 (often abbreviated as fb2k or f2k) is a freeware audio player for Microsoft Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, and formerly Windows Phone, developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in c ...

Media Player Classic Media Player Classic (MPC), Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC), and Media Player Classic - Black Edition (MPC-BE) are a family of free and open-source, compact, lightweight, and customizable media players for 32- and 64-bit Microsoft Wi ...

-HC, BS.player,

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer (from Latin ''mixus, the PPP of miscere eng. to Mix)'' or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsify food and other substances. A stationary ...

Kdenlive Kdenlive (; acronym for ''KDE Non-Linear Video Editor'') is a free and open-source video editing software based on the MLT Framework, KDE and Qt. The project was started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now part of the official KDE Projects su ...

Handbrake HandBrake is a free and open-source transcoder for digital video files. It was originally developed in 2003 by Eric Petit to make ripping DVDs to a data storage device easier. HandBrake's backend contains comparatively little original code; t ...

as well as

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

(which uses

extensively), and

OBS Studio OBS Studio (also Open Broadcaster Software or OBS, for short) is a free and open-source, cross-platform screencasting and live streaming app. It is available for Windows, macOS, Linux distributions, and BSD. The OBS Project raises funds on Open ...

. Outside of ffmpeg,

supports Matroska natively as well. Earlier versions relied on codec packs (like

K-Lite Codec Pack The K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of audio and video codecs for Microsoft Windows DirectShow that enables an operating system and its software to play various audio and video formats generally not supported by the operating system itself. Th ...

Combined Community Codec Pack The Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) is a collection of codecs (video compression filters) packed for Microsoft Windows, designed originally for the playback of anime fansubs. The CCCP was developed and maintained by members of various fansub ...

) to integrate ffmpeg (via

ffdshow ffdshow is an open-source unmaintained codec library that is mainly used for decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. encoded with DivX or Xvid) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as well. ...

) and other additions into Windows' native

DirectShow DirectShow (sometimes abbreviated as DS or DShow), codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's ea ...

. Apple's native

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

player for

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

notably lacks support.

References

External links

*
Matroska Multimedia Container
— Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

Collections {{Compression formats Computer-related introductions in 2002 Digital container formats Free digital container formats Open formats Russian inventions