Comments on: MKV/OGM/etc Support in Mac OS X Leopard (and others before it)

By: Michael David

Michael David — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:10:01 +0000

No iteration of Mplayer will do either DTS or Dolby Digital sound… VLC will. It does cause the occasional kernel panic on Macs, but it is the only player that does Hi=Def video AND sound correctly. Plex and all the rest are studdery, or just don’t work.

Here’s hoping that the next version of Quicktime fixes these problems, and in particular Snow Leopard.

By: dude

dude — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:02:43 +0000

Better solution: use MPlayer OSX Extended. Statically compiled with an updated cocoa-native interface. It just works. http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/

By: Q

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:22:40 +0000

man thanks alot i stumbled on this and all i can say is it just works now! thanks bro

By: jeff

jeff — Tue, 20 May 2008 00:44:09 +0000

dude, totally kick ass. i have been smashing bottles against my head for hours trying to get some goddamn subtitles to work on Basilisk, and i come across your page, and problem solved. fucking awesome. fuck vlc, fuck it in its stupid ass.

By: Donat

Donat — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:11:46 +0000

OH lifesaver !

# (alt-3 on a British Keyboard ;) ) didn’t work.. but -aid did not fail!

thanks for the quick help too :)

By: Jaymz

Jaymz — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:51:56 +0000

OGM’s are problematic in that they either don’t seem to have language descriptions for the audio tracks, or the encoders just never seem to use them.

How you’re supposed to do it, is by hitting # (shift 3 on US keyboards), and it’s supposed to change the audio track. This has never worked for me, so the painful way to do it is to add “-aid 1” to MPlayer before playing tracks like that, and remember to remove it as it usually stops other files from playing correctly.

By: Donat

Donat — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:20:03 +0000

Hey Jaymz, Thanks for the tutorial :)

I still have one problem: I am trying to play this OGM file, but my only problem is that “-alang jpn” is not working… It plays in English all the same (and I know it has a Japanese audio track in the file, thanks to VLC). With MPlayer however I can’t seem to find a way to manually switch between the audio tracks, am I just being dumb?

thanks for any help !

By: Jaymz

Jaymz — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:49:53 +0000

Yeah, it doesn’t seem to work at all under Tiger right now with the builds I recommend. I have had this work on the past with custom builds from this AnimeSuki forum thread, so that might be a good place to start.

By: ConMan

ConMan — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:48:42 +0000

I just installed mplayer on my MacBook (10.4), in the hope that it would handle subtitles better than VLC. Sadly, I have found the same problem as above: the -fontconfig option, which appears to be the key to making subtitles work, is also the key to making it not play mkv files.

By: Jaymz

Jaymz — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:10:51 +0000

No need for apology - I’m a sucker for trying to fix things. It’s why I still do what I do at work, and not trying to get into something more sensible from a career perspective, like management or becoming a consultant.

In any case, if you’re still having issues - fire me off an e-mail or IM me and I’ll see if I can’t sort things out.