I had some DVDs with some downloaded movies and serials on it which I had hoarded up for the day we would have a DVD ROM to play them. I do have a DVD player but thatz a generic DVD player and these DVD’s weren’t burned so as to play on them….but had only files-stored therein. Our wait for a DVD ROM ended finally yesterday when my roomie got his Toshiba Portege with a combo drive in it. but to our dismay, the files on the DVD were encoded in formats that no generally-found media player could play.

WinDVD, PowerDVD and Windows Media Player all came up cropper against those files which were with an unheard-of extensions - RMVD and MKV!!! We installed VLC Player and also tried our K-Lite Mega Codec pack but those files simply wouldn’t play. Google came to our rescue and we quickly realized that MKV was a proprietary MatroskaVideo and RMVB was actually Real Media Variable Bitrate. I d/l’ed the corresponding filters/codecs today and shall be trying again to play those elusive movies today!

Find the info about playing MKV files here and about playing RMVB files here. Many thanks to these uber-geeks.

Moral of the exercise: There’s more in the media world than meets the eye