Library for playing Matroska (.MKV) in Flash?

Question

Is there any library for playing MKV (matroska multimedia container) files in Flash (AS3, MXML)? I am looking for an open source or similar to open source implementation. Since my MKV file has only Theora video, I am okay even if library supports only one type of video stream.

Answer 1

You can only play videos in Flash that the player natively supports. If you write or convert an actual video codec in ActionScript (or even use the C to Flash bytecode compiler) the performance will not be good enough to get acceptable video quality.

For internal purposes we implemented a Motion JPEG display within ActionScript and even though all that did was modify the headers a bit and display a series of jpeg files using mostly native code, the effective framerate was poor.

Flash player natively supports a few formats

• On2 VP6
• Sorenson Spark (Sorenson H.263)
• H.264

Mostly everyone uses H264 which is the most recently added.