MKV and MP4 are two most common types of video formats in downloaded video files. When it comes to the difference between MKV and MP4, the following question is always related:
1. Almost all media players can play MP4. However, MKV compatibility is worse than MP4, especially on mobile devices. Why?
2. The MKV format file is generally larger than the MP4 format. Is MKV better than MP4 in video quality?
3. Why do people often choose MKV format when they need to rip Blu-ray discs?
As a digital video lover, knowing MKV and MP4 is the important part that you cannot miss. Here in the text, you can learn more about the different aspects of MKV and MP4 that can help you choose between them for yourself. The above questions are also answered in this article. If you have any other questions about MP4 and MKV, please leave a message in the comment section.
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CONTENT
1. Brief description of MKV and MP4
2. MKV vs MP4: differences between MKV and MP4
3. Top video converter to convert videos to MKV / MP4
Brief description of MKV and MP4
What is MKV? MKV is developed by Matroska.org.
From the pronunciation of Russian, it sounds like матрёшка (Russian dolls). That’s nice and fun because MKV is a container format. Encapsulates multiple media formats like Russian dolls. The MKV video format has the powerful ability to store an unlimited amount of video, audio, image and subtitle media in a single file, such as the FLAC audio format and the ASS subtitle format.
What is MP4?
As short for MPEG-4 Part 14, MP4 is probably very familiar to all of us. Like the MKV video format, MP4 is also a container format. The merge function is to easily combine different digital streams into a single file. However, MKV and MP4 have different encapsulation options. For example, MP4 cannot encapsulate a closed caption format like ASS, like MKV can.
For this part, the main novelty that we know is that MP4 and MKV are container formats but not multimedia formats. Although two files can be tagged with .mkv, the encapsulated video and audio media formats they contain may not be the same. This explains why some players cannot play videos in the same container format. In the second part, I will introduce the difference between MKV and MP4 in more detail.
Platform compatibility
MKV is being developed by the personal team committed to AVI replacement. MP4 is an industry standard that aims to replace the old MPG as the next generation video / audio packaging format. As an industry standard, MP4 has better compatibility than MKV in video editing software and playback devices. When to upload video to YouTube MP4 is a suitable format.
Therefore, videos that have been optimized for mobile devices always choose MP4 for encapsulation. It can play MP4 video on various kinds of portable players like Apple iPad / iPhone / Android phone without limitation. If you have downloaded special third-party media players on mobile devices, you may be able to play MKV as well.
Compatible videos / audios
The main combination for MP4 is [Video] H.264 (x264) / Xvid / MPEG4 + [Audio] AAC / MP3. MKV supports lossless FLAC audio, while MP4 does not. MP4 could support other lossless audio ALAC, even if ALAC is less efficient than FLAC. MKV supports selectable ASS / SSA subtitles and selectable audio tracks, but not MP4. When copying an optical disc, people always choose to rip DVD / Blu-ray to MKV, which is what MP4 cannot do as the tracks can remain selectable after copying.
quality
While MKV generally has a larger file size than MP4 videos due to support for additional features, multiple audio tracks, and subtitle tracks, this does not mean that the quality of the MP4 file is not as good as MKV. Because MKV and MP4 are container formats and can encapsulate the same video and audio. For example, both can be encoded with x264 (one of H.264) + AAC. If other settings are the same, the video and audio quality will be exactly the same.
