MP4/MOV is probably the most native video file format for a Mac, so choose that. You can choose from the menu, but it’s critical you also click on Customize… for it to work.Ĭlick on Customize… and you’ll see there are a lot of different formats that the program knows about! Then it’s time to pick the output format. Starting at the top, I’ve already picked out my demo MKV file, you can either click to select or just drag the file onto the top portion of the window to select your file.

That opens up a bit, rather sparsely populated window:

Launch the program, then choose Convert/Stream from the File menu: There ya go, today’s trivia, right?Īnyway, download it onto your computer and here’s how easy it is to basically pluck the MP4 video file out of the MKV container in VLC: Its name actually comes from the Russian word for Nesting Dolls, matryoshka. MKV = Matroska Video and it’s an open source standard created by Russian programmers Lasse Kärkkäinen and Steve Lhomme. It’s a container that lets you embed other video and audio format files within. It’s a must-install just for those situations when the regular video player fails to read the file you have.īut MKV is a particularly interesting format because it’s not actually a format at all. Nice, but who wants to pay money when there’s a free alternative? You can grab a copy of VLC for your Mac from and I have it on every one of my systems. Turns out that there are a lot of commercial programs that promise you the ability to convert from just about any format to any other. But it turns out that VLC has some conversion capabilities hidden in its menu choices too! Fortunately there’s a terrific open source video player app called VLC that will let your Mac (or PC or Linux system) play just about any possible video format you can imagine, including MKV. You can try dragging and dropping videos into your Web browser too, but give how many formats are floating around on the ‘net, it’s a disappointingly small subset. Your Mac system has a fairly narrow set of video file formats it can understand and play, mostly all through the QuickTime Player program.

Convert mkv to mp4 mac