I connected a 32Gb USB stick to my Roku Ultra to play a movie I have on the stick. I get audio but no video. The movie is in .mkv format. I also have a Roku TV and I tried it on the USB port on the TV and it does the same thing. Is there something wrong with my movie? Does Roku support .mkv format movies?
I just re-encoded the movie to .mp4 format and it plays correctly. I suppose that Roku does not support .mkv and it would have made a lot of sense if that fact had been made known to users.
The supported formats for the Roku Media Player (RMP) can be found in their support article.
https://support.roku.com/article/208754908
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Most of my content is in .mkv format and plays fine.
I usually just run everything through free/open-source ffmpeg https://www.ffmpeg.org/ and convert into .mkv. On occasion, I have had to demux a .mp4 into .mkv (without reencode) through ffmpeg to get it to work properly with RMP.
As such, I usually just run through a series of ffmpeg commands and convert everything into .mkv. (again, without re-encoding so it is very fast).
Likely there was just an issue with a codec that was contained in your original .mkv container and was fixed with your conversion.
Thank you very much! Exactly what I needed!
@perzaklie MKV is a container, nothing else. The video and audio codecs within the container are what plays. Roku does support the MKV container, but my guess is your video codec was not supported by Roku. When you transcoded the video into the MP4 container, the software you used also changed to video codec, most likely to H.264, which Roku supports.
Don't feel bad you didn't understand the difference between a container and the contents within, as the majority of users really don't know about it. Roku does provide more detail about playing media (at the link @AvsGunnar provided), but again, it's something one needs to look for.
Thanks