How to Play MKV on Mac for Free?

Have some MKV video files and want to play them on your Mac? Here two free MKV players for Mac: VLC Media Player and MPlayer OS X are recommended to play MKV on Mac. These excellent and free multimedia players can tackle many of the video formats unknown to QuickTime. They contain a decoder to decode the MKV files. They will also play many of the formats you will find inside the MKV file.

Part 1. The best two free MKV players for Mac

1. VLC

VLC Media Player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, MKV, MP3, OGG, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. To play your MKV videos on Mac with VLC, you don't need to install any codecs or filters. Simply add the MKV videos to VLC playlist and play them on your Mac freely!

Free Download VLC Media Player

2. MPlayer OS X

Media Player Classic has a built in DVD player with real-time zoom, support for AVI subtitles, QuickTime and RealVideo support (requires QuickTime and/or Real Player); built-in MPEG2/SVCD/DVD codec. To watch MKV file you need to install updated Matroska Pack. Open Media Player Classic and navigate to View –> Options then select Internal Filters situated on the left and then uncheck to disable Matroska. Now install the Matroska Pack. You should now be able to play the MKV files on Mac.

Free Download MPlayer OS X

Part 2. Play MKV on Mac with QuickTime and iTunes

Since QuickTime and iTunes are perfect for playing videos on Mac, you may want to view MKV files on Mac with them. However, MKV format is not supported by neither QuickTime or iTunes. Luckily, there are some ways to make MKV playable in QuickTime and iTunes. What you need to do is to convert MKV on Mac to QuickTime supported MP4 or MOV format. To do this, you can use Aimersoft Video Converter for Mac to help you. With it, you can easily convert MKV to MOV, MP4, M4V, AVI, WMV, ASF, FLV, etc. popular video formats on Mac while keeping the video quality. After the conversion, you ca easily play MKV using QuickTime on Mac.

Free download MKV converter for Mac:

The main interface of the Mac MKV converter is as below. As you can see, it can also serve as a good MKV player for Mac since you can preview the loaded video files on the viewing window.

To convert MKV on Mac, simply click "Add Video Files" to import the MKV videos to the program. Then choose 'Video Formats' and select MP4 as output format. When all the settings are done, press the "Start" button to convert MKV on Mac for playing and sharing the videos anywhere you like.

Free download MKV converter for Mac:

About MKV: MKV is a container format developed by Matroska. It can hold different types of video and audio. For example, there might be an AVI file contained within the MKV file. The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free Container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file. It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows. Matroska is similar in conception to other containers like AVI, MP4 or ASF, but is entirely open in specification, with implementations consisting mostly of open source software. Matroska file types are MKV for video (with subtitles and audio), .mka for audio-only files and .mks for subtitles only. High Definition movies in 720 or 1080 pixel width format are often encoded and packaged as a Matroska format video with a MKV file extension.