Playing .mkv files on my TV

Steve M

Steve M

Steve M

Associate
Joined
14 Dec 2007
Posts
1,586
I have an LG HDTV and i want to play my .mkv films on it.

The .mkv files currently reside on the hard drive of my desktop PC upstairs and what i've been doing is converting and burning them to DVD to watch on my DVD player connected to the TV downstairs.

What i'd like to do is watch the files on the TV without burning them, although connecting the PC directly into the TV is not an option. Daft question maybe but is there an external HD i could chuck the files on and connect this to my TV and watch them that way? My TV has both HDMI and USB connectivity.

If not what the easiest way of doing this without burning them to DVD or connecting the PC directly to the TV?

Thanks.
 
if you connect the tv to your internal network you should be able to stream them directly to the tv
Depending on what model of tv you have you may be able to connect via ethernet cable or AN-WF100 LGH wireless dongle.

it seems this is the only wifi dongle that will work that i have found so far.
 
Your TV might be able to play .mkv files, best way to test it is to load up a USB stick with a sample .mkv movie. If it works you can plug in a USB drive, or wireless adapter and stream over the network.

Otherwise you'll need some kind of computer/media server to decode the film and connect to the TV via HDMI.
 
Sorry guys, my TV does play .mkv files! I never knew this.

Gonna get myself a large external HD and chuck a load of films on there.
 
TV with Network+DLNA is one easy solution
External HDD with USB connection to the TV is the other.
 
I have an LG tv, fairly new 3d and tried this today with a .mkv on a usb stick.

Recognises the file and duration but upon opening everything is green as though it doesn't have the correct codec.
 
.MKV is just a container for video and sound so there could be lots of different codecs really.

In my opinion, the only way to truly guarantee playback of .mkv is by using a PC with the correct level of hardware. Especially when you are talking blu ray rip mkvs
 
Couple of things to check first will be does the TV support an NTFS partition on the HDD, as if any film is over 4-5GB, it will need to be on an HTFS partition to work properly.

If these are BlurRay rips, then you will want to check whether the TV has a fast enough processor to cope with the high bit rate. My Panasonic will play BR rips for a few seconds but once the buffer is used up it starts stuttering.
 
El_Watcher said:
If these are BlurRay rips, then you will want to check whether the TV has a fast enough processor to cope with the high bit rate. My Panasonic will play BR rips for a few seconds but once the buffer is used up it starts stuttering.
Click to expand...

Yes i was thinking about this..

I'm on an i7 monster PC at the minute but with my old rig which was an AMD dual core with 4GB of RAM that was struggling with some films with stuttering and pauses (completely gone on my i7 machine) but i was wondering how my TV would cope where a dual core PC processor couldn't...

I've tried a few samples on my USB stick, one of which was Iron Man which was 90 seconds long which was fine but not sure how a whole film would play. My TV is an LG 42LK450.
 
Last edited:
Going to save myself the cash and not bother getting an external HD. My girlfriend had a decent i5 laptop so going to hook that up to the TV for watching the films.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom