Play or Stream MKV videos on Xbox 360

Tags

Android, Digital Living Network Alliance, DLNA, Matroska, Media server, Multimedia, Plex, Plex Media Server, Streaming media, Tips, Tricks, Twonky Beam, Windows Media Center, Xbox 360

Xbox 360 icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First of all, let me tell you, I was as disappointed as you might be when I found out that my Xbox 360 won’t play mkv file only because it chooses not to. (maybe because of licensing issues). So, without much hope, I tried to google for some workaround to make it play the mkv files, and here is what I found:

1. MKV is just an open source and free  multimedia container, so like an AVI file, MKV file can contain any type of files in it.
2. Xbox 360 supports H.264/MPEG-4 AVC encoding profile of upto level 4.1 (but not if it is in mkv container)
3. Xbox 360 only supports 2 channel audio.

Based on the above facts, there are 2 types of solutions.