Blackmagic Forum

https://theblog.adobe.com/changes-to-mk ... a-encoder/

So Adobe has dropped MKV support, if BMD implement it into Resolve they can pilfer Adobe's angry customers by providing an alternative.

Just an idea.

I kinda doubt there are a lot of people who actually care about that format.

.MKF is just a container as far as I know, and it can hold heavily-compressed MP4 or AVI-compressed formats. It's not ideal at all for shooting, nor is it good for post.

But it would be grand if Resolve could decode it. You do see stuff in this format. These days, anything goes....

Marc Wielage wrote:.MKF is just a container as far as I know, and it can hold heavily-compressed MP4 or AVI-compressed formats. It's not ideal at all for shooting, nor is it good for post.

Actually, mp4 and AVI are containers as is mkv, even though mkv can hold more compression formats than, say, mp4. I can't say how good or bad it is for aquisition, editing, scrubbing etc but the other two were not really meant for that either.

MKV in practice is used prevalently for the stuff that you should not render out into the world unless you want FBI take interest in you. I don't see how that's useful. No one "in business " will put out an mkv for you to use in edit.

Matroska is simply a container that may contain lossless codecs (such as FFV1), or lossy codecs (such as ProRes), and is increasingly used as an archival master format.

John Paines wrote:But it would be grand if Resolve could decode it.

It would also be grand if people would just shoot reasonable formats for post. Figuring out a proper workflow that will function well for editorial, color, sound, and VFX takes a bit of work and research. You can't just throw any format at it and expect everything to go well. Workflow decisions are crucial, and you can cripple your production if you choose poorly.

I don't think mkv is actually in use on any camera, but meanwhile it's no secret that clips from archive sources can come in any format, created or packaged with no thought to future post-production -- the editor can't very well demand a reshoot or unavailable source material. I can't see any downside to being able to decode this or any other current format.

It's also the same format as WebM (just with a different file extension), which is an industry standard pushed by Google.

John Paines wrote:I don't think mkv is actually in use on any camera, but meanwhile it's no secret that clips from archive sources can come in any format, created or packaged with no thought to future post-production -- the editor can't very well demand a reshoot or unavailable source material. I can't see any downside to being able to decode this or any other current format.

The downside is potential headaches for support team that yet another format will bring, and one that, although documented, seems to be constantly in motion and requires constant R&D while not being accepted by professional film/video community...I'm not sure where you get the info about mkv being used considerably as an archival container...

OK, it's still beyond me why .ts is not supported in Resolve. Oh, I know, it's not an aquisition but distribution format...

I don't think there's any need for you to anticipate the headaches of the support team, or assess what's possible and what isn't. They're capable of deciding that for themselves.

If every new feature is up for user votes, with at least half the contingent foreseeing terror and catastrophe, or taking a personal interest in seeing one feature or another is excluded, there likely wouldn't be much progress.

John Paines wrote:I don't think there's any need for you to anticipate the headaches of the support team, or assess what's possible and what isn't. They're capable of deciding that for themselves.

If every new feature is up for user votes, with at least half the contingent foreseeing terror and catastrophe, or taking a personal interest in seeing one feature or another is excluded, there likely wouldn't be much progress.

I'm just explaining why it will never happen, even plebs-friendly Adobe removed mkv support. I don't really care if it's there or not, but other things require more immediate attention than implementing mkv.

Okay, fine. You're just trying to be helpful, by insisting that you speak, with no foundation, for BMD.

As a side note, the open source NLE, 'shotcut', has MKV support. It's lacking a lot of features, but mkv support is something it managed without any apparent difficulty. But since that support would bring Resolve to its knees, I guess it'll never happen.

John Paines wrote:As a side note, the open source NLE, 'shotcut', has MKV support. It's lacking a lot of features, but mkv support is something it managed without any apparent difficulty.

Probably because Shotcut uses libffmpeg and gets quite a lot of things for free via ffmpeg.

As a commercial product, Resolve couldn't use libffmpeg due to licensing issues. So they'd have to implement that themselves, or find a suitably licensed library for that.

Now speaking as someone who has written a Matroska demuxer, it isn't that hard, and it's a well-documented and very capable format. The feature itself wouldn't be difficult to implement, but the question is whether the added ongoing maintenance burden (including a new thing to test) is worth it. Personally I'd love to see both muxing and demuxing support for mkv in Resolve -- and I'd use it -- but I also recognize that it's a little fringe for Resolve's audience.

DaVinci Resolve already uses libavformat, libavcodec and libavutil, so I don't think implementing MKV decoding would be terribly difficult.

John Paines wrote:You do see stuff in this format.

In professional production, not really.

John Paines wrote:the editor can't very well demand a reshoot or unavailable source material.

No, but he can convert, which is probably the more reasonable path than trying to get BMD to support oddball formats.

Mario Kalogjera wrote:other things require more immediate attention than implementing mkv.

I would argue this as well, in perpetuity.

I know, in perpetuity. Which is the problem. How about we leave it to the developers, to sort out their priorities, and what any given feature requires?

You have a miles' long "17" request thread by now. Is every feature now to be ranked in importance, where users who have no need for a particular pronounce it unnecessary and wasteful, and users who think otherwise insist otherwise?

Frankly, I don't care all that much about mkv support. But as someone else raised it, and I've had uses for it in the past, why not?

But that's apparently not acceptable to some. Odd....

In the meantime, there are some free tools that will unpack an MKV container you can Google up. Also Handbrake will transcode.

https://mkvtoolnix.download/

Great open source for mux/demux.

+1 Please add support in ver 17 2021!
Is not so hard eventually ... )