Playing large mkv files on MacOSX? Which player???

Try Plex.

 

It seems odd to me that VLC does not work for you, I regularly play 720p MKV's using my original low end macbook (to which the the only change I've made is upgrading the ram from 512mb to 2gb) connected to my tv.

The only time I get stuttering is in the following situations.

1. Playing off optical media. This stuters quite a bit, still watchable, but not good.

2. Playing over wireless. A lot better than fro optical media but still not good.

So if you have not tried it, copy the fiel to your mac first.

Note, I cannot comemnt on a external HD or wired network as I never do it (well not in ages anyway), but I would think they should be fine also.

 

One would think, but VLC struggles to play HD content from my external drives as well. Plex works fine.

 

I hate .mkv files... HATE them. I usually throw them through VisualHub and watch the resulting MP4 file instead. It depends though whether you're archiving it for multiple viewings later, or just a one-off though, might not be worth doing for a single view.

 

VLC defaults to using QT codecs these days, so will not necessarily perform any differently from QT itself. Try using Movist and set the preferences to use FFmpeg instead as a default for mkv/mp4 files.

http://movist.googlecode.com/files/Movist_v0.6.1.zip

 

I never have any problem with 720p content on my MBP.

Most 1080p files work fine too.

 

I do have some high-bitrate 1080p mkv files, which are a huge burden on any system.
My Mac mini Core Duo 1.66 GHz doesn't have the horsepower to run them smoothly...

My Mac Pro is okay with them, certainly using Plex. Movist does well too.