Microsoft has never been especially active with its video decoding support and through all Windows generations users have had to install numerous additional codecs and filters to play their video files. With Windows 7 Microsoft has taken a great leap forward as it now more or less supports all big video codecs, among them the popular H.264 standard. There is just one tiny flaw, there is no MKV support. MKV is not a decoding standard but a container that can house several combinations of audio and video streams.
MKV happens to be the most popular format for HD video and Windows 7 has to manually add support for the MKV format despite the integrated H.264 codec, by installing a media splitter.
This is by far not an optimal solution as High Definition streams inside MKV files can result in lagging playback and other problems. Simply because Windows doesn’t quite understand what codec to use.
DivX Labs has now announced a solution to this that not only adds support for MKV for the container in Windows 7 but also enables hardware acceleration of the media through Microsoft’s own H.264 decoder.
“The advantages of enabling MKV file support in the Media Foundation framework include the ability to use hardware acceleration for H.264 video decoding via the system H.264 decoder (where supported), as well as adding support for serving both DivX and DivX Plus HD video through Windows Media Center Extenders and the Windows Media Network Sharing Service for UPNP devices.”
They have released a 32-bit version of DivX Tech Preview that can be downloaded at its website where you can also find more information on this very promising solution.
