Chromecast MKV - How to Solve MKV Wouldn't Cast with Sound through a Chromecast?

February 24th, 2014 by Harvey Taylor

Tags: MKV Chromecast

Overview

A lot of people say that they can't cast MKV videos through Chromecast. Most time there is no audio but all such MKV files can be played well on Mac or Windows with both audio and video. Actually, you can stream WebM, MP4, MPEG and MKV format videos to Chromecast enabled TV. But why we can't get audio played? How to cast MKV through Chromecast with both audio and video? This following tip just aims to give the reason and solution.

Why MKV wouldn't cast with sound through a Chromecast?

MKV is a popular format that can hold an unlimited number of tracks in one file for saving video, audio, picture and subtitle. It can be encoded with many different video and audio codecs like MPEG4, H.264, DTS, AAC, AC3, etc. According to the official website, with Google Cast you have several options for supporting various media types, codecs, and facilities:

Video codecs: H.264 High Profile Level 4.1, 4.2 and 5, VP8
Audio decoding: HE-AAC, LC-AAC, CELT/Opus, MP3, Vorbis
Image formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WEBP
Containers: MP4, WebM

The MKV video which can't be played with audio through Chromecast may contain DTS or AC3 audio codec which is unsupported by Chromecast. The audio needs to be AAC, it'll even work with AAC 5.1. If you try to play a mkv with DTS or AC3 audio, you'll only get video as the audio will not decode. So the best way to solve such issue is to encode Chromecast unsupported MKV AC3 to more compatible MP4 AAC format.

How to solve MKV wouldn't cast with sound through a Chromecast?

All you need is an ideal Chromecast MKV to MP4 converter to help convert MKV AC3 to MP4 AAC. Bigasoft MP4 Converter is a good choice. Besides converting MKV to MP4 for Chromecast, it also helps to convert other Chromecast unsupported video format to Chromecast compatible format like converting AVI, AVCHD, MOV, VOB, FLV, ASF, 3GP, WTV, OGV, RMVB and more.

If you are Mac user, you can try this Bigasoft MP4 Converter for Mac which is fully compatible with MAC OS X 10.5-10.9.

MKV Chromecast

Step 1 Add MKV to Bigasoft MP4 Converter

Click "Add File" button to import your MKV files or simply drag it directly to the main interface of this MKV to MP4 Converter.

Step 2 Choose the output format as MP4

Choose H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Video (*.mp4) profile and click "Settings" button to open Advanced Settings panel. Then select AAC for Audio Codec and 2000 for Video Bitrate to keep good quality.

MKV Chromecast

Step 3 Start MKV to MP4 Conversion

Click "Convert" button to start and finish the MKV to MP4 format conversion.

MKV Chromecast

If you don't want to remove the older MKV videos and take more space to save the converted mp4 movies, you also can select "Matroska Video(*.mkv)" and choose AAC as audio codec. Then the output MKV will be played with both audio and video through Chromecast. Free download Bigasoft MP4 Converter.