Can iTunes play MKV video files?

iTunes is a great way Apple offers to manage your iOS device's media content. Just like songs and audio books, iTunes allows you to play videos on your computer, whether it be video clips, TV shows, movies, episodes, or music videos, video podcasts. While it can handle video files in an *.mp4, *.mov, *.m4v extension, a large number of other formats is excluded in iTunes' support list. And MKV is one of them. When you try to open and play a MKV file in iTunes (Alternatives to iTunes), it's not surprising you get a warning message saying that the file type is not supported.

So what can you do if you have movie files in .mkv format and want to play them with iTunes? Thankfully, an online search will turn up countless MKV video converters. All you need to do is convert those MKV files into a format iTunes understands.

Most of MKV files in these days are encoded with H.264 video and AAC audio. To retain the same quality, you'll want to convert them to H.264/AAC compression formats in an M4V, MOV, or MP4 file so that iTunes can open. As for MKV conversion, Video Converter for Mac is our tool of choice.

This program is a powerful tool specifically designed for convert digital files. Not only can it convert video & audio files from one format to another, but can extract audio tracks out of a video and save a audio fileyou want. That's not all—it also include some other useful features behind the simple interface, such as the options for editing videos, the ability to batch convert multiple video files at a time, and the presets for popular devices you wish to play movie on.

This program is available for both MacOS and Windows users, If you want to convert MKV to play in iTunes, please use the PC equivalent—Video Converter for Windows.

Now let's take a look at how to use it to convert the MKV to iTunes playable format.

Step 1: Insert the MKV files

Open up the program on your computer.

To add .mkv movie files to it, you can directly drag and drop them to the interface, or input them by hitting the "Add File" on the menu bar manually. It allows you to input several video files at a time.

Step 2: Select iTunes playable output format

Once your MKV files are loaded, go ahead and click the "Profiles" drop-down menu. This will bring up a panel where you can choose what format you want as output file type.

In our case, head to "General Video" category on the left pane, then select M4V, MP4, or MP4 as output format in its expanding list on the right pane.

You'll probably want to get a little more control over what your output video looks. To do so, simply click the "Settings" button to the right side of the "Profile" drop-down menu. In the window that opens, tweak the settings related to the video for your preference.

Normally, you can keep everything untouched, as they are good enough for most of people.

You can also choose a preset profile from the drop-down list if you want to convert the video to play on a multimedia device—this MKV converter includes a library of pre-defined profiles for devices to simplify the process. Once you select that profile, all settings will be adjusted automatically to be suitable for your device. (Read next: How to play MKV on Mac)

Step 3: Start converting

When you're ready, click on the "Convert" button at the bottom side of the interface and this software will start converting the MKV video files to your selected format that iTunes recognizes.

Since the H.264 codec is very CPU intensive, the process will take a while. If you a long list of MKV files on the queue, you can let them convert while you sleep.

Once you've converted MKV videos to files playable in iTunes, you can add them to iTunes library and open them to check if they all work well.

Enjoy!

Tips & Tricks

Apart from converting MKV files to iTunes readable formats, you can also use this powerful tool to achieve many other conversions, whatever WMV to MP4, VOB to MP4, MTS to MOV, WebM to M4V, and more.