Matroska Pack 1.1.2

Released on May 1, 2006 as the final build, it was one of the first packs to make Matroska playback practical on consumer Windows machines at a time when MKV support was fragmented and unreliable.

This page exists primarily for historical and archival reference.

Active development on Matroska Pack ended in 2006, and the bundled components have all been superseded by maintained alternatives.

If you are setting up MKV playback on a current Windows install, the K-Lite Codec Pack or X Codec Pack 3.0 will give you a faster, safer, and far more capable installation in a fraction of the disk footprint.

When Matroska Pack Still Makes Sense

There are three scenarios where downloading the original 1.1.2 build is a defensible choice:

The first is legacy hardware preservation. If you are maintaining a Windows XP or Vista machine for a specific reason - retro gaming, vintage capture cards, period-accurate playback for a media archive - Matroska Pack ships components that were designed for that era and register cleanly on those operating systems.

Modern packs assume a 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 baseline and will refuse to install or behave unpredictably on older systems.

The second is decade-old archival MKV files. A small percentage of MKV files muxed in the mid-2000s use early Matroska elements or unusual track layouts that current splitters may misread.

Loading the period-correct Haali Matroska Splitter (last updated 2013) sometimes produces cleaner parsing of these files than newer splitters that have moved on from edge-case compatibility.

The third is DirectShow research and forensics. Developers studying the evolution of Windows multimedia playback occasionally need access to historical filter versions in a registered state. The Matroska Pack installer preserves a snapshot of mid-2000s DirectShow conventions that is hard to reconstruct from scratch.

For any other use case, the components in this pack are simply outdated.

What the Original Pack Contains

The Matroska Pack Full installer includes a fixed set of components from 2005-2006:

Haali Matroska Splitter (the primary MKV demuxer of the era), MatroskaMuxer 1.0.0.9, Matroska Shell Extension 2.8, VSFilter 2.36 (the original DirectShow subtitle renderer), TTA 1.0.0.203, CoreFLAC 0.4.0.46, CoreWavpack 1.0.3, FFDShow (decoding only, dated 15-10-2005), RealMedia Splitter 1.0.1.0, MPEG2 Decoder v0.1.2.0, and MatroskaDiag 1.0.0.62.

During installation the legacy installer lets you toggle individual components on or off. The only piece with a visible interface is MatroskaDiag, a diagnostic utility for inspecting MKV file structure.

The Matroska Pack Lite strips this down to the bare minimum needed to play MKV files containing Vorbis audio with subtitles on a DirectShow player, on the assumption that you have video and audio decoders installed separately.

The Lite build also includes the matroska muxer filter, which lets DirectShow-based capture and muxing applications create MKV files - useful for software like ATV2000 or VirtualVCR_matroska that were popular in that period.

The Matroska Pack MPEG4 variant is based on the Full pack but strips out anything not needed for DivX/Xvid MKV playback. This was the most efficient configuration for the dominant MKV use case in the mid-2000s.

Modern Replacements for Each Component

Every component in Matroska Pack 1.1.2 has a maintained successor that does the same job better on current Windows:

For the splitter layer, the current Matroska Splitter (version 1.8.9.193) handles MKV containers with full HEVC, VP9, AV1, and AVS3 stream extraction. It supersedes both the Haali splitter and the bundled MatroskaMuxer with a single modern installer that registers correctly on Windows 10 and 11.

For video and audio decoding, LAV Filters is the modern equivalent of the FFDShow/CoreFLAC/CoreWavpack combination.

A single LAV Filters install gives you LAV Splitter, LAV Video, and LAV Audio - covering H.264, HEVC, VP9, AV1, FLAC, AC3, DTS, TrueHD, and Opus with GPU-accelerated decoding through DXVA2 and D3D11. This is the decoding stack that every current codec pack is built on.

For subtitle rendering, the current DirectVobSub and xy-VSFilter builds replace the original VSFilter 2.36 with proper YUV color handling, support for modern subtitle formats including PGS, and stable behavior in 64-bit players.

For an all-in-one replacement, the X Codec Pack 3.0 bundles LAV Filters 0.81, MPC-HC, madVR, MPC Video Renderer, xy-VSFilter, and the current Matroska Splitter into a single 64-bit installer with no adware. It is the closest spiritual successor to what Matroska Pack tried to be, rebuilt for the current decade.

For users who want the most widely tested option, the K-Lite Codec Pack and its K-Lite Codec Pack Update channel cover the same ground with a longer track record.

Player Recommendations

If your goal is simply to play MKV files on a current Windows install without assembling components, the simplest paths are MPC-BE and MPC-HC, both of which ship with LAV Filters built in and handle MKV containers natively.

VLC Media Player is the codec-free alternative - it carries its own internal decoders, plays virtually every MKV file out of the box, and requires no DirectShow filter management at all. None of these require Matroska Pack or anything related to it.

A Word on Installation Issues

The most common feedback on Matroska Pack 1.1.2 - reflected in the reviews on this page - is that the installer sometimes leaves a dialog box that requires a system restart to dismiss. This is a known behavior tied to the registration logic of the period and one of the reasons modern packs use silent installers with clean uninstall hooks.

If you encounter this on a current Windows version, it is a signal that the pack is not suited to your environment and you should uninstall it and switch to a maintained alternative.

Identifying What You Actually Need

If you arrived at this page because you have an MKV file that will not play and you are not sure which component is missing, do not start with Matroska Pack.

Use the Codec Finder to identify which codecs and filters are already registered on your system and which are missing.

This avoids the common mistake of installing a legacy pack on top of a working modern stack, which causes priority conflicts that are difficult to diagnose.

For a broader overview of current options, the Best Codec Packs Guide compares K-Lite, X Codec Pack, Shark007, and other actively maintained bundles head-to-head.

The full Codec Packs section lists every pack currently catalogued.

Matroska Pack 1.1.2 belongs in the same conceptual category as Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative - useful, well-designed software from an era that has now passed. Download it if you have a specific historical, archival, or legacy-hardware reason to do so.

For everything else, the modern alternatives linked above will give you better playback, safer installation, and ongoing security updates that a 2006 release simply cannot provide.