Even though I'm playing it on my last generation macbook pro with 2.2GHz? The reason why I think its the program is because VLC player is not the smoothest program I've ever used. It still has many bugs which even causes it to crash every once in a while on a bunch of different macs i've seen. I may be wrong though, but thats why I've concluded that its a program. I do agree though that it would take a good processor and video card to play a massive 1080p video, but it should in theory be able to do that because its not like I have an old computer either.
![Mkv player for mac os x 10.4.11 Mkv player for mac os x 10.4.11](http://obamapacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/1080p-HD-MKV-Video-Playback-on-Apple-computers-Mac-OS-X.jpg)
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/3/125388106/720160935.jpg)
MPlayer can play them as well, and in my experience it's a bit faster and smoother than VLC. The problem is that the MPlayer GUI is not very reliable, and often doesn't work at all. I actually compiled my own MPlayer command-line version from source, and I use that frequently now.
Solution 1, a QuickTime alternative player will be your choice to open MKV on Mac. Solution 2, you can try a video converter to convert MKV to MOV. In this way, watching MKV files on Mac with QuickTime will be simple and easy. Mkv player for os x free download - Free MKV Player, MKV File Player, Apple Mac OS X Mavericks, and many more programs. Mkv player for os x free download - Free MKV Player, MKV File Player, Apple.
If you have Apple's developer tools installed, it's really not hard. I've heard that VLC and MPlayer (and I suppose Perian, since it's based on the same core) do not use multiple threads for video decoding at this point. That means the second core of your processor would basically sit idle.
(That could be out of date or just plain wrong, though; can't say I've ever tested it.) Apple's H.264 decoder is threaded, but I don't think there's any way you'll be able to use it with an mkv.