SMPlayer and MKV Files

So I've been spending the better part of the day trying to figure out how to make the shittastic MKV format work on my computer again (sometime between when I was watching Gurren Lagann and today it decided to go back to its old video lag shenanigans). Everywhere I go tells me that SMPlayer is an MKV player, and the SMPlayer website has an MKV file being played right there on a screenshot just to show how great it is at playing MKV files. So I load an MKV file into the player... and it plays a whole millisecond of audio with no image and then ceases playing. What the fuck is this shit?

>>4
MKV is a (very interesting) audio/video container and NOT and audio/video codec. Whatever codec used to compress the audio or video data contained within the MKV file is of no consequence to the MKV demuxer. You need to find out which codecs are contained within each MKV file and find out if your player supports playing that codec from within a MKV file.