How to Convert MKV files to AVI format

How to Convert MKV files to AVI format
AVI and MKV are not formats, they are containers that can store audio, video tracks and subtitles.

Many people who download a file with the extension MKV will often try to play it back with video player software they have installed on their systems. Most of time this doesn’t work. And if then want to convert these mkv files into avi files, how to do that?
For this situation, I think you should make sure three things.

Question 1: What is MKV?
The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file. It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows. Matroska is similar in concept to other containers like AVI, MP4 or ASF, but is entirely open in specification, with implementations consisting mostly of open source software. Matroska file types are .MKV for video (with subtitles and audio), .MKA for audio-only files and .MKS for subtitles only.

Question 2: What is AVI?
Audio Video Interleave, known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback. Like the DVD video format, AVI files support multiple streaming audio and video, although these features are seldom used.

Question 3: How to convert mkv to avi easily?
An MKV file is a Matroska file. Matroska is an open source container format. It is an alternative to the popular AVI and MP4 formats and it also surpasses them in many areas.

Instead of using audio/video converters, especially those ones that are promoted by spam, you need to extract audio, video tracks and subtitles from MKV files and then mux them into AVI. This lossless process can be done with freeware AVIDemux.

Please note that MKV is a much newer container, so it supports much more features than AVI. If you can't remux MKV to AVI, you will need to use an audio/video converter. Note that you will lose some quality when using it.

Question 4: Why do I need to convert MKV to AVI?
Some hardware players do not support MKV files.
If you have problems playing MKV on your computer, just install a good freeware player like VLC or SMPlayer.