Convert MKV to AVI for free (on Windows and OSX)

The MKV for­mat, although never orig­i­nally intended to share stuff online because it's large and really high qual­ity, has now become stan­dard. Espe­cially now with Blu-Ray becom­ing a stan­dard. But some of us are happy stor­ing AVI for our own use espe­cially if we can have it in decent-enough qual­ity (MKV files are usu­ally 1GB or more for, say, a film).

Google is full of tools and util­i­ties that allow MKV to AVI con­ver­sion. Many of them are share­ware. You down­load them free but then you have to cough up $29.99.

I have found the FREE tool, All2AVI ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/alltoavi/ ) does the job and does it superbly. It's fast, free, and the con­ver­sion from MKV and other for­mats to AVI hap­pens pretty effi­ciently and reliably.

If you're on OSX, you can use Visu­al­Hub or Sub­merge, but both of them are a bit unre­li­able. Visu­al­Hub in par­tic­u­lar is a fan­tas­tic way to do any con­ver­sion on Mac OSX, but if it col­lapses with a cryp­tic "Sorry, could not con­vert for some rea­son", then you may wish to use All­toAVI inside an XP vir­tual machine.