How Russian Dolls Got Inside Your Video Files

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The argument started over four letters: EBML.

It was December 2002 in Russia, and the Multimedia Container Format development team was splitting apart. Steve Lhomme had heard enough. He walked away from the project and started building something new. Something better.

Every video you watch is wrapped in a container—a digital box holding the pictures, sound, subtitles, and instructions for how they fit together. Back then, one container ruled them all: AVI, a Microsoft format from 1992. It worked well in the days of short, grainy clips on beige PCs. But by the early 2000s, it was showing its age: a 2-gigabyte limit, awkward codec hacks, and no built-in support for subtitles or chapters.

The industry kept patching instead of rebuilding.

Lhomme decided to start from scratch. He called his new format Matroska, after the Russian nesting dolls—matryoshka—one thing inside another. Its foundation was EBML (Extensible Binary Meta Language), a self-describing binary cousin of XML. EBML turns a file into a flexible tree of “elements.” Add a new element tomorrow and yesterday’s players simply skip what they don’t understand instead of crashing. Future-proofing baked right in.

Matroska could hold anything: any video codec, audio format, subtitle type, and unlimited tracks. If you wanted twelve audio languages and thirty-seven subtitle tracks, Matroska smiled and made room.

It was also resilient. If part of the file got corrupted, the rest kept playing. If the recording stopped suddenly, you didn’t lose everything. It could have chapters like a book, DVD-style menus, and metadata that stored all kinds of extra information.

And it was free. No licenses. No royalties. No corporate gatekeepers deciding who could use what. Anyone could implement it. Anyone could improve it.

This mattered more than most people realized.

For years, Matroska lived in the shadows. Enthusiasts used it. Archivists loved it. But mainstream adoption progressed slowly.

Then small victories started adding up.

In 2014, Microsoft finally added native MKV support to Windows 10. Google built WebM on Matroska's foundation. Streaming services discovered they could pack more languages, more quality options, more features into files that just worked.

The nesting doll had found its place.

Today, Matroska powers more of the internet than most people know. Behind streaming video. Inside media servers. Preserving films in digital archives. The container format that nobody talks about and everyone uses.

Files created twenty years ago still play perfectly. They'll play twenty years from now.

There's something beautiful about building something that lasts. About creating tools that outlive their creators. About walking away from an argument in December and returning with something better.