For example renaming "rar" to "cbr" for comics scanned into as a collection of JPG's then bundled as a RAR file. (there are also examples where renaming the extension makes sense. It's still an MP3 audio file so some devices might manage to decode as MP3 but others might expect AAC and produce garbage or just crash. It's like naming an MP3 audio file to AAC. so luckily it works but again there's no guarantee that will work elsewhere. it's still splitting with a Matroska protocol. Nor can a media device decode a Matroska file if it actually thinks it's AVI. You don't change ANY of that by renaming the extension to AVI. Your media file has four main components: In this particular case changing from MKV to AVI still means it's the Matroska container so there's a good chance you'd confuse some media players so that the "AVI" file might now not work other places. Glad you found a solution, however be aware that in general you should NOT change the extension of any file.
dont forget to rename your subtitles identical to the movie file name In order to make things work you don't need to use any third party application like MKVtoolnix, all you need to do is to change the file extension from MKV to AVI, and then put your subtitle files in the same directory just like you said. samsung tv does not use the subtitles in the same folder if the MKV file contains merged subtitles and there is no way to tell the TV to ignore them. The selected answer works good but I've found a better and easier workaround. I'm using a USB stick and have done this before but now nothing works I've tried to change the coding of the srt file to every type available. I've put the files in the same folder and named them the same name both folder and files). I've been trying for hours to get my Samsung TV (ue50ju6875) to play subtitles for a mkv file. Not sure if this question belongs to this part of the forum but here goes.