By converting the movie’s video to Xvid and it’s audio to ac3 using avconv, I have found that it plays nicely on my Vizio TV. The libav-tools package and the mkv library needed to be installed first on my system (Ubuntu). Also avconv’s default video encoding quality is too low, hence the -b:v 1500k option.
sudo apt-get install libav-tools libmkv0
avconv -i input.mkv -vcodec mpeg4 -vtag xvid -b:v 1500k -c:a ac3 output.avi