There are more .MAT file readers than well working numerical libraries. Scipy's io library seemsto be maintained - http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/Reading_mat_files A neuroscience package that is supposed to be helpful in studying adata in many formats - http://mien.sourceforge.net/docs/matlab.html CVXOPT, another numerical python project has its own parser - http://abel.ee.ucla.edu/cvxopt/examples/extra-utilities/matfile.py/view ANSI C MAT-file reader claims to deal with version <= v7.3 - http://sourceforge.net/projects/matio/ Finally, the official documentation of the MAT file is here http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/pdf_doc/matlab/matfile_format.pdf |