2010 macbook air won't play .mov files pre2015

Hi, I have a 2010 MacBook air which works great. I have a lot of photos and videos from 2009 to present day stored on the MacBook and when trying to play video files, they will not play. The older video files have a message advising that the MacBook cannot play the videos as it uses an unsupported format. It seems that 2016 onwards is working. Can anyone advise if there is software i can use to play these files or can i do anything with the files to make them play? I tried VLC however they said they couldn't see any files to read, so i presume they had the same issue?

Thanks in advance