Playing .avi HELP ME PLEASE!!!!!

Well, I'll tell you how I solved the avi problem on my machine once and for all.

First, I downloaded VLC, which is a free, open source video player for the Mac. It plays virtually every avi file I've thrown at it perfectly without any hiccups or need for modifications whatsoever.

Second, I selected one of the avi files that I had on my system (with the ".avi" file extension) and typed command I (for get info). Then, with the get info window open, I clicked the "Open with" triangle and selected VLC as the default playback program and clicked "change all". A dialog screen will pop up asking to confirm the change for all avi files. I confirmed. That will set VLC as the default player for all avi files, while Quicktime remains the default for everything else (excluding wmv of course).

That's all there is to it. Now all avi files will open on your machine hassle and goof-proof free. No searching for codecs, no dealing with conflicts with Quicktime and third-party codecs, etc. With VLC, avi files "just work"

Frankly, Quicktime just isn't up to the task of handling avi files, certainly not out of the box. And for less than technically savvy user, there is no user friendly way of setting up Quicktime for handling all the avi files that are floating around out there and figuring out what codecs are for what. VLC allows you to skip all of that nonsense entirely.

I'm also becoming very impressed with the present state of VLC's playback engine, and becoming increasingly less enamored with Quicktime player's. For example, one of Quicktime 7's vaunted features was real time resizing of the playback window. It does this, but it seems labored and not very smooth on some videos, whereas VLC has this feature and it works effortlessly and smoothly on everything it plays. That may be due to Quicktime's reliance on core video and whether you have a high-end graphics card installed, but VLC doesn't seem to mind that you don't have a core image compatible graphics card and delivers live resizing far better than Quicktime.

All in all, I'm looking forward to some serious optimzing of Quicktime 7, because it's been rather disappointing since it's release. On the other hand, admittedly, H.264 looks tremendous.





1 gig emac superdrive Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Yeah, AVI is a really wildly non-standard format. VLC knows about all of these and picks just the right one to use. If you want to use 'em in any projects (like iDVD, iMovie, etc.) though, then you're going to have to do a bit of work to get them into a standard format.

VLC does play most avi files but be aware that there are still some older video clips around that use the Indeo codecs and VLC will not play them. The only solution on a Mac is to install the Indeo codecs in the Classic environment, use Virtual PC or be able to boot into OS 9, as I can. For those interested the codecs are available from Apple here: Indeo codecs for Classic

Yah, Windows video is like a land mine field 🙂

The only old QuickTime movies I can't play are ones that used QuickTime 3D.

The DivX 6 component allows many .avi files to play in QuickTime. Download it here:

http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/download/

Follow the instructions of the installer, and that's it.

There are other components you could install, but this might be sufficient. On the occasions when QT can't play an .avi file, I use VLC, as the other posters have recommended.

iMac G5 2.1 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.3)

mPlayer does decode Indeo Video 3 under Mac OS X although the video quality is pretty shabby compared to using QuickTime Player under Classic (as opposed to the OS X version of QuickTime Player.)

Installing VirtualPC also allows playback of all the Indeo Video compressed files and others too such as ON2 VPC6 (for which there is no Mac compatible coded in either OS X or previous OS 9 etc.)

Soon after Apple switches to Intel hardware, both VLC and mPlayer may be able to play a whole lot more video types as those players already support many other codecs but only in x86 implemenations...