how do I play .avi files on itunes

Handbrake. It's what everyone around here uses.

Problem solved. 😀

Pavtube spammer with a single post to their name. No one even mentioned iTunes. Get out.

Pavtube is another software seller offering low quality programs. Pavtube Video Converter promised to convert videos among all video and audio formats, but in reality it is a worthless set of bits. Don't buy this crap not only because they develop low quality software, but also because they use spam to promote it (otherwise you only encourage spammers to send you more ****).

Don't say something badly to the things that you have never used. And not all of time rumors are believable

Thorntonvre wrote:

Pavtube spammer with a single post to their name. No one even mentioned iTunes. Get out.

The forum topic is "how do I play .avi files on itunes", therefore people *did* mention iTunes, LOL. Re the spammers, no arguments. We don't need them. I'm trying Handbrake now, to convert some old AVI movies. It seems to work, but it's almost as slow as ripping them from DVD.

I agree with you, I didn't want to convert all my files using handbrake. It would take forever.

Actually, this won't allow for play on iPod or iPhone. Just iTunes ... it relies on a trick to allow iTunes to play files using QT plugins. iTunes normally will only play QT native files (i.e. MP4s, etc). If you use this, you can create reference files that pull any video that Quicktime can play into iTunes without converting it. However, as the plugins do not work on the iPod or iPhone, you are still left with using iSquint or the like to actually convert the videos for those uses.

If it's a downloaded MPEG-4 video file, you just drag it into iTunes and sync it over.

If it's a downloaded movie file of some other kind (windows formats, etc), you use a program like iSquint, VisualHub, ffmpegx, etc, to convert it and then use iTunes to sync it.

If it's a Youtube or similar video, you use a program like PodTube to convert it and use iTunes to sync it (or some of these services will create an MP4 file for you to download).

All in all you typically only need a couple of these converter apps even if you do a lot of this.

So AirPlay takes whatever's playing in iTunes and streams to the Apple TV 2.0... I wonder if the Apple TV actually processes anything...

Can anyone check if this works? Mine's arriving tomorrow 🙂

According to Apple official website, iTunes only works with QuickTime and MPEG-4 Movie files that end in ".mov", ".m4v", or ".mp4" and are playable in QuickTime Player. Therefore, if you try to import .avi movie to iTunes (including import AVI to iTunes 11) for syncing, it will end in fail in importing AVI video to iTunes let alone transfer this AVI file to iPad, iPhone, iPod.

In order to successfully import AVI files to iTunes, we have to convert this AVI video to iTunes compatible video format like MP4.

Bichlerte wrote:

So AirPlay takes whatever's playing in iTunes and streams to the Apple TV 2.0... I wonder if the Apple TV actually processes anything...

Can anyone check if this works? Mine's arriving tomorrow 🙂

I have three Apple TV's (two 3rd gen, one 1st.) Based on my WiFi traffic, AirPlay only streams games from portable IOS devices. For media streams, the URL and login data are sent to Apple TV, which streams content itself. Otherwise, you'd be spending twice as much bandwidth (streaming the same movie twice), and drain your iPad's batteries in short order.

This is an educated guess, of course, since I do not work for Apple. But my own monitors confirm that once the iPad establishes a connection, further traffic is going directly from the media source to the Apple TV, and not thorugh my iPad. As for AVI files, a quick run through Handbrake will convert them into useable media.

So AirPlay takes whatever's playing in iTunes and streams to the Apple TV 2.0... I wonder if the Apple TV actually processes anything...

There is no real difference in the streamed playback whether you initiate streaming from within iTunes, from an iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, or via the TV. The only difference is in which device initiates the streaming process and whether or not currently playing content is terminated/overridden by the new streaming content. In fact, you can initiate streaming in iTunes on your computer (or from any of the other mobile devices) and move to your video area and continue viewing and controling the streaming content the same as if it had been initiated via the TV. (Just don't forget to reset the initiating AirPlay switch later.)

Thanks for everyone's reply.

I didn't want to convert all my files using handbrake. It would take forever.

I did a search on the apple forum (thinking someone must have posted this question before) but came up with nothing. However, then I Google searched and came up with a result suggesting to use a freeware program called Movie2itunes. Ironically this result was a apple post.

It took me a bit to figure out as they would say "drag your files into this droplet". Well, there is no droplet (I'm assuming it's an icon of some sort). So, I dragged my files onto the applescript icon after setting my destination folder and voila, multiple reference files instantly imported into iTunes.

Patience was rewarded today. It took me some time to find this solution, but it also saved me from buying a piece of software.

A friend recommended Vuze, it's a free torrent app with a built in file converter. Www.vuze.com. The system is slick and it gives you images of iPads, iPhones and Apple TV's all generations to choose from. You simply drag the avi files to the conversion tab choose the output format and it converts them seamlessly to mp4. Works on single files and batches, drops the converted files into the TRANSCODES folder.

If you don't mind to change a video player, plex is a nice choice. Videos can be streamed to phones, tablets that worked similar to iTunes. However most of my home videos are saved in AVC MP4 format that worked no problem on both mac and other apple devices.