You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

My QuickTime player us not playing .avi files and says I need a codec I can't play no .avi files on QuickTime. How could I fix this because I want to play these files with QuickTime.

My QuickTime player us not playing .avi files and says I need a codec I can't play no .avi files on QuickTime. How could I fix this because I want to play these files with QuickTime.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7.

Posted on Jun 15, 2012 8:03 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 15, 2012 9:11 AM

There is no single codec for movies that have .avi extensions. AVI is a container format, not a specific type of file. An AVI movie may use one of the Indeo codecs (there are at least four that I'm aware of, none of which have been ported to Mac OS X) or one of the various flavors of DivX, among other possibilities. You'll have to find out what codec was used for the movies you want to view to determine what you need. Note that not all codecs for the various .avi movies are available for QuickTime.


If you want to try "hit and miss", Perian, which rolls several codecs into one package, might work. If not, you can try the codecs at http://www.divx.com/ and http://www.3ivx.com/ and see if one of them will work for you. Do not install both Perian and the DiVX/3iVX codecs at the same time.


If you just want to play the movie any way you can, you can also give this player a try:


http://www.videolan.org/vlc/


Regards.

17 replies

My QuickTime player us not playing .avi files and says I need a codec I can't play no .avi files on QuickTime. How could I fix this because I want to play these files with QuickTime.

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.