Why can't Quicktime tell me which Codec it needs?

geowulf wrote:

For years Quicktime played any AVI file I asked it to run. Now, with Mt. Lion Apple throws me into cyberspace tellign me I have to find a codec to see an AVI movie. Give me a break Apple. I don't have time for this.

Then download VLC player (free)

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html

Cheers

Pete

Quicktime X can't play AVI video files. You will need something like the VLC video player to play the AVI files. You can download the VLC video player (it's free) from here :

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

I can't remember Quicktime ever being able to play an avi on its own, but Quicktime X is a complete overhaul of Quicktime, not just the player. Try installing Perian. It can help quicktime view various other video types. The developers have quit working on it, though.

As with the others, I don't believe that Quicktime has ever been able to play AVIs. If you had that capability and lost it after an upgrade or the purchase of a new machine, that is probably because of some third-party software (like Perian) that you had installed that was not compatible with the upgrade or that wasn't installed by default on the new machine. You may not remember installing it, especially if it had been installed for a few years, but something additional was there to give you the ability to play AVIs.

AVI is simply a container format, just like MKV or MOV files. Quicktime is perfectly capable of interpreting this format, but often the codecs used for media content in this container are not compatible with QuickTime. If you have an MPEG or similar common standard used in the AVI file then you should be able to view the movie just fine. Additionally, sometimes odd encodings of even common formats like MPEG may issue this or similar errors when in an AVI container.

Apple article shows AVI supported, but Topher's explanation explains why it may not be.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3775