Avi...

N

Nafae

Registered
I have seen this question in a million forums (well, not a million...) but have never seen a proper answer. Does ANYONE know how to play .avi files on mac os X? I have tried many different codecs, tools, converters, but am still never able to get some files to play with quicktime. Neither versiontracker nor downloads.com has a player that is able to understand all of my avi files, and I have worked on this for about 5 hours this evening. So if ANYONE out there has gotten this problem fixed, I would love to hear from you.

-Rob
 
Have you tried the Windows Media Player for OS X from Microsoft? That should play most of your AVI files. However, if the files are encoded with Codecs that are simply not available for OS X, then there's probably no way to play them.
 
The biggest problem with .avi files you get when they're DivX encoded. Go here and download DivX doctor. On that page you'll also find links for where to get the latest codecs for QT. That should fix most of your problems. Note however, that sound can still be an issue since .avi files have a very strong tendency to get out of sync. Also, you may want to do a search for "DivX Tool" at Versiontracker. In short, converting .avi files to .mov files normally is the best solution. There are a couple of (other) converters out there....
Hope that helps some.
If you're still having trouble tell me what errors occur....
 
Plain .avi files can be played with Windows Media Player. The ones you get when you download illegal copies of DVDs are DivX encoded (with AAC or MPEG 1 Layer 3 [mp3] soundtracks).

Some of those can't be doctored well, not by DivX Doctor II, not by Avi2Mov (ffmpeg). Those usually use some strange variation of mp3 encoding that isn't yet covered by the doctors.

Others, however, are simply corrupted files you can't even play on Windows machines with the right codecs.

QuickTime 6 won't help here (to prevent the question), as QT6 does *nothing* for DivX.

Let's hope that people will start ripping DVDs to 'real' MPEG 4 directly with AAC or MP3 sound.
 
Thanks for all the help.

I seem to get an error when launching DivX Doctor II, it sayes the 3ivx codec isn't installed when it most definately is. I have placed a copy in both /library/quiktime and ~/library/quicktime. I have tried this in both 5 and beta 6, it just isn't reading the codecs! Have you ever gotten this error, or do you have any idea how to remedy it?
 
Also, you might wish to check out this
little app. It allows you to play both DivX and MS-MPEG 4 encoded .avi files.
Tell me if you're still having trouble installing DivX Doctor...
 
I have had the same problem with AVI files and being able to play them in OS X. On MacOS 9, I have the Intel Indeo Video 3 and Indeo Video 5 codecs which enable me to play most AVI files, but I have not been able to find MacOS X versions of these codecs. I'll have to look around again, but the last time I looked, I could only find the OS 9 codecs. Here's a link to the OS 9 codecs available from an Apple support page.

http://kbase.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/kbase.woa/127/wa/query?searchMode=Expert&type=id&val=KC.60366

 
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