MPEGs on MacBooks?

U

untz

Registered
Hello there,

A friend of mine just switched from WinXP to OS X Tiger by purchasing a MacBook (Intel-based).

He's run into an dillemma - he's unable to watch any Windows media files (mpegs, etcs) on his MacBook.

When I tried to install the Flip4Mac WMV plug-in, the installer stated that Flip4Mac is not supported on Intel Macs...

Does anyone know how one can watch Windows media files on Intel-based Macs?

Isn't Windows Media Player for Macs been pulled from Microsoft?

Perhaps the only way to work around this problem is to download and install MPG to MOV Converters?

Many, many thanks!
 
MPG/MPEG is not a Windows Media format; it's an open format that QuickTime should be able to play straight out of the box. If you have MPEGs that QuickTime can't play, there are two likely causes:

1. The file is not in fact an mpg, but an asf or some other type that has been misnamed ".mpg". This will work in some Windows programs, but might confuse QuickTime Player. This is very common in the Windows world.

2. The MPEG uses MPEG-2 video rather than MPEG-1. QuickTime cannot decode MPEG-2 video without a special codec. Apple sells theur MPEG-2 playback component for $20. You can also use non-QuickTime-based players like VLC to play these files.

VLC is probably worth downloading one way or another, since it can read a lot of files that give QuickTime trouble.
 
There are, however, MPEG files that actually use a different codec inside (only using MPEG as the container format) - and Quicktime can have problems with those. I usually throw those at VLC - www.videolan.org - and they just work fine with that.
 
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