Anyone managed to get avi's to work on quicktime x? I upgraded to snow leopard, installed perian and now the avi files i have no longer work. The only avi file i got to work was one that was converted (originally a .mov file).    --- Brooklyn

Nowadays QuickTime has updated itself to the tenth generation, but when it turns to play AVI on QuickTime, there are still these and those situations that will happen, which annoys Mac users a lot. We provide several methods to solve the problem of playing and editing AVI file on Mac. Here goes the solution.

AVI stands for Audio Video Interleave. The .AVI format is what is known as a container format. It specifies a way in which a file may contain audio and video data. It does not specify how that data is encoded. The encoding of audio and video data is specified in what are known as codecs. A codec (short for Compressor/DECompressor) tells the computer how to decode the audio and video tracks that have been encoded within the .AVI file. If the audio or video or both were created using codecs that QuickTime cannot use, you may see a message like the following:

"QuickTime is missing the software needed to perform this operation. Unfortunately, it is not available on the QuickTime server" or "You may experience problems playing a video track in "filename.avi" because the required compressor could not be found."

These are the message prompting you need some third party plug-ins in order to play your unrecognized AVI files. So the first method is to download some plug-in to support your player. One of the most popular components is Perian.

Solution 2: Shift to some other players

The second method is to change a player. There are some other players which runs perfectly on Mac Operating System. VLC is one of them.

VLC Media Player is a cross-platform open-source multimedia framework, player and server. It is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac ...) as well as DVDs, Audio CDs VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a media converter or a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on networks.

Solution 3: Convert AVI to MOV and playback with quicktime

The third method is to convert AVI to a Mac native format, MOV. This might be another complex but better way. Converting AVI to MOV on Mac not only allows you watch and play AVI files on QuickTime but also allows you edit it in iMovie. Aimersoft AVI to MOV Converter acts as a good assistant on this. By using Mac AVI to MOV Converter, you can easily convert your AVI files to MOV on Mac and even edit it.

Links: How to convert AVI files to MOV format on Mac ?

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