Play Almost Any Video File On Your Mac

Posted by Taylor Sternberg on 12/9/07 in Tutorial, Utilities, Video

In my circle, I’ve had a lot of friends recently purchase Apple computers. One of the first questions that they ask me is: “How do I play this video? It’s not showing up properly!” My friends, you have come to the right guy, because I have quite the toolbox for you.

There are 3 very important applications that every Mac user should download. These applications will allow you to play almost every video file on your mac, and make you a happier, more entertained person.

Just follow these steps in order:

1. Download Perian - This is the ultimate Quicktime addition, as it adds the following codecs:
AVI, FLV (Flash Video), MKV, “MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivX, H.264, FLV1, FSV1, VP6, H263I, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), MPEG Layer II Audio [...] AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3″.
Wow… that’s a lot. Perian will install an preference pane, which will allow you to check for updates automatically, and tweak audio settings. Perian is Free, and is available from Perian.org.

2. Download Flip4Mac WMV - Microsoft stopped supporting the Windows Media Player a short while ago, and told the Flip4Mac guys to take over. They have done so with their Flip4Mac WMV components. After the download, it will install the components on your computer. If you want to give them money, they’ll reward you with extra importing and exporting functions.

By this point, Quicktime should be able to play most media formats.

If not, then try to…

3. Download VLC - This is the “swiss army” knife of video players, and can handle most video formats out there. This is my go-to if my Perian-Flip4Mac-Quicktime system doesn’t work. There are so many formats supported, I’m not going to write them out. VLC is free, and can be downloaded from videolan.org.

Hopefully these 3 items will get your video files playing. If all fails, try exporting a video file out of Quicktime to a format that Quicktime can understand, like MPEG4. Good luck!

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7 Comment(s)

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Chris said on

December 9th, 2007 at 7:55 am

Optionally use NicePlayer as Quicktime “replacement”. It’s got a much nicer, more minimalistic interface!

John Melby said on

December 10th, 2007 at 7:16 am

Also, if you install Perian, you can eliminate the problems that inevitably crop up every time Adobe updates its Flash Player by avoiding Flash Player like the plague.

-2

Darrell said on

December 11th, 2007 at 5:36 am

Don’t forget mPlayer(http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html) too!

Sometimes when VLC or quicktime crash due to a bad video, mPlayer will play it just fine.

Insomnic said on

December 11th, 2007 at 12:27 pm

I second Chris’s recommendation for NicePlayer. I’ve been much happier using that for watching videos compared to Quicktime.

Also, like Darrell, I prefer MPlayer to VLC on the Mac. It tends to handle subtitles and scaling better for me. Specifically, get the alternate builds here: http://www.haque.net/software/mplayer/mplayerosx/builds/
They are more recent than what is on the official download site.

It should be noted that Perian is not currently supported on Leopard. It will sort of work for some things… but not nearly as complete a solution as it is on Tiger. Anxiously awaiting the update.

James said on

January 7th, 2008 at 4:17 pm

I have trouble playing an avi file captured using Hypercam 2 on the iMac (OS 10.5 Leopard) even with Perian 1.0 installed as a QT component. The playback windows shows just a white screen.

Furthermore, when I try to play back the same file using VLC (VLC 0.8.6d) I also have problem. The playback window now shows just a black screen with the error message “computer too slow?”!!

Funny thing is that the video clip plays fine on my PC (Windows XP) with QT 7. I’m a new Mac user and bought the iMac expecting everything to be a breeze, but everything seems to be the same in the computer world–workarounds are needed to make them work properly. Alas! The dream that I had is somewhat broken in buying into the Mac dream…especially since I splurged on a 24″ iMac.

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bob said on

February 10th, 2008 at 5:09 pm

As of February 6, 2008, Perian supports Leopard.

gaurro said on

August 25th, 2008 at 5:30 pm

vlc rocks, quicktime sucks, that’s a matter of fact.

vlc can play almost all videos, and even if the gui is bad, is a great program