Question on playing DiVX, MPEG, AVI, etc. on Macs

[~Shard~]

I'll be moving to my first Mac right away, and am curious on how I'll go about playing all my video clips. Obviously QuickTime won't be an issue, but what player do I need to play MPEGs, AVIs, etc.? I assume playing Windows Media files are out of the question? ;) And what about DiVX movies? On my PC, I have a ton of audio codecs, video codecs, etc. (xvid, AC3, etc.) to play files properly, and a couple DiVX players, so how does this all work on a Mac?

Any help would be appreciated!

Cheers,
Scott

[pepeleuepe]

I currently use three players and have never had a problem opening any media.

1. Quicktime (http://www.apple.com/quicktime): It can handle almost anything you throw at it, but not everything.

2. VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html): Handles basically everything Quicktime can't (including DiVX).

3. Windows Media Player (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/software/Macintosh/osx/default.aspx): Yes, Microsoft does make a Mac version. Although it doesn't do anything but play WMV files, it handles the small number of files Quicktime and VLC can't.

If you have any other questions, let me know.

[Thanatoast]

VLC (http://www.versiontracker.com/redir.fcgi/lid=347733/vlc-0.6.2.dmg) plays just about all the videos you could need. WMP is out for osx, and will be updated to WMP 9 soon. Good luck and welcome!

:)

[Fukui]

Originally posted by ~Shard~
I'll be moving to my first Mac right away, and am curious on how I'll go about playing all my video clips. Obviously QuickTime won't be an issue, but what player do I need to play MPEGs, AVIs, etc.? I assume playing Windows Media files are out of the question? ;) And what about DiVX movies? On my PC, I have a ton of audio codecs, video codecs, etc. (xvid, AC3, etc.) to play files properly, and a couple DiVX players, so how does this all work on a Mac?

Any help would be appreciated!

Cheers,
Scott
Quicktime will play just about anything like MPEG except DiVX and WMV.

Windows Media Player will Play WM9 Files just fine.

You can get VLC to play MPEG2 and AC3 files.

MPlayer will play just about any DiVX file fine, and also plays windows media up to 8 series.

If you want to encode, also you can use Mencoder or FFMPEG among many others.

[vniow]

How could anyone forget MPlayer? (http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/)

BTW, the latest version of WMP is 9 just so ya know...

[Thanatoast]

Originally posted by vniow
BTW, the latest version of WMP is 9 just so ya know...
sweet! guess that shows how often i use wmp.

thanks, vniow! when did it come out?

[Thanatoast]

Sorry for the double post but...

Jeezum peets! WMP9 just installed 510 items on my computer! What in the world could they need all that for?

[JFreak]

there are codecs available for viewing divx and xvid in quicktime, and it's not hard to copy a file to a specific folder. i have no other player installed and have no trouble whatsoever.

[manitoubalck]

www.download.com and search for media players under a sub search of Mac OS X.

Also look up www.divx.com I'm sure they make a Divx player for mack OSX

[Makosuke]

The first poster covered almost everything, but left two things out that others didn't quite fill in:

1) Everyone seems to be forgetting Real, which has a functional OSX client--if you're going to do streaming, get this.

2) Install the DivX codec (http://www.divx.com/) and 3ivx codec (http://www.3ivx.com/) for Quicktime. With the two of those installed, Quicktime Player will play almost anything, including Divx and XviX, without problems. VLC picks up the slack (and, in my opinion, runs much smoother than mplayer), but with those codecs you'll rarely need it unless you feel like it.

[~Shard~]

Thanks guys, I appreciate all your feedback. Sounds like I won't have any troubles at all! Hmm, what a surprise, no troubles on a Mac... I'll have to get used to this after moving from my Windows world.... ;)