I don't care how annoying Real is, Real Player 10 is vastly better than WMP on the Mac. Why? How about RP10 actually works? You can skip around in a movie in a reasonably functional manner, and it actually plays Real content. WMP fo the Mac is like a bad joke--it stalls at the slightest provocation, skipping around in the file can take several seconds to restart the video, and it doesn't even support some MS codecs. Oh, and its video scaling is hideously ugly.
Ironically, there's a $10 3rd party plugin for Quicktime that allows it to play most WMV videos that works FAR better than WMP on the Mac--more attractive scaling faster scrubbing (heck, you can almost legitimately call it scrubbing), and it's far more stable than the "real deal". Check out WMV player--best $10 I've spent this year.
Back on the original topic, I've only ever come across two videos that weren't outright corrupt that either Quicktime, VLC, or MPlayer wouldn't play (usually all three, and VLC in 99.7% of the cases): One was an .avi that used VP6 video, which is a proprietary codec by a small company that, though good, is obscure and closed source with absolutely no Mac version (the earlier VP3, however, is available in Quicktime and VLC plays it, too). Get info to check the video codec to see if this is what you've got--if so, you're out of luck. If not, it's probably just a corrupt file.
The other thing I can't play I still haven't figured out, and perhaps someone can give me a tip on this since we're on the topic: It is an .avi container with DivX video and an Ogg Vorbis audio track (but it's not a misnamed OGM file like most things with this combo--it really is an AVI). Normally VLC has no issue with these, but however the bozo that encoded this one did it, he/she managed to leave out the identifying tag on the audio stream, so nothing (including most Windows players) can figure out what it is, even though they know how to play it. Ironically, if I use DivX Tool on the Mac to strip out the audio track, it's an Ogg file that plays fine in VLC. I've been looking for some way to manually edit the audio stream identifier, but I can't even find a Windows program to do that--only the FourCC. Anybody seen something like this?
