.AVI movies wont play on Quicktime

[fitworldmac]

Hi All, Im searching through my old video files and I have a bunch of videos from those flip cameras that were popular a few years ago. They produced .AVI files and I cant get them to play! I have Maverick and quicktime 7. They still wont play after I was told to download quicktime 7..
any advice? Much appreciated!!

 

[mpantone]

Have you tried the VLC player?

 

[Dave Braine]

As far as I know, Quicktime doesn't play avi files buy itself. You can try downloading and installing Perian. This used to enable QT to play just about anything, but it's no longer being developed, so it may, or may not work. It certainly won't harm your Mac, so give it a try.
http://perian.org

Otherwise use MPEGStreamclip, which is a standalone video player/converter.
http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

 

[floh]

Hi All, Im searching through my old video files and I have a bunch of videos from those flip cameras that were popular a few years ago. They produced .AVI files and I cant get them to play! I have Maverick and quicktime 7. They still wont play after I was told to download quicktime 7..
any advice? Much appreciated!!

.avi is a very, very old container created by Microsoft. QuickTime was never really good at handling it. I definitely second the amazing VLC player, which is free and can virtually play back anything. If you want the videos to be playable on Mac systems out of the box, you can try just switching the container to .mov with this little tool I programmed. It won't lose any quality, since it is merely re-wrapping the content. But if you only want to go through them, this is probably overkill and you will be better off with VLC.

 

[grizzlyedwin]

I agree with the previous statements, if you're goal is just to play the videos, VLC Player should do the trick.

If you want to edit the video in another app then you need to install the previously mentioned Perian.

I personally have both since I do both and they're both great apps to have.