Technical Advice Requested

[rushthatspeaks]

So Ruth and I are borrowing a lot of anime from the Bostonians, on CD, mostly in .avi format. I am having massive technical difficulties making Ruth's laptop play .avi. Ruth has a Mac, OS 10.1.2, which already had Quicktime 4, the original Windows Media Player, and Realplayer 4. Windows Media Player simply croaked and died at the thought of .avi, which is understandable given that WMP is not even designed for this operating system. Quicktime 4 did the classic 'play the sound but not the image' bit, so I went on the web to try to install Quicktime 5, only to discover that Quicktime 5 is only compatible with *either* Mac OS 8 *or* Mac OS 10.1.3 and up, so no luck there. I then downloaded Divx. Divx, working mated with Quicktime 4, would play the image, but not the sound, a bug it said in the online docs was common to the Mac, and for which they had included a converter to get things out of .avi and into divx format where they will actually work. The converter does not work; no matter how many times or in what ways I try to shove files through it, from CD or hard drive, the resultant converted file contains no data. So I tried Global Divx. Global Divx kicked the computer into something called iMovie which appears to be built-in video editing equipment. While it is nice to know that we have built-in video editing equipment, it won't accept .avi imports. I then, in desperation, went to Realplayer 4, also juryrigged to be working on the wrong OS; frickin' thing takes ten minutes to load, literally. It said it needed an upgrade. So I went and looked, and Realplayer has upgraded to this thing called Real One Gold, which, guess what, I *could not bloody well make take .avi*. On that one I couldn't even figure out why it wasn't working. Could somebody very kindly recommend either a way to make the built-in divx converter work or a (free) player that will actually run .avi on a Mac? Please? You will have my eternal gratitude. I will send you chocolate.

All I want to do is watch Angelic Layer. It should not take three days to figure out how to make this thing play Angelic Layer.

Frickin' brain-sucking aliens.

Comments

[batshua]

Is Ruth's laptop Classic Mac OS free? Does she have Mac OS 9.1 or somesuch on there anywhere? One might be able to run it under 9. I don't know, I don't generally use .avi's, but I'll see what I can dig up.

[wayman.livejournal.com]

Caveat: I'm running 10.1.5, so there's a chance this won't help you.

Try Playa, a free program which plays Quicktime, MPG, and AVI movies in Mac OS X. It doesn't claim to only run in certain versions, and it does play video and audio on sample AVI files for me.

I found it at the Native OS X Applications page, which is a great resource for finding freeware or payware downloadable software of all sorts for OS X.

[thespooniest.livejournal.com]

OK, I can explain this one. The problem comes from this: DivX files aren't actually .AVI format at all!

Yes, they're labelled as .AVI, but they're not. Trust me on this. QuickTime actually supports the .AVI format perfectly, but this "fake .AVI" format is still beyond it. The format is similar enough that it can get the video right, but not the sound. In fact, the only way the format works on Windows at all is because of a bug in Windows Media Player. Why the DivX team chose to do it this way is beyond me; they should have either chosen the real .AVI format (this would have meant doing their sound a different way, since this is where the problem lies) or another format entirely. But what's done is done, I suppose.

Because of this, most Mac programs need a program to help them out on this. What I'd recommend is going to http://www.3ivx.com. Get the 3ivx codec that they have there and install it. Then go to http://doctor.3ivx.com and get the "DivX Doctor II" program there. Run DivX Doctor II on your .AVI files; this will convert them into .MOV files which will work. You'll have to save the .MOV's to your hard drive; you can save a lot of space by not making them "self-contained", but if you do this, then you'll need to have the appropriate CD in the drive (the one with the corresponding .AVI) to play it.

[weirdquark]

this makes no sense to me because *I* have watched said Angelic Layer on my brainsucking alien using the Divx converter thingy. With the same OS too, I think. I forget what insignificant upgrade I have from OS10. brainsucking aliens are weird.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

This plays everything except .avi. Fortunately, the 'everything' includes the Streaming Media ruth gave up on months ago, so I'm leaving it on her computer.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

This works! Thanks, nii-chan.