rushthatspeaks | Technical Advice Requested

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.