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Play back certain .avi movies on Intel Macs System
Tiger only hintMy Samsung Digimax A7 digital camera is capable of shooting video footage. The file format is .avi, but I found that my Titanium PowerBook was incapable of playing the video. It is my understanding that QuickTime supports the AVI format, but not all of the codecs associated with it.

When I arrived back home from my vacation, I tried the video on my desktop G4, but still no luck. Then I tried them on my new iMac (Intel). QuickTime was able to view the movies with no problem whatsoever!

[robg adds: This seemed odd to me, so I had veggiedude send me a short demo clip. Sure enough, the clip would not only crash QuickTime Player (7.1) on my G5, it also sent CPU usage to 100% in the Finder when I simply selected the clip. When I moved the file to the Intel mini, it played back perfectly, in both the Finder and QuickTime. In QuickTime, the movie's format is listed as Apple OpenDML JPEG.

I then looked at the /System -> Library -> QuickTime folder on both machines, and found only two differences: ApplePixletVideo is version 1.2.9 on the mini vs. 1.2.5 on the, and QuickTimeUSBVDCDigitizer is version 1.3.6 vs. 1.2. I tried copying these two pieces back to the G5, but it didn't help, so I don't really know why this video works on Intel yet fails on PowerPC.]
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Play back certain .avi movies on Intel Macs
Authored by: TomAlperin on May 12, '06 08:29:29AM

Did you check the power PC machines audio set-up in Audio Midi Setup to make sure that it was set to 44.1 KHz? I seem to remember reading that if this was not set this way some format Quicktime movies, specifically some formats of .avi would not play properly.



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Play back certain .avi movies on Intel Macs
Authored by: codingismy11to7 on May 12, '06 09:52:32AM

My Canon Powershot SD200 records video in an AVI container with MJPEG video and....I can't remember the audio at the moment...I believe it's 8khz mono PCM. These videos crash quicktime or any programs that use quicktime as soon as they're opened on my macbook pro. I haven't tried since installing 7.1 last night. It's really annoying to have to remote desktop to my windows box to reencode these things - I had hoped to get away from that annoyance.



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Play back certain .avi movies on Intel Macs
Authored by: goober123 on May 12, '06 09:57:30AM

This is pure speculation on my part. But perhaps the video might be encoded in one of the older Intel Indeo Video codecs. These were supported by extensions on Mac OS 9 and below but were never supported on any flavor of Mac OS X and are unplayable on a Mac in either Quicktime, VLC Player, or Mplayer.

Perhaps support for these old codecs was tossed in with the Intel processor switch since the codecs would presumably be supported natively on the processor.

Again, pure speculation....but who knows?



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Play back certain .avi movies on Intel Macs
Authored by: visionaut on May 12, '06 01:21:24PM

Also pure speculation, but another idea I came up with is that maybe the codec IS supported in Quicktime, but there's a complicated (endian-related?) conversion calc required on the PPC side that caused QuickTime to seem to 'hang'? Or that the routine used in the codec is somehow native to the Intel Processor and not to the PPC?

The idea it may be Intel-codec related seems like a better possible answer - but this is obviously curious... I wonder what's going on?



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Play back certain .avi movies on Intel Macs
Authored by: teledeus on May 13, '06 09:12:19AM
My understanding is that to play back most AVI movies in Quicktime Player you would need the Divx or 3ivx codec installed on your machine. Some programs, like Toast, come with the Divx codec. However, you can also find them online. Try installing these codecs on your PowerPC machines first.
The whole endian theory discussed above seems unlikely to me. Try using VLC Player or Mplayer. I bet they play the file.
Also, replacing a system file from a PowerPC Mac with one from an Intel Mac seems like a sure way to screw things up. Use Software Update if you need the latest version of things.

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Play back certain .avi movies on Intel Macs
Authored by: teledeus on May 13, '06 09:14:57AM
My understanding is that to play back most AVI movies in Quicktime Player you would need the Divx or 3ivx codec installed on your machine. Some programs, like Toast, come with the Divx codec. However, you can also find them online. Try installing these codecs on your PowerPC machines first.
The whole endian theory discussed above seems unlikely to me. Try using VLC Player or Mplayer. I bet they play the file.
Also, replacing a system file from a PowerPC Mac with one from an Intel Mac seems like a sure way to screw things up. Use Software Update if you need the latest version of things.

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Play back certain .avi movies on Intel Macs
Authored by: BradMacPro on May 14, '06 07:54:06PM

Latest vlc 0.8.5 is now avilable in a intel only version and it plays most .avi file very well. at least the PPC version for my dual 2GHz PM G5.



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Problem solved
Authored by: tonyinsf on Aug 27, '06 09:06:17PM

I have discovered that by removing "DivX 6 Decoder.component" the video now plays fine on my PowerBook G4. Somehow, it seems to corrupt QT when trying to playback certain kinds of AVI video.



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"Maybe happiness is a fragment of existence, but with better packaging"



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