Video/Audio Format Playback on Mac OS X Questions

[WILL]

Hey guys I thought maybe you Mac users out there might be able to answer this one and make my life easier or at least my Downloads folder less messy in the short term.

I usually play a lot of DivX, Xvid via mkv and avi and even often with AC3 encoded audio. What is the easiest and simplistic way (read no or next to no compiling of 3rd party junk) that I can get these playing nicely via QuickTime or at least with DivX Player?

I'd opt to use WinAmp if it had a Mac OS X version, but alas it doesn't. I've looked into the AC3 filter Solutions?

On a side note I've already paid for that silly Flip4Mac so that I can playback AVI and WMV formats and there is those stupid paid for MPEG-2 codecs that you can buy too, I'm not looking into buying any more unless it's absolutely nessissary since I don't really agree with this policy of Apple's which force Mac users to pay for other media encoding than what the very limited Quick Time Player uses (MPEG-4 + AAC)

[Stoney]

If you absolutely want to play video/audio with the Quicktime Player install Perian (http://perian.org/).
If you can settle for a more light-weight application take VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/). :)

[paul_nicholls]

If you absolutely want to play video/audio with the Quicktime Player install Perian (http://perian.org/).
If you can settle for a more light-weight application take VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/). :)


VLC player rocks!! It plays heaps of codecs out of the box :)

cheers,
Paul

[WILL]

If you all want to laugh, I actually got the last episode of Lost(mkv; DivX video, AC3 audio) to play in Vuze for Mac. Seems I had 3 players to choose from. VLC is pretty decent, I've used it before on Win32. If I encounter any more trouble with audio/video playback I'll give it a try.

I'll have to see how things go for iMovie however, to edit anything (WMV, AVI, Mpeg-2) I have to convert all the video to the specific Mpeg-4 format that Apple uses as standard. Kind of crumby that they do that. Microsoft at least includes free support for other video codecs. Why the DivX codecs don't include the same mkv + AC3 decoding that they do on the Win32 platform blows me away too.