How do I play Xvid video on a Mac when Quicktime fails?

Welcome to the complex and confusing world of video and audio codecs. A codec is a protocol whereby the media is encoded and (often) compressed, and there are a ton of them. Problem is, if the video is encoded using a codec that you don't have, video players can be completely baffled and basically see a file that has a name that makes sense (like .avi or .mov) but is completely random garbage, for all intents and purposes.

There are some standard codecs that programs like iMovie and iDVD use to encapsulate video content, but sometimes you'll find that a filmmaker - or someone encoding or "ripping" video material - uses a non-standard codec because it'll do a better job of compressing, leave less artifacting (boxy visual noise you'll see in scenes with lots of action and movement) or offer some security features that aren't normally part of a video file. Worse, the audio can be separately encoded using one of a ton of audio codecs too, so you can also end up with a file where you can see the video but can't hear anything because the video player just can't figure that part out.

Ugh.

Fortunately, whether you're on a Mac OS X system or a Windows system, there's an open source third-party video player that includes a ton of codecs and typically can play files that Quicktime Player can't handle. It's called VLC and I encourage you to grab a copy for yourself at http://www.videolan.org/.

To experiment, I recently got a video file that's encoded in the DivX format. How do I know? I'll show you that too, have patience!

First off, when I try to play the video file with Apple's Quicktime Player, here's what I see:

That's ugly, there's no way around it. Instead, I open the same file in VLC and here's what I see:

Yay! VLC works just fine with the video.

Let's see how it's encoded, just to expand our video horizons. To do so, choose Window --> Media Information...:

When you select that and click on the "Codec Details" tab, here's what we see:

As you can see, the audio is in MPGA format (which is actually an MPEG-1 Layer3 Audio Stream), and the video is in XVID format. You can also dig into the video file and find out the format even if it can't actually play the video. Why? Because you might need the XVID codec, for example, which you can find here: download XVID codec for your Mac.

There's no easy way around it, video can be a pain in the booty for computers. VLC makes it easier, but if you do need to get a new codec to get video (or audio) to work, don't forget that you can use Google. Try a search for "download mac XVID codec", for example.

Good luck and enjoy your friend's movie. While we're talking about movies, btw, don't miss that I also have a popular film blog called Dave On Film. :-)