Wallpapers and movies from World of Warcraft?

As I have said before, I haven't spent much time with the so-called massively multiplayer role playing games, but I do have some pals who are into World of Warcraft and it looks fabulous. Way too dangerous if I want to have any sort of life too!

Fortunately, there are plenty of fans out there and it's remarkable how much you find if you simply go to Google and search for

    world of warcraft wallpaper download

Indeed, the very first match is from the Blizzard.com site itself (Blizzard is the creator of World of Warcraft): World of Warcraft Wallpaper.

There are a bunch of wallpapers there, free for the download, including this one that I particularly like:

Below the individual graphics you'll see links to different dimension images in different "bit depths": if you're running in more than 256 color mode, I'd suggest that you download the "24 bit" version. Click the link and it'll drop a "ZIP" file on your desktop, which you can unpack by double-clicking on it. This gives you a "BMP" (bitmapped) file that's really more suitable for the PC than a Mac, but we can deal with it anyway.

Now choose System Preferences... from the Apple menu on your Mac G5, then choose Desktop and Screen Saver, then click on "Choose Folder..." and pick the folder that contains the new image:

Just about done. Now just click on the new image you've downloaded and you're good to go!

If you want to cycle through a variety of World of Warcraft images, download 'em all, put them in their own folder, open that folder instead, and check the "change image every 30 minutes" option on the bottom of the System Preference window.

By the way, the earlier Google search produces lots of matches, not just Blizzard.com, so if you don't particularly like any of theirs, the net has many, many more options to choose from.

Now, about that DivX problem...

The other half of your question is why the DivX format videos on the WoW site won't play on your Mac, and the answer is that it's probably because you haven't installed the full DivX codec for Quicktime on your system. Last I checked, however, the DivX codec actually cost money, which is rather tedious if you're used to free software.

Check out the DivX Web site, and you'll see what I mean: the Mac DivX codecs cost $19.99. Not a ton of money, to be fair, but not free either.

The slick ffmpeg application has links to some codecs, including an open source codec for DivX called FFusion, but I haven't tried it and can't say whether it works well or not.

Failing that, I'm a big fan of VLC, a free video player that seems to handle just about anything I throw at it, so you might check that out as an option too.

Good luck to you, and good hunting too!