Mat on Macs

One of the first problems I ran into was playing downloaded videos on BONAVENTURE. This is really annoying as Divx for Mac 6 (PPC) had just been released a few days before and I was justing getting used to using it to play divx and xvid content in the Quicktime Player. Fortunately, the Divx people are on the ball and have already released a Intel beta. I’ve downloaded it and it seems to be running quite well. It has played most of the files I’ve thrown at it so far, but still chokes on certain xvids. [update: There’s a divide by zero error caused, evidently, by malformed AVI headers. Supposedly it’s already fixed internally, so I assume they’ll kick it out with the next beta. For now, though, my only recourse has been MPlayerOSX (see below)]

Before the Divx release I was using the excellent open source video player VLC, but it just wasn’t cutting it through Rosetta. And from what I could tell from the forums it might be a while before the Intel native binary is released. A few sites list an Intel binary from last year, which I had to google to find, but even when I did I was unable to make it work properly (all the blacks appeared green). [update: Someone suggested to me in an email comment that I should try one of the nightly Intel builds found here. I just tried the Feb 21st nightly build and it’s finally working! Huzzah!]

After assiduous searching I found that an Intel binary of MPlayerOSX (download) had been released that would in fact play the xvid that was acting up. I never really liked MPlayerOSX (which come from the Linux world and looks it). I found the PPC version to be much less capable (and attractive) than VLC, but I’ll take what I can get as long as my content playing. So I would recommend first trying the Divx codec in Quicktime and if that doesn’t work try MPlayerOSX.

[update: sadly the story on Windows Media support isn’t as good. Ironically, Microsoft announced that it was stopping development of the unlamented Windows Media Player for the Mac and instead would be giving away flip4mac’s WMV codec for QT Player at MWSF, but unfortunately they’ve indicated that it’s not yet Intel compatible and there’s no ETA.]