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elvirav said:
Too silly! And what a waste of time! An MPEG file not playing? That's one of the most basic file formats. Most computers will play that.

As far as Macs not playing videos—I am starting out making videos, and I'm finding that it's so often the Windows users who are bleating about how they "can't play this." It's because they think everything should open automatically in Windows Media Player, and when it doesn't, they're lost. (Oh my, I witnessed such difficulties experienced by Windows users who were trying to play video from DivX.com . . .. don't get me started. Poor souls!)

In my experience most of the troubles with not being able to play video files is either ignorance or lack of initiative on the part of the user. (They won't download and install the proper codecs, or can't seem to figure out how to do it.) Sure, once in a while some video file won't play correctly no matter what efforts are made. But most of the time its user error/ignorance.

But never mind that. I know this thread was basically a waste of time.

I downloaded and installed everything I could, and people on this post said that the file can be played on quicktime without any additions, it didn't play on mine
 
VanNess said:
In case it isn't entirely clear from this thread, you can play wmv3 (aka Windows Media 9) on your Mac.

For both Intel and PPC-based Macs there is the current universal version of Flip4Mac, which will enables you to play wmv3 (and a host of other wmv formats) with Quicktime.

For PPC-based Macs there is Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 for the Mac, which also plays wmv3. There are reports that it also works just fine in Rosetta for Intel Mac users. Microsoft has discontinued further development of the Mac client, however it is still available for download at Microsoft's site. My guess is that it will be until Flip4Mac irons out all of the bugs, particularly with website compatibility.

VLC presently can handle some wmv formats, but not wmv3. As has been posted, wmv3 compatibility is currently under development and is expected to be included with the next public release of VLC. Since VLC is presently universal, that means Intel users will have 2 choices shortly for playing wmv3-based clips natively and 1 choice under Rosetta. PPC users get to kiss their G3's 4's and 5's because they will have native versions for all three Windows media choices.

None of the above includes support for any protected, DRM'd, Windows-Media-Anything. Microsoft, in it's infinite lack of wisdom, has so far not seen fit to offer compatibility for that on anything but Windows.

sorrry, but I can't agree with that, that file I played in windows, but it didn't work in my macbook
 
Please address your issues in one post instead of three consecutive ones.

pahanorlando said:
you didn't told me to download any software, which software?

What you referred to as "FlipFlop" - hence that portion of your post being quoted in mine.

I now regret I even bothered registering at that YouSendIt site just to test this MPG file to verify that it works (which it does on all of my machines). And that before we got to any further step (such as disk repair, archive-restore, etc...) this person returned it and posted about how Macs are bad because there is no software (???) and that Macs are now stupid because of poor support from Microsoft (oh god what would we ever do without Microsoft?!!?!?) and so this is now officially a time-waster.

In fact, nobody even asked if he actually installed Flip4Mac, as opposed to simply downloading it to the desktop. But it doesn't matter anyway, because this is a normal MPEG2 file that QuickTime should open without Flip4Mac.

Sigh...

As a side note, this 3 minute and 20 second video is over 60 MB how ridiculous is that.
 
pahanorlando said:
you didn't told me to download any software, which software?

VLC for one, it also allows movies to be played at up to 400% of normal volume which should be plenty loud enough.

Also VLC plays everything (highly recommended even on a PC)

Also if you do some searching (*cough* versiontracker.com, macupdate.com *cough*) you would find that there is plenty of free software for the Mac.
 
VanNess said:
Because it blows, and you don't need it. Just use Flip4Mac.

Also, if the clip is MPEG-2, QuickTime won't be able to play it unless you have the MPEG-2 playback component, which is only available in Pro, I believe, or with Final Cut Studio apps.
 
Eraserhead said:
VLC for one, it also allows movies to be played at up to 400% of normal volume which should be plenty loud enough.

Also VLC plays everything (highly recommended even on a PC)

Also if you do some searching (*cough* versiontracker.com, macupdate.com *cough*) you would find that there is plenty of free software for the Mac.

i had vlc and it didn't work there, and when I went to change it, the people was really mean to me and they was like "its not slow, if you don't like it just return it bla bla bla"
and I wasn't really need to fix the problem because I brought it like 4 days ago, the best was to change it but they didn't want to change it, they really wanted me to return it
 
killmoms said:
Because it blows, and you don't need it. Just use Flip4Mac.

Even the folks at Flip4Mac advise keeping WMV Player for the Mac around in case you need it. Flip4Mac's web browser plugin is an admitted work in progress, and although it continues to make headway with each new release, it's still far from 100% compatible with sites that embed WMV content. Microsoft's plugin for WMP 9 for the Mac, on the other hand, doesn't suffer from that issue. That's one of the reasons why Flip4Mac's preference pane allows you to swap plugins more or less on the fly, just in case you run into a site that Flip4Mac can't handle

Flip4Mac looks to be a fine successor to MS's player, but it just aint there yet. Between the rendering bugs that are still present in it's Quicktime codec, and the various compatibility issues with websites, it's just a good idea to have WMP 9 for the Mac around. That way you won't get shut out of the picture while Flip4Mac is busy sweating the details on it's product.

And it doesn't seem to "blow" on my system. It's certainly not the most full-featured media player around, but it works as advertised. It plays WMV-based stuff (except protected) and it's free. I'm just not feeling the pain on this one.
 
pahanorlando said:
i had vlc and it didn't work there, and when I went to change it, the people was really mean to me and they was like "its not slow, if you don't like it just return it bla bla bla"
and I wasn't really need to fix the problem because I brought it like 4 days ago, the best was to change it but they didn't want to change it, they really wanted me to return it
I think in my previous post, i said that VLC 0.8.5 doesn't support WMV v3, you need to download their recent nightly version which has WMV v3 support. please try it.
 
Good grief. The file will play in VLC. It's a mainstream file type, not something obscure. It plays on Quicktime for me as well, since I've got the MPEG-2 component.
 
So could it be that all of those who reported success had the MPEG-2 plugin for QT, and the OP didn't?

Note too that Windows doesn't ship with an MPEG-2 codec at all. You can't even watch a DVD out of the box unless your OEM packaged an MPEG-2 codec.

B
 
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