help with video on mac

[AshleyA]

I have a PC that I have video on and I transfered my video to an external hard drive so I could then put it on my mac. and for some reason I can not play these videos on my mac. Is there something i have to do when transfering files from a pc to a mac. It looks like the file type changed as well but I didn't change it knowingly.

[Nethfel]

Well, the first thing that would be helpful to know is what are the video files on the PC? Are they AVI's or are the WMVs or are they something else?

Chances are, unless they have DRM attached to them - you can play them if you install one (or both) of these packages (these two packages will give you the most flexibility overall):

Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components
and
Windows Media® Components for QuickTime

The first one will open up support for a lot of containers, like AVI, MKV, etc. The second one is specifically for WMVs.

I'm not sure how much perian integerates with QuicktimeX (assuming you have snow leopard installed) so you may need to install quicktime 7 from your OS install DVD - once again, assuming you're using Snow Leopard.

[Mattlike]

I also recommend downloading/installing VLC player just in case.

[oposky2006]

yeah, lots of video files cant be played on Mac. only few video formats such as mov, mp4, etc can be accepted by Mac. You must put the unsupported video files to your Mac. U can convert them to a compatible format, or use VLC or Gom player to help u.

[Nethfel]

Actually, with perian installed, you can play most containers, and with flip4mac, you can play WMVs - and between using that for quicktime playback of various containers and VLC player, you can play most, if not all popular/major containers and codecs.