just switched and encountered weird .avi file

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today i downloaded and ran a movie file that was about 100 mb the movie played but was only about a minute long. thoight that was weird for such a big file. extension was like .avi.0001. was it virus
 

cwa107


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To date, there are no viruses for Mac OS X. What was the content of the file?
 
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My guess is it was made with software that puts crap in the file that doesn't need to be there. AVI files are more compatible with Windows then Macs, and there could be Windows-targeted malware inside. DON'T pass the file on to a windows machine.
 
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My guess is it was made with software that puts crap in the file that doesn't need to be there. AVI files are more compatible with Windows then Macs, and there could be Windows-targeted malware inside. DON'T pass the file on to a windows machine.

I deleted the file. Do you think it installed any permently residing malware or files that will take up space on my computer or mess w/ it? Also there are no viruses for OSX does that include malware and spyware?

Thanks.
 
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Was the movie complete? There's a particular method of multi-file archiving that is popular on binary newsgroups and less reputable places that will RAR the file (RAR is a compression type like ZIP popular in Windows) and the extensions will be .001, .002, .003, etc. If you had a chunk of the movie but not the entire thing, it might play (I think VLC can play incomplete AVI files) but it won't be a reliable full video in itself.
 

dtravis7


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I deleted the file. Do you think it installed any permently residing malware or files that will take up space on my computer or mess w/ it? Also there are no viruses for OSX does that include malware and spyware?

Thanks.

There are no actual Virus's for OSX and no Spyware. There is a Trojan that comes as a Video Codec that you would have to install and give your admin password to allow it to install. Another Similar Trojan only comes with Pirated copies of IWork and iLife software. If you did not install a Codec from a movie site nor pirate any Apple Software, you are probably very safe.
 
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Was the movie complete? There's a particular method of multi-file archiving that is popular on binary newsgroups and less reputable places that will RAR the file (RAR is a compression type like ZIP popular in Windows) and the extensions will be .001, .002, .003, etc. If you had a chunk of the movie but not the entire thing, it might play (I think VLC can play incomplete AVI files) but it won't be a reliable full video in itself.

no the movie wasn't complete. It was only like a min of it. Yeah, the extension was .avi.001 or 0001 something like that. It was zipped not RAR and when I unzipped there was only the one file. But the download was like 100 MB so there had to be something else in there...

Thanks
 
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There are no actual Virus's for OSX and no Spyware. There is a Trojan that comes as a Video Codec that you would have to install and give your admin password to allow it to install. Another Similar Trojan only comes with Pirated copies of IWork and iLife software. If you did not install a Codec from a movie site nor pirate any Apple Software, you are probably very safe.

could anything have automatically installed from the opening of the .avi file and not asked for a password if I was on the admin acct?
 

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could anything have automatically installed from the opening of the .avi file and not asked for a password if I was on the admin acct?

Again - No.

Nothing that will run in OS X.

See dtravis's answer above.
 
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no the movie wasn't complete. It was only like a min of it. Yeah, the extension was .avi.001 or 0001 something like that. It was zipped not RAR and when I unzipped there was only the one file. But the download was like 100 MB so there had to be something else in there...
Not really. The extra length of the file could have been a part of the video that you can't play, because you don't have enough of the rest of the file to play it. It's not like a 1:1 thing where if you download 100MB of the file, you can play 100MB of content. Some of the content may be unplayable due to missing data further along that it needs. AVI files are weird when they aren't complete.
 
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You need to concatenate the files, all of them, together. There will be multiple parts, named .avi.001, .avi.002, etc. The number of parts will vary depending on how many parts the uploader split it into.

There is a mac program called "splitandconcat" (I think it is free) that works great with these files.
 

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