Help with pictures

Hi Guys, I have a couple of questions if some one can help.
I have a couple of picture CD's that were made on a PC. When I put them in the mac it says “disk not readable”. Also if they send me a video clip by e-mail that was made on a PC it will not play on the Mac. What do I need to do?
I’ve Had the Mac since October and up until yesterday I never herd the fan run, well yesterday it started and it runs as long as the computer is on. Is this normal?
Thanks

I can't answer many of your questions, as I've only had my mac for less than a month.
As far as watching the videos. I downloaded a program called ffmpegx that converts most any common video format to any other common video format.
Sorry I can't be of any help on the other stuff.

Welcome to Mac-Forums to both of you.

I think the problem lies with the encoding. The videos might be a question of you not having proper codecs to watch them (try Flip4Mac and VLC, for starters).

As for the CDs, I'm not enough of an expert to know if it can be burned in a way it will only be read by a WinBox and cannot be read by a Mac.

I would stick the disk back into a PC and see if it can read them. Then convert them to JPG or similar and move them to a USB drive and try putting them onto the Mac that way.
As for the video clip, yep sounds like codecs. VLC is pretty good. Otherwise you could use something like Visual Hub to convert them to a format such as MP4 for use on the Mac.

For your video problems, download this plugin, it worked perfectly for me:

Flip4Mac

As for the CDs, try to read them using a PC like maddog said, it might be a problem with the persons formatting. Ask them how they are burning them to a CD also.

Thanks guys, the flip4mac works fine now I just need to get the pictures to work. I may take them to work and save them as a jpeg and try again.

Well I don't think the image file format is the problem. I think it has to do with the encoding of the CD burn or something. Macs can read pretty much any image file format, unless the image type is proprietary to an app that doesn't not run natively on the Mac like for example AutoCAD.