XviD Files Won’t Play On Mac

Ben Baker-Smith — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:28:46 +0000

I recently found myself in a troubling situation. A client had come in to do an edit with a harddrive full of XviD encoded AVI files. When I tried opening up the first of them on our Intel Power Mac I received a Quicktime error stating that I was missing a required codec (VLC also would not play the files). Quicktime linked me to the XviD download page, which was troubling as I knew XviD had been previously installed on that machine.

MediaInfo confirmed that the files were encoded with XviD, so I went ahead and re-installed the codec, making sure to get an Intel Mac compatible binary.

This did not fix the problem. Upon rebooting (probably not necessary anyway) I continued to receive the same error, and the same link to the XviD page.

Long story short, a quick install of Perian cleared up all my problems. I’m still not entirely sure what was at fault; maybe the DivX codec which I believe is a pre-requisite for XviD on Mac.

Anyway, I’ll wrap with a plug for Perian. It’s a great package of Quicktime components, and is super-easy to install. I use it on every Mac that I use regularly (somehow this one got overlooked, probably due to a recent reformatting).

Behind the Scenes » Codec

XviD Files Won’t Play On Mac