QuickTime does not include native DivX support, even though QuickTime 6 and later support the ISO Standard MPEG-4 media compression format and DivX is based on the MPEG-4 standard. To further confuse the issue, many DivX®-encoded files carry the. In particular, the Indeo ® CODEC, popular for video compression on PCs, has not been ported to Mac OS X. However, most, if not all AVI playback issues arise with movies that have been compressed using CODECs (Compressor - Decompressor) that are unavailable for QuickTime in Mac OS X. AVI was originally called Video for Windows ® (VFW) and QuickTime supports the VFW format. AVI is a media container very similar to QuickTime, but with a unique data format.
There has been confusion over AVI files since QuickTime ® added support for such. This chapter from our book Troubleshooting Mac® OS X discusses why some Audio Video Interleaved (AVI) multimedia files do not play in QuickTime and provides methods for playing AVIs on Mac OS X.
