How to Play AVI on Mac OS X (Mountain Lion included)
Want to easily stream video from the collection in AVI on Mac or transfer to a portable Apple iOS device? The AVI format, short for Audio video interleave, was first developed by Microsoft in the early 1990s. The AVI file format is heavily used on PCs, but can't be used on a Mac computer. Even Apple's QuickTime media player, which can play many types of videos, but unfortunately the free version of QuickTime is not compatible with all types of AVI video files on Mac. If you want the freedom to play AVI files on Mac, you must enable the Mac's OS X operating system so it can recognize AVI video files.
To be able to watch AVI on Mac, here are some methods for your reference.
Method 1: Convert AVI format to QuickTime compatible formats
Converting AVI video files to Mac QuickTime file format makes AVI video files playable on all of the native Mac video programs. To play AVI for Mac, here we will use Video Converter for Mac, which helps you easily and quickly turn .AVI into QuickTime compatible formats like MOV, MP4 and M4V. After that, you can not only watch AVI on Mac smoothly, but also transfer the files to your iPhone, iPod or iPad for playback and so on.
Supported devices and OS:
Devices: iMac, Unibody Macbook, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and PC with Mac OS X
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X Tiger, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5.7, Mac OS X 10.5.8, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
Method 2: Utilize Perian –a QuickTime Component to handle AVI on Mac issue
Perian is a handy free program that allows your Mac to play almost any movie format including AVI files. Installing video file add-on software will let the Mac's QuickTime player play AVI movie files on Mac as easily as it does the native QuickTime video format. In fact it claims to play all the following movie formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW, MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture and DosBox Capture.
You can download it for free from perian.org.
Conclusion
While there are other apps or addons that will let you play AVI on Mac OSX, we had the best experience with two method mentioned above. If you're looking for what is probably the easiest way to stream AVI video on Mac, Video Converter for Mac or Perian is definitely the way to go.
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