Great article. I’m an advanced user and been using macs since 1984, but this was a cool new thing to learn. So, I can trash my Windows Media Player now???

@Nik, thanks for the comment, and yes, for those others reading, if you do in fact have a very old version of Windows Media player, feel free to put it in the trash and never look back.

Another piece of software that is great on the Mac is VLC. This software will play pretty much any video format you run into.

Great article. (And great new site, by the looks of it!). I’ve been well aware of Flip4Mac, for quite a while, but I’ve honestly never heard of Perian, before. I’ll definitely give that a shot, and hopefully won’t have to deal with those darn ‘You’re missing a codec. Go to this Apple web page and try to guess which one that’s advertised, that you really need.’ message, any more.

To be able to play a number of videos, I’ve tried the much-heralded VLC and MPlayer, and while they’ll often play video that Quicktime won’t, I’ve never found either one to be very stable. They just act weird, for me, a lot of times.

I’ve heard a lot about Perian, but never tried it. I use QuickTime with MPEG-2 Playback plug-in, Flip4Mac WMV plug-in, and VLC for AVI playback. I also keep RealPlayer for the occasional file that requires it. For FLV there’s a little free app called flvThing that works well. If Perian can help consolidate some of these, then I will definitely be interested.

I second VLC. It also is less processor intensive than Apple’s own quicktime player – the fans on my MacBook make me well aware of this

How do you interact with front row? I mean, could I see an avi film in front row with those components?

TIA

Regards,
silta

@silta:
Yup. Front Row uses QuickTime components, which is what Flip4Mac and Perian are. Despite how many formats VLC plays, this is something most people overlook: It won’t help with Front Row.

@silta

Yes, Fron Row, uses Quicktime for all playback, since these two components just make QuickTime play more, this means Front Row can also play more.

Does any app play .rmi audio files?

@Deborah, .rmi files are just midi data, which quicktime has been able to play for a long time. It is only a data instruction set, there is no read audio data in the file. I do not have a .rmi file to test with, but i have played midi files before, this should be no different.

@Scott, Quicktime won’t play these files. The error I get is “The movie could not be opened. The file is not a movie file.” Windows Media Player gives the error “Cannot play back the file. The file format is invalid.” You said, “It is only a data instruction set, there is no read audio data in the file.” What does that mean? Where is the audio data? Maybe that is why they can’t play.

@Deborah, I do not have access to a .rmp file. .rmi is just like a midi file, neither are technically data. Both are instructions that tell your computer how to play sounds. Think of it like a keyboard. You press a key, and a sound is made, you can tell a keyboard to play that keypress in any number of other sounds. So, a midi/rmi file is just a recording of those sequences.

Quicktime 7 lists midi as a supported format:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/player/specs.html

If you can not play rmi/midi files, they may be created in a non standard way.

Where are you getting the .rmi files, there seems to be very little data on them, the only way I even know about them is as a result of an older phone using that format for ringtones.

There are a number of midi converters and players here:
http://www.macupdate.com/search.php?arch=all&keywords=midi&os=macosx

Perhaps give some of those a try. The last time I had to play with these was years ago trying to get a ringtone to work on my phone. Sorry I was not of more help.

@Scott, Thank you for your help and all the information. I’ll try the midi converters and players as you suggest.

Yup, perian is the swiss army knife of video codecs.

“WMV Components for QuickTime will help you play some of the proprietary video formats that Microsoft has floating around out there.”

Right, like QuickTime and other Apple formats aren’t proprietary?

@frogola

“WMV Components for QuickTime will help you play some of the proprietary video formats that Microsoft has floating around out there.”

Right, like QuickTime and other Apple formats aren’t proprietary?

The point of the post was to allow users to be able to play as many video formats as possible. For many people, the web is largely a place for entertainment. There are many video formats out there, and we wanted to help people be able to see and hear all of the web. I think the tutorial accomplishes that.

So far you have made three comments that are more or less complaining. I am doing my best to find spare time to take away from work to write tutorials to help people. If I make a statement that is not correct, by all means, I would love to correct that mistake.

I do not feel my sentence you quoted above in any way was making a comparison. It is a simple factual statement, installing WMV Components for Quicktime will in fact allow you to play proprietary formats. I am not quite sure what the point would have been to state that other vendors also make proprietary formats.

That being said, lets talk about Apple’s media formats.
Starting with AAC, which they use in the iTunes store. Yes, they use FairPlay DRM, which is proprietary. This is for protected songs. This was also clearly pushed by the record industry. Apple has made it clear that they want open formats and no DRM.

AAC is a standard, was not written by Apple, and is not proprietary. From Sony, to Nintendo, to Microsoft, it is supported across the board. It is further declared an international standard by the MPEG working group. It dates back to the early 90’s as far as I remember.

A few years back, Apple made a big push to start using H.264 for video. This is also a non proprietary format. Just because quicktime plays it, does not mean it is quicktime specific, or that other players and other OS’s can not play it. H.264 is also no more than a variant of MPEG, this one being part 10.

H.264 was not written by apple, but by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group along with the MPEG group.

I would go as far as to say, that for media formats, Apple is the least proprietary. Flash is Adobe’s baby, Microsoft makes a number of formats that only they know how to decode. Quicktime is a player, just because a media file has a quicktime icon on it, does not imply in any way it is some Apple proprietary format. It just means Quicktime may be able to play the file.

Anything based on MPEG, is about as standard and no proprietary a format you are going to get. It would not be in Apple’s interest to use proprietary formats. With a smaller market share, Apple needs to be sure video and audio created on the Mac can play on as many players as possible.

@scott,

Thanks for the lengthy reply. Sorry you don’t like my negative posts. If I don’t like something I am prone to complain. Don’t take it personally, these are just my feelings about Apple and Mac to date and you provide a forum. I will stop posting negative comments since you don’t like it. Good luck with the site (seriously).

@forgola, please, indeed, do continue to post. If my reply was taken harshly, it is just that written word does not always come across with emotion, and I try not to litter posts with too many smiley faces

I want all comments from all people, good or bad, it is just nicer if they are constructed in a way that can inspire an elaboration as a reply to a question. This way, new data can help others. I make a strong effort to never bash on the PC, but just point out what I like or do not like.

If you listen to the radio interview, you can hear that they were rather anti-PC, and I more or less kept my mouth shut, as that is not at all where I want to go with this site.

Both Caroline and I want the site to be a safe and friendly place for all users. There is a lot of trepidation with new Mac users getting on forums and people being harsh towards them.

We want a site where users are never afraid to ask a question, and certainly never afraid to challenge things myself or another writer posts. Literally, this is priority number one for us, to make certain no one ever feels afraid to want to learn.

Knowing that, your post just struck a chord with me, as I was not at all trying to imply negatively towards Microsoft, or Windows at all, but just pointing out, that in order to play those formats, you would be helped with those two pieces of software.

I do hope to see you posting here again, and feel free to call me out of something that is wrong, but just remember, the other users here are generally very new to all this, and I never want the tone of the site to be one that intimidates.

Thanks again for reading.

Before installing either Perian and/or Flip4Mac, will one of these enable me to watch the videos off the BBC website (see http://news.bbc.co.uk and choose one of the ‘watch’ items)?

Thanks in advance (great tutorial by the way – exactly what I need!)

@Vince, I am able to get them to playback, I selected high quality windows media player, and after a time, they loaded and played. I seemed to have better results with the “open in standalone player”.

At any rate, installing the two above mentioned tools will not hurt anything, as is a good idea.

This is a great post you have… it really did help me get my research done… Thanks for this…

hey just discovered this site a today cos i was snooping around figuring out how best to use my new macbookpro. this post was really helpful!

just one qn! after downloading the flip4mac wmv player, is it ok for me to just delete the flip4mac WMV.mpkg file ? i’ve already moved the wmv player icon to my application folder.

thanks!

@sharon. You can actually delete all the flip4mac files, if you so desire. All you were really after was the components it installs. Those will be installed in an area that you would not easily locate. This allows QuickTime to play many more video files.

If you want, you can in fact keep the icon, though in most cases, just using QuickTime to play the files will be fine. I personally just toss the entire flip4mac folder in the trash.

@Vince, @Scott: On the Mac platform, RealPlayer is much better for BBC video playback, and indeed they discourage WMV use.

Just wanted to say that I’m impressed with how clearly you explain stuff. Thanks.

will these downloads of Perian and/or Flip4Mac work with Snow Leopard?

@JWS, According to Some google searched on Perian, you will have to read the F4M forums to confirm. As far as I know, most should work, but they may run in 32 bit mode instead of 64.

@Hexley, thanks for your quick reply and data. After reading your reply I downloaded F4M and it said it needed to be run in 32 bit mode and that they were working on a Snow Leopard version so I decided to wait and did not install it. I switched and bought my white macbook in Nov07 so I’m still leery about program issues from dealing with Windows for so long. I finally wised up and switched.

@JWS, that warning you are seeing only means the F4M preference pane has to temporarily load in 32 bit mode. A lot of people need to ask themselves exactly why they need to be in 64 bit mode. It is not a matter of things being 2x as fast, and in all reality, there are plenty of cases where 32 bit mode may outperform 64 bit mode.

It is not a holy grail, but it was marketed as a good thing. I am not saying it is a bad thing, but I am saying there is nothing wrong with 32 bit mode, especially if it is just the time you are working in System Preferences. Apple should not have put that alert up, it confuses people, but I thin it was a push to get developers to move to 64.

64 bit gives you one main thing, above all, the ability to address more memory in your applications. The one app that it matters in, Photoshop, is 32 bit, and will be for 2 more years or so.

iTunes is 32 bit, iPhoto is 32 I believe, none of the iLife apps are yet 64 bits, mostly just the Finder was made 64, and that makes sense. I would not be surprised if we never see iTunes 64 bit, or not for a long time. I do not think it matters in the slightest.

Safari is 64 bit, Apple Mail is. Safari will benefit from it, but a lot of time was put into it to make that happen, and the web is so driven by Javascript these days, to get that runtime into 64 bot mode makes sense.

The Apps that most need 64 bit are pro apps, Photoshop, Logic, Aperture, all of Office, Entourage, etc. I bet not a single printer driver out there is 64 bits.

Back to your original issue, are the underlying libraries that F4M installs for QuickTime 64 bit? That I am not sure, but it will not hurt nor degrade them in any way to run them in 32 bit mode.

Apple may make a cut off, and say 64-bit only at some point in the future, if they do, it will be year out, 5 years out, but as to the state of current developer tools from Apple, 32 bit is still very much alive and ticking. The large majority of Apples own apps are 32 bit.

You want compatibility, so does it work, caring about the bitness of an app is not something a consumer needs to do. If you were a server admin, this matters, and havign a 64 bit webserver over a 32 bit one is great, you can use a ton more memory. But 64 bit versions of those apps have been around for ages, and running on the Mac in 64 bit mode long before Snow as well.

There is a lot of confusion on this issue, in the end, if you do not need more than 4GB or memory out of an app you are using you will not see a gain from going to 64 bit, it may even be slower at this point in time.

Thanks for the information. You are right. The warning is what made me hesitant to give it a try. The warning should have been labeled an instruction note with an explanation that you have given, such as ‘this program needs to run in 32 bit mode’.

@JWS, glad you understand. I do want to clarify, it is not even that severe, in that the warning of ‘this program needs to run in 32 bit mode’ may be too severe, which is why I was in favor of not even having the message. Apple can log it to syslog or some other place the user does not see it.

The warning, if there had to be one, would be more along the lines of this verbose mess: “this preference pane needs to load in 32 bit mode, preference panes generally only are an interface to control some other application elsewhere on your system, we have no idea if that other application is running in 32 or 64 bits.”

This of preference panes, in this case, like an alias almost, which is a gross way to describe it, but works well enough for this.

Imagine if you had an alias to another remote server in your dock, to mount a remote volume, and it said “you are about to connect to a Mac Mini, running OS X 10.5, you are running 10.6″, that is sort of about how important this message is.

Thanks for the help and your great and informative website
for us MacHuman’s. Take a bow.

Great article. I have just downloaded perian AND flip4mac, but still get the dreaded The file is not a movie fole notice.. GRRRRR

@John, can you tell me a little more about the movie, where did you get it, is there a url you can share with us?