Do DivX / Xvid movies work on Macs?

[Hobart Paving]

Do DivX / Xvid movies work on Macs?

[Jonny M]

Yes

[Hobart Paving]

Seriously? There's Xvid codecs for Macs?

(Am considering buying a imac laptop but need to be 100% sure that it plays all the usual p2p encoded movie files).

[headbrace]

Yep, you can get the codecs and use something like VLC to play them all. Obviously they are legitimate videos that are not copyrighted if you get them via p2p

[Hobart Paving]

Ta.

[directhex]

peronsally i found xvid playback completely unuseable on mac, where an equivalent speed pentium (~500Mhz p3 vs g3) was fine

[bsodmike]

How did you manage that Hex? VLC has never given me any trouble...

Plays everything from Divx, Xvid, mkv and other formats... The only format that CAN NOT be played on the mac is WMV3, Windows Media Player for Mac doesn't play it either...but I manage to avoid those files.

[directhex]

tried both VLC and MPlayerOSX, on some high bitrate xvids i made from the Look Around You DVD. barely managed slideshow status.

and, equally irritating, sound didn't work in either player when i tried on a g5 powermac.

[bsodmike]

With the G5 there is one little niggle with certain audio files in VLC.

You need to go to Prefs > Adv and under 'Core Audio' make the '0' a '1' and everything works perfectly.

Don't ask me why it's 0 as default tho

[directhex]

JustWorks(tm) on Linux

[bsodmike]

Linux doesn't use CoreAudio does it?

Come on hex, you should know better than to pull out the 'JustWorks' card - If you want to do a OS X vs. Linux JustWorks comparison, OS X would win

Actually the reason for this CoreAudio issue with G5s is the fault of the VLC developers. Check their forums, that's how I found out about it...

[kenazo]

Yup, VLC works a charm. It's been able to handle everything I've ever thrown at it. I do admit on some of the high bitrate movies you'll need a good processor to keep smooth playback though. On my old iBook 600 there were some xvid that it would choke on.

[BroadbandPlacey]

VLC here too, works like a charm with everything

[bsodmike]

Yup, you do need a fairly decent processor but my first powerbook a 1Ghz G4 handled pretty much everything I threw at it quite well, and the G5 here just blazes through them.