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How to Play AVI files with QuickTime on Mac

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Most of the time, you may be disappointed to find out that QuickTime, Apple's main video player, doesn't play AVI files natively. In this article, we will briefly illustrate the causes and then give some methods to help you solve the problem.

As you know AVI is a container format, not a specific type of file. When QuickTime opens an .AVI file, it checks to see which codecs were used to encode the audio and video tracks within it. For example, an .AVI file may contain a video track encoded in the Cinepak codec and an audio track encoded with the ALaw 2:1 codec. If both the audio and the video were compressed using a codec that QuickTime can use, the file will play normally. If the audio or video or both were created using codecs that QuickTime cannot use, you may see a message like the following:

"QuickTime is missing the software needed to perform this operation. Unfortunately, it is not available on the QuickTime server"

A quick and effective solution to playing AVI video clips on QuickTime player is to change AVI to QuickTime highly compatible video formats like MOV, MP4, M4V, etc. So, you can open and view AVI on Mac OS X easily. Plus, it's also available for you to transfer and share the AVI files with other Apple devices.

That's where Brorsoft Video Converter for Mac comes in: It supports converting all AVI files to QuickTime natively supported media format on Mac OS X (macOS Sierra, El Capitan included) with fast encoding speed and without quality loss. Besides AVI, it can also transcode more video file formats like H.265, MTS, WMV, MXF, MKV, VOB, MPG, FLV, XAVC, etc to QuickTime playable video. If you are facing AVI to QuickTime playback issue on Windows, turn to Brorsoft video Converter. Let's start the conversion.

First download AVI to QuickTime Converter:

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Tutorial: how to convert AVI videos to QuickTime for smooth playback

Step 1: Load source AVI videos

Launch the Video Converter for Mac, and you may either click "Add" button to import .avi files, or directly drag and drop the files into this program. If you'd like to combine multiple AVI files to be a single file, you can tick the checkbox "Merge into one file".

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Step 2: Select output format

This AVI to QuickTime Converter offers the QuickTime Movie Format for you. Or, you can also choose "Common Video -> MOV - QuickTime (*.mov)" as the target format.

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Step 3: Adjust audio and video parameters

To make good control of the output file size and quality, you can adjust all the items in the following interface, including codec, bit rate, frame rate, sample rate, and audio channels. To bear least quality loss, you may set A/V parameters according to the source AVI files.

Step 4: Start transcoding AVI to QuickTime MOV

Finally, press the convert button; it will start to convert AVI files to QuickTime friendly video format immediately.

After the conversion completed you can click on "Open" button in the main interface to get the generated files and load the video to QuickTime player effortlessly.

P.S. If you want to try "hit and miss", Perian, a great open-source QuickTime component, which rolls several codecs into one package, might work.

Important Note: Perian is no longer under development and does not work with QuickTime 10 or above. (It still works with QuickTime 7.6.6.) Plus, note that not all codecs for the various .avi movies are available for QuickTime. So, what we highly recommend is to convert AVI to QuickTime for smooth playback.

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