If you are in the mulitimedia field or ever deal with PowerPoint presentations and movies and AVI’s, and you have Mac and PC or your client has a PC and you have a Mac or something to that degree- well the world has gotten a little bit easier with some good ‘ol open source software.
What is it you say? Well its Perian. How has this made my life more easier? Part of what I do is create presentations for people and they are usually filled with AVI’s. Now Powerpoint for Mac and Powerpoint for Win are two different apps really. And there are issues with embedding movies in one of the programs/platform and then watching it on a different platform. The Mac uses the quicktime architecture to make it happen and windows uses windows media driver- which is different than windows media player. (Good ‘ol windows to screw things up.)
Ok- i am side tracking here. Back to my original point. AVI’s and MOV’s are both container files. you can put lots of different types of files inside the container.
Well Perian will let Quicktime play those screwy AVI files MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, (and more) that Quicktime just can’t play until now.
So download it- make your Mac life easier.