In the third installment of our Switch to Mac series, we’ll have a look at playing video on your Mac. It’s a simple topic, for sure, but one that leaves Mac newbies scratching their heads or wasting several hours looking for the best solution. Well, search no more, the answers to all your video questions are here.

Because video formats can be really confusing (it’s a whole alphabet soup of file extensions!) and I don’t want to get too “inside baseball” on this topic, I’m going to keep this article simple and aimed at the beginner. With that out of the way, let’s dive in.

QuickTime for Mac OS X

Every Mac comes pre-installed with QuickTime Player, which is the default media player for videos. The QuickTime Player is not the same as a QuickTime Movie, although both are a part of Apple’s QuickTime technology.

The QuickTime technology consists of:

1. The QuickTime Player application, which is the media player application this article will focus on.
2. The QuickTime Movie (.mov) file format, which you can playback with #1
3. The QuickTime framework that enables encoding and decoding of audio and video

QuickTime Player is a great media player application that’s fast and plays many video and audio file formats. This is the main media player you’ll use to play videos on your Mac. If you’re inclined, you can find a list of all the file formats supported by QuickTime Player here.

Unfortunately, QuickTime Player won’t play some of the files that you brought over from Windows, most notably certain AVI files (torrents anyone?) and WMV (Windows Media Video) files.

Luckily, we can fix this in a few simple steps.

Extending QuickTime with Perian

Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. Installing the Perian component should allow you to play all AVI formats, including any problem files from Windows, directly in QuickTime.

To install Perian, mount the disk image and drag the Perian.component icon to the QuickTime shortcut.

Flip4Mac Windows Media Component for Quicktime

Previously, to play WMV files you would need to download the Windows Media Player for Mac. Ugh. Fortunately, Flip4Mac has a free WMV component for QuickTime that allows you to play WMV videos directly in QuickTime.

First however, you need to navigate Flip4Mac’s website to find the download link, or you could just use the link below:

Download Flip4Mac Windows Media Component for QuickTime

Once downloaded, locate the installer inside and run it. The installer will install the WMV Player in your Applications folder and a Flip4Mac preference pane in your Preferences along with the Windows Media Component. Now you can totally forget about silly Windows Media Components and play WMV files in QuickTime directly.

If you need help installing apps on your Mac, check out the first article in the Switch to Mac series: Installing applications and software on Mac OS X

QuickTime quick-tip

There’s one thing that’s a pain in the butt neck about QuickTime. The free version doesn’t allow you to play your videos in fullscreen. You need to buy the Pro version that costs USD29.99 to do that (of course, you get other features too). It’s something that I’ve always found to be rather silly.

Anyway, you can QuickTime to play in full screen mode for free with a little bit of AppleScript. Don’t worry, I promise it’s simple.

Open up Script Editor (it’s in your Applications/AppleScript folder). Create a new script and enter:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
    present front movie scale screen
end tell

Save your script as an application. Now every time you’re playing a video in QuickTime and want it in full screen mode, double-click the application you just created. Or if you know Quicksilver, you can invoke it directly from your keyboard.

Update: QuickTime 7.2 brings full screen video playback for free

RealPlayer

Then of course there’s that pesky proprietary Real Media format. There’s only one player that can play it so just download RealPlayer if you ever need to play these files.

VLC for everything else

With the QuickTime player, the Perian and Flip4Mac Wiindows Media Component installed, your Mac will now play 99% of all video files you will ever come across. For everything else, you can use VLC Media Player.

The VLC Media Player is a cross-platform, open source media player by VideoLAN. It supports a dizzying array of multimedia file formats and should play any video format you throw at it. It even plays your videos in full screen for free. The only reason I don’t use VLC more is because of QuickTime’s better integration with Mac OS X. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of preference.

Summary

So, a quick recap of how to watch any video in OS X:

Step 1: Install Perian Step 2: Install Flip4Mac Windows Media Component Step 3: Install RealPlayer if you have to Step 4: Use VLC Media Player for everything else.

Have fun with your videos

P.S. Sorry this article is late, it was bad time management on my part. Watch out for the next article in the series on BitTorrent to be published (on schedule!) next Monday.