Can macs play AVIs

hello I have been told that macs will have trouble playing AVI movies, I have a 500GB HD full of movies, TV shows, home and personal videos etc, with many different formats, AVIs, MPGs, ASFs etc... The most seem to be in AVI and i know when I got the current notebook I have now,(panasonic tough book) I had to download many codecs, and even a few different players to be able to play all the different formats that I have in my collection, and Iam just wondering if the mac should be able to handle most of them right off the bat or will i have to download codecs and various players to try and get them all to play?
And can macs rip DVDs easily, I have a DVD collection of over 200 DVDs many which are quite current, and I have started to make copys of them with DVD FAB, and it works alright but over the years I have gone through many programs and trouble to be able to find a reliable program to make copys of DVDs, So will the mac be able to do it without much trouble or will it be similar to the PC eg. donwloading various programs, and ripping software and burning software etc....
PS Iam considering purchasing the new macbook aluminum 2.0ghz

 

VLC has built-in codecs that will play anything.

I personally like Quicktime better, since it's not a 3rd party app. The codecs Perian are just awesome for it, I also have like half a terabyte of TV shows and movies and what-not. I can play them all just fine.

 

but vlc for mac does not play real media

 

Yes it can and Quicktime could also play it you just need to download the avi codec decoder for it and it's free.

Warning though the xvid website is full of spam - well i just hate web sites that write a lot of crap instead of useful info so i found sites like that to be nothing but spam.

Here is the direct link otherwise you will have to fight their annoying "text reading useless info" spam for days on ends just to get to the direct link http://n.ethz.ch/student/naegelic/download/

You should also install the DivX codec aswell.

 

VLC player

 

For the DVD's use Handbrake, just make sure you install vlc aswell as the new version of Handbrake no longer has native dvd support. But if you have vlc installed, then you can rip easy peasy !

I have both Perian and vlc installed, and with these two your covered for 99.99% of all video codec's, the only missing one is realplayer, but that is so rare these days that its not really an issue.
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I use Plex and MPlayer. I personally dislike VLC due to its lack of proper subtitle support, lousy interface, and it has a hard time playing high bit-rate 1080P video (unlike Plex).

 

which multimedia player has the most professional interface?

 

Well Plex (and any other video player based off OSXBMC) are full blown media centers and look pretty sharp. There are also several different skins out for them.

 

The most seamless way to play things like .avi is Perian. It has several codecs. If you are looking for a whole new player (i.e. not Quicktime), I like VLC.

http://perian.org/

 

+1 for perian.

 

+2 for Perian

 

To clear up some things:

The .avi format has nothing to do with it. Quicktime has supported .avi forever. The issue is really the codecs. .avi and .mov are the same basic thing - a container for codecs.

So, the real question is here is how do I access this or that codec, like DiVx, Real, etc, to which good answers have been given above.

 

For the typical user, Perian will be able to play most if not all the files they come across.

VLC should do the rest, and there are alternatives for real player videos.

Plex is good if you watch stuff that has subtitles, or really large 720p(or higher) content. Though the latest versions of vlc do subtitles pretty well.

 

+3 for Perian.

 

either has anyone else in the last 5 years, stop using realplayer!

get VLC and Perian and you will be set, don't worry about Divx or any of that, just get those 2 things and you are good to go.

VLC and Quicktime work very similarly, and both are excellent, you can't really go wrong.

VLC is the way to go for most file types as it is just easy and quick to use overall, basically anything that isn't a .mov, just go with VLC.

 

Unfortunately, C-SPAN still uses real.

 

VLC is popular and easy, but it has the poorest quality on Macs, Linux, and Windows.

Get something else if possible.