How to play videos on a Mac

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

My son and his friend shot and edited a short film for a Science Project
at school (about 3 minutes in length). They used Pinnacle Studio running
on a WinXP PC to create an SVCD-quality mpeg-2 file.

I helped them create an SVCD that plays fine in WinDVD, PowerDVD and our
APEX living-room DVD player. We also burned a DVD (DVD+RW) with a little
opening menu that also plays fine on all the mentioned players.

Finally, they just burned a copy of the mpeg-2 file on a CD.

So .... they had three sources of their video - 1. the raw mpeg-2 file,
2. a "play-able" SVCD and 3. a "play-able" DVD to take to school. But
the school only has MACs and the teacher could not get it to play. I
assume the MAC would use Quicktime but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure
if the teacher tried all three disks.

So my question is - how do you play an MPEG-2 file (or SVCD or DVD) on a
MAC?

We have iTunes and QuickTime for Windows running our our WinXP PCs at
home and sure enough, I can't get QuickTime to play the MPEG-2 file (or
a WMV or AVI file for that matter).

Will QuickTime only play an .MOV file?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

tripaz wrote:

> My son and his friend shot and edited a short film for a Science Project
> at school (about 3 minutes in length). They used Pinnacle Studio running
> on a WinXP PC to create an SVCD-quality mpeg-2 file.
>
> I helped them create an SVCD that plays fine in WinDVD, PowerDVD and our
> APEX living-room DVD player. We also burned a DVD (DVD+RW) with a little
> opening menu that also plays fine on all the mentioned players.
>
> Finally, they just burned a copy of the mpeg-2 file on a CD.
>
> So .... they had three sources of their video - 1. the raw mpeg-2 file,
> 2. a "play-able" SVCD and 3. a "play-able" DVD to take to school. But
> the school only has MACs and the teacher could not get it to play. I
> assume the MAC would use Quicktime but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure
> if the teacher tried all three disks.

AFAIK every Mac made since the early to mid 90s has included a QuickTime
player. Of course, the earlier versions of QuickTime were less capable
than the current version.

>
> So my question is - how do you play an MPEG-2 file (or SVCD or DVD) on a
> MAC?

To play a DVD on my Mac, I just push it into the slot. I play most other
multimedia formats by just double clicking the icon.

Unfortunately, schools tend to have very old Macs in the classrooms.
Seriously, I have seen Macs in classrooms running decade-old software.
Those things were made before DVDs were an option. For the same reason,
they tend to be limited in the multimedia formats they can play.

When my son needed to play a short movie for a science fair (a few years
ago) we had one of those situations. In that case, we were able to solve
the problem by putting the movie and a recent QuickTime player onto a
CD-ROM. We also had to reduce the viewing size because the old cpu was
just too slow to play full screen. YMMV.

>
> We have iTunes and QuickTime for Windows running our our WinXP PCs at
> home and sure enough, I can't get QuickTime to play the MPEG-2 file (or
> a WMV or AVI file for that matter).
>
> Will QuickTime only play an .MOV file?

QuickTime plays .mov, MPEG-4, .avi and a variety of other popular
formats. I'm not sure whether .wmv is licensed for non-Microsoft
platforms. It doesn't seem to be very portable. Most of the file types
support a variety of codecs, and it's important to have the right one
installed when playing any particular movie.

>
> Thanks in advance.

Good luck. It's unfortunate that our schools can't afford to keep their
computers up to date. Sometimes it's a challenge to work around that.

 

[Lazarus]

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

vcdhelp.com......search.....there is a free player there somewhere i seen
it....

"tripaz" <nobody@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:Xns94CCE3D376D5Btripaznobodynospamco@216.148.227.77...
> My son and his friend shot and edited a short film for a Science Project
> at school (about 3 minutes in length). They used Pinnacle Studio running
> on a WinXP PC to create an SVCD-quality mpeg-2 file.
>
> I helped them create an SVCD that plays fine in WinDVD, PowerDVD and our
> APEX living-room DVD player. We also burned a DVD (DVD+RW) with a little
> opening menu that also plays fine on all the mentioned players.
>
> Finally, they just burned a copy of the mpeg-2 file on a CD.
>
> So .... they had three sources of their video - 1. the raw mpeg-2 file,
> 2. a "play-able" SVCD and 3. a "play-able" DVD to take to school. But
> the school only has MACs and the teacher could not get it to play. I
> assume the MAC would use Quicktime but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure
> if the teacher tried all three disks.
>
> So my question is - how do you play an MPEG-2 file (or SVCD or DVD) on a
> MAC?
>
> We have iTunes and QuickTime for Windows running our our WinXP PCs at
> home and sure enough, I can't get QuickTime to play the MPEG-2 file (or
> a WMV or AVI file for that matter).
>
> Will QuickTime only play an .MOV file?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

"Ed Anson" wrote ...
> QuickTime plays .mov, MPEG-4, .avi and a variety of
> other popular formats. I'm not sure whether .wmv is
> licensed for non-Microsoft platforms.

I counted nine different versions of Windows Media Player
(for WMV, WMA, etc.) is available for many platforms/OSes
including Mac, OSX, Solaris, Pocket, Palm, Hand, etc. here....

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/player.aspx

> It doesn't seem to be very portable.

SDKs and Codecs also available at the same location to
port to anywhere you wish. Seems quite portable to me.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

tripaz <nobody@nospam.com> wrote:

> I helped them create an SVCD that plays fine in WinDVD, PowerDVD and our
> APEX living-room DVD player. We also burned a DVD (DVD+RW) with a little
> opening menu that also plays fine on all the mentioned players.
>
> Finally, they just burned a copy of the mpeg-2 file on a CD.
>
> So .... they had three sources of their video - 1. the raw mpeg-2 file,
> 2. a "play-able" SVCD and 3. a "play-able" DVD to take to school. But
> the school only has MACs and the teacher could not get it to play. I
> assume the MAC would use Quicktime but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure
> if the teacher tried all three disks.
>
> So my question is - how do you play an MPEG-2 file (or SVCD or DVD) on a
> MAC?

They might be having a problem with the DVD+ format discs - Macs
generally have DVD-R drives.

Having similar difficulties I opened a DVD+R disc in an iBook (which I
think has a Sony combo drive) and copied he files to an external FW disk
- the editing Mac opened the DVD files fine using the built-in Apple DVD
Player, it just couldn't read the +R disc.

QuickTime needs an extra MPEG2 player to play the raw mpeg2 files - a
paid for component at

<http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/mpeg2playback/>

They could also try downloading VLC player for the SVDC - only for OS X
(no OS9 vesion)

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

If the project originated as DV you could burn the avi to a cd and that
will play OK- though only a couple of minutes will fit on a cd

Good luck

Stuart
--
http://www.sundog.co.uk - cut that out to reply