Software Substitutes pt IV

Apple Macs have come with Quicktime player for a very long time. Quicktime was in fact invented by Apple specifically to make videos easy to play. But nowadays, your Video Cameras, phones, will take videos in a variety of formats. Add to this the huge number of videos you can download and watch on your computer. Can Quicktime handle all these files? Not really.

If you haven’t already done so, do yourself a huge favour and install Perian. This will let Quicktime play almost any video you throw at it. But if you really want a fine quality video player (which is also free), then look no further than VLC, which will play almost any file you can think of, and as a bonus plays DVD’s brilliantly as well.

Lastly, it’s worth having a copy of MPEG Streamclip in your Applications folder. This rather oddly named program doesn’t look as slick as most others, but what it lacks in the looks department, it makes up for in the usefulness department. MPEG Streamclip will open almost any movie file, and convert it to something else. This is great if you want to grab a YouTube clip off the internet, and put it in a iMovie project for example. But we’ll cover this at a later date in more detail.