Why Apple can’t extend QuickTime Player to support more video formats is beyond me, but that’s how it is. Want to watch the video to ensure it’s what you want? You can’t do that in QuickTime Player, for sure: You can see the OS knows that it’s an “AVI movie” but not much more than that. Let’s look just a tiny bit more closely at the file with File > Get Info in the Finder: If you haven’t yet installed VLC, it’ll be a generic file icon, a further indicator that the system is clueless about that type of file. You can see the Mac doesn’t really know what to do with it by the fact that there’s no preview shown, just the VLC traffic cone icon. The dashcam I’ve been testing out at the same time produces MP4: that’s the file on the right.

Here’s how that ends up looking on my Mac desktop: HOW TO WATCH AVI VIDEO ON MACĪs a first step, I have been testing out a time-lapse camera and it’s good fun, but it’s also another gadget that produces AVI, not MP4.

You can download a copy for free from and it’s a very useful utility to have on every Mac and Windows computer you own.Ī lot of devices like webcams and similar save video files in AVI format too, so this is a problem more and more people are encountering on both the Mac and PC side. It’s actually a video player that offers somewhat the same functionality as the playback portion of QuickTime Player, but supports just about every possible video format I’ve ever bumped into, even obscure Linux formats. To convert the AVI file on your Mac system to an MP4, I’m going to use the wonderful program VLC. So why don’t default video players support them? If they were associated with a specific program, like, say, a DOCX from a Microsoft Word file, then it would make sense, but file formats like MP4 and AVI are more universal.

Not only that, but it’s more flexible and powerful than most of the commercial programs you can acquire, and who doesn’t like “free” when it comes to useful applications? It is pretty frustrating how different systems have incompatible file formats too. There are a ton of video converters available for the Mac system (and PCs too) but it turns out that there’s a terrific open source program that offers much of the same functionality and it’s free.

Program to open avi files on mac