AppleChronicles

One frustrating thing you find as a Mac user is many websites provide video content in a format Apple's Quick Time player will not play. You may also find this to be a problem when people send you video clips via email, or on optical disk. There really is no reason for this, other than Apple's stubborn position that they will not support anything that came from Windows. But the simple fact is, the majority of people use Windows and some of the media they develop does not work on a Mac.

There are free Quick Time plug-ins (codecs) you can add to your Mac that will allow Quick Time to play more formats of media. For maximum compatibility you should install both of them.

• Flip4Mac allows you to play most wmv files (Windows Media).
• Perian allows you to play a variety of other media formats.

Even with these plug-ins you may still encounter media that will not play on your Mac. But you will be far more compatible with the rest of the world than you were before.