Why QuickTime Won't Play AVI Files?
AVI (Audio Video Interleaved) is a container format designed by Microsoft to wrap audio and video stream together. The video in AVI file can be compressed by many kinds of codec, such as MJPEG (Motion JPEG), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DivX, XviD, WMV and others. To play all AVI files, your player must support all of these codecs. So far, no matter you are a Windows user or a Mac user, QuickTime only natively plays AVI files with MJPEG video.
As a great open-source QuickTime component, Perian is the saver to allow QuickTime to play all kinds of AVI videos for Mac users. Unfortunately, the latest version 1.2.3 of Perian is not compatible with Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9), Mountain Lion (10.8) and Lion (10.7).
In order to
solve "QuickTime won't play AVI" on Mac (Mavericks included) and Windows, it is best to
convert AVI to QuickTime more popular formats like MP4, MOV with some professional AVI to QuickTime Converter.
Hope it will help you more or less.