Hey, if you are like me your are bound to hop form system to system on daily basis i use OSX at work and sometimes Linux and at home i use Windows XP and managing files is a bit difficult but i get by that is until yesterday i needed to get some screen caps form a PC and make something nice out of them naturally thinking Aftereffects opens Avi’s on my PC with no problem at all i loaded up AE and tried importing the Files. 20 minutes later i realized it was hopeless because AE uses 3d party Plug-ins to load media and when its installed on windows it uses things like Divx and the standard Avi libraries that Windows comes with, and those don’t exist on a mac. well 2 days and some googling later here is what i came up with there are 2 or 3 OpenSource Plugins i found that extend the native abilities of Quicktime that let you not only run avis on your mac but play them in QuickTime which i found extremely useful since i can now open them in AE and do what i wanted to do.

so to play any Avi on your Mac without any editing needs you can download VLC player or Mplayer which are both OpenSouce and support playback of windows media on a mac

or if you needed the coded itself so you could edit Windows Media and import it into AE or Premiere of FCP here are some of those

Perian – Quicktime plugin that will guarantee to play almost any codec within an AVI

3ivx -  A free version of this MPEG4 codec is available for Mac

AC3 – This codec is very useful for viewing .avi files encoded with AC3 audio.

Divx for Mac – A free version is available for watching DivX movies Mac Version

Flip4Mac – A free solution, offering playback of AVI, ASF, ASX and non-DRM

protected WMA and WMV files.