Playing DVSD Videos in Quicktime

A little while back, a friend turned me on to a deal for a DVD of stock footage clips from Footage Firm for a very nice price. I'm all about collecting inexpensive royalty-free media, so I ordered one. But when I slotted it into my MacBook Pro and tried to play the videos, Quicktime told me there was a codec issue, sent me to their page of links to recommended codecs, and never told me which codec I needed.

I downloaded a few but nothing worked. And now, Quicktime wasn't giving a warning anymore. It just played the clip, but the video was blank white. Blank white video is not a good thing.

I bumbled around, finally finding the video properties details in the Window menu (rather than in File or View, where you might expect it to be) and found that the codec was DSVD, a DV codec. So, I hunted around for a DSVD codec for Quicktime, but with no luck. Then I found this page where someone described having the very same problem.

He posted that his problem was fixed when he removed the Perian codec pack (a freeware pack of various codecs all combined into one package). I took it out and my problem remained. So, I took out all my extra codecs and found that I could watch the videos. Adding my codecs back in, I found that the Xvid codec and the Perian codec pack both caused the issue. So I popped over to the Perian site and found out that XVid is in the Perian pack.

So, if you're having difficulty viewing videos on Quicktime that are in a DV AVI format, check the properties. If it's DSVD, check in your /Library/Quicktime folder to see if you have the XVid codec or Perian codec pack installed. If so, remove them and the videos will play nicely.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.