If you are using Front Row/QuickTime as your media player then you'll soon find that it can't play every movie file you throw at it. For a list of supported file formats and video formats see www.apple.com/quicktime/player/specs.html. There are some glaring omissions from this list, most notably MPEG-2 which Apple have the cheek to charge you extra for!

Note that there is a difference between file format and video/audio format. The file is just a container for the video and audio streams contained within it and to be able to play a particular file QuickTime will need to understand the file format and have codecs for the video and audio content. Whilst the file type can give you an idea of the the codecs used within it you cannot always be certain.

Fortunately there are plenty of third-party codecs available that plug into QuickTime to fill the gaps. The very least you will probably need to install:

• Flip4Mac [ www.flip4mac.com ] - allows you to play Windows Media Video (WMV) files. There is a free version of this and the latest version has much better support for WMVHD files than the previous versions did. I do find though that the latest version appears to spend a few minutes caching the media before starting to play it which wasn't the case previously.


• Perian [ perian.org ] - adds support for a number of video formats including the increasingly popular Matroska MKV format. This is also a free download.


• MPEG-2 [ www.apple.com/uk/quicktime/mpeg2 ] - Apples MPEG-2 component for QuickTime that you unfortunately have to pay £15 for!