QuickTime is a great application. But it just doesn’t do everything. But because Apple realized they couldn’t make it do everything, they went ahead and made it somewhat extensible. In comes Perian. Per the site:
Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats.
You can download it here and once installed it will allow you to use AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, VFW, MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture, Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, MPEG Layer I/II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics, Nellymoser ASAO and a few other little treats.
