OT Playing AVI files

[Brian Olesky]

I have the 600 mghz G3 with 384 MB of Ram.

What's the best way to play AVI files?

QuickTime Player often can't read them, and/or usually freezes a short way
in.

VLC usually gives me an error message saying there's either something wrong
with the file or my computer's running too slow to play them back, and gives
up.

The best I've found is MPlayerOSX, but it often stutters frame by frame
through them, or in some cases plays them back but in lower res than I'd
expect. And of course, sometimes it can't play them at all.

Any better ideas out there? Or is the 600 w/384 MB of Ram just not powerful
enough for this? (It plays MPEG and WMV files just fine.)

Also, can these files be converted to some other format that will work
better?

And while I'm at it, speaking of QuickTime, I've discovered that quite
often, it'll play back an MPEG file just fine, then stop like it's played
the whole thing when it's actually just played a small portion (this just
happens with larger files). So I'll try the same file with MPlayerOSX and
find out that there's actually much more movie there that QuickTime never
played. In other words, it'll take a 10 min. movie, play 3 minutes, the
pointer will reach the end of the graph line, and it'll end. Is there a way
to fix this? A preference file or something that needs to be adjusted to
allow QuickTime to play longer files?

TIA

Brian