How to see video on Quicktime?

Question

When I got my Mac recently, it came with Quicktime. With updates my version is 7.0.4. Many times when I open videos in my brower (i.e Safari), the smaller Quicktime player will open and I can hear the audio but cannot see the video.
Am I missing some type of codec? If so, where can this be obtained?
Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, you have the correct plug-in and if you wish you could re-install Windows Media Player 9 so that it will also install the WMP plug ins as well (which you may then selectively enable and disable from the Flip4Mac pref pane.) Whichever plug-in is enabled will dictate which player handles the media. You could also manually download a file and drag it to either player icon in the dock or in the Finder. You could also manually enter the URL for a file in either WMP or QuickTime (or MPlayer, or VLC and so on.)
WMP is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=windowsmedia
Unfortunately, you should not expect every video to play -period-. Neither Windows Media Player -nor- Flip4Mac supports every possible codec for the video and audio within all WMV files... this is also true on Windows itself although typically one can download codecs for Windows which will then allow the Windows version of Media Player to support each format of video and audio. Not all codecs are available on the Mac - predominantly due to the fact that the companies who hold the copyrights for the codecs don't release them all for every platform (Mac, Windows et al, Unix, Linux etc.)
There are alternatives which may play some (but again, not all) of the unuspported types of video and audio. MPlayer, VLC and NicePlayer with the Xine plug-in are the most powerful of the alternatives to QuickTime and all are free. (You should also have RealPlayer because again, they have not made codecs available for use in QuickTime or Windows Media Player and so on...)
I don't use the WMV Player icon from Flip4Mac at all. I have associated all the corresponding file extensions (and the somewhat more cryptic type and creator codes) with QuickTime Player itself and thus have no need for the little green icon in the dock. I'm not entirely sure what they mean by "re_associate a Windows Media file with Quicktime Player" - certainly dragging a wmv file to the WMV Player icon will launch it in QuickTime but perhaps they are also changing the type and creator code of the file itself so that it will be handled by QuickTime automatically in the future.