Using Quicktime to Play AVI files

My Canon PowerShot creates AVI movie files. These play fine on my mac through iPhoto. I then drag them to my desktop so that I can attach them to an email. When I email them to family who also have macs (who are on 10.4.2) with QuickTime, they are unable to to open them. When I email them to my Windows PC it says that the file is not a movie file and cannot be opened with QuickTime. I've tried importing it to imovie and saved it as a .mov but that did not help.
How is one supposed to play an AVI file outside of iphoto?
These are some of the errors I get:
QuickTime cannot open the file: "MVI_1670.MOV"
it is not a file that QuickTime understands (-2048)
Or Error -32

hi Nat,
I got the avi file in my email. this is what happened to me:
I waited for a couple of minutes for it to download then double clicked the icon file for the avi in the email and nothing happened.
I then hit the "save" button to save to the desktop. I did this twice and nothing was saved to the desktop.
I then tried to drag the file from the email body to my desktop and got the spinning ball. Mail turned unresponsive and I finally had to force quit it.
I went to .mac webmail and opened your mail there. I clicked to download the avi from the webmail. took a couple of seconds and then it opened in quicktime just fine. You have an adorable doggie!!
Next I went back and opened Mail.app again. This time I went to Window>Activity viewer to see what was happening.
In Activity Viewer I see that it is stuck on "downloading attachment" and "caching attachments"
It's been over 10 minutes and it still has those two things showing in the Activity Viewer.
Ok, 14 minutes went by and now the AVI file is finally showing up in my email message and I can play the file within the message.
I don't know but maybe they didn't give the file enough time to download to their computer. It certainly gave me problems until it was all downloaded.
I have the latest OS and the latest Quicktime and it plays fine on my computer.

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