In article <39fd0c16$1@news.povray.org>, "Mark Wagner" 
<mar### [at] gtenet> wrote:

>Thorsten Froehlich wrote in message <39fceb81$1@news.povray.org>...
>>No, QuickTime plays MPEG movies.
>To quote the error message Quicktime 4 gives me:
>"Couldn't open the file "mwinvade.mpg" because it is
>not a file Quicktime understands."

The Mac generally stores a file's type and creator as an integral part 
of the file, so when it sees a Windows file, it has to guess. The act of 
registering a windows file as playable by quicktime and the ability to 
play a windows file are actually completely separate in the Mac OS.

When you place a windows file on a Macintosh, the Mac's OS looks at the 
extension, and then looks in its database of Windows extensions and 
marks the file appropriately. The extension ".mpg" corresponds to MPEG, 
which Quicktime can play. Go ahead and (if you really want to see this 
in action) name a Word document "myresume.mpg" on Windows, and copy it 
to your Mac. It will register for Quicktime, but Quicktime obviously 
won't be able to play it.

(Windows does the same thing on its own files: go ahead and rename your 
MPEG file "mymovie.doc", and double-click it. It should open in 
Microsoft Word assuming you have Word on your computer. Word will 
hopefully tell you it doesn't understand the file format. If you go into 
your movie player and do a File:Open, and tell the filepicker to show 
all files, you will still be able to open the mymovie.doc file that way 
and the movie player will accept the file.)

Most likely:
  (a) this is a new form of MPEG that Quicktime 4 doesn't yet 
understand. I think this is unlikely, since as far as I know MPEG is a 
specific format, not an encapsulation of other formats. But if MPEG can 
encapsulate other formats, I'd call this the most likely problem.

  (b) the file was corrupted in transit; for example, if it was FTP'd, 
it might have been FTP'd in text mode.

  (c)  Or it might be that it isn't really an MPEG file, it just has the 
.mpg extension, and is actually another video format (divx?) that is 
relatively new, and that the other players understand but that Quicktime 
doesn't yet.

Jerry
-- 
http://www.hoboes.com/jerry/
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you've
depleted the lake."--It Isn't Murder If They're Yankees
(http://www.hoboes.com/jerry/Murder/)

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