[kadup893]

I am using Quicktime 7.0.4, I am trying to play a video and I get the notice

"it is not a file that QuickTime understands (-2048)"

And I simply can't play the video. Anyone experience this? Any solutions? Thanks for any help.

[guillaume.kh]

video files are made of sound & video. Both are compressed with what is know as codecs. For example, you could have video in DivX and audio in mp3.

QuickTime does understand only a limited number of codecs.

It seems your file uses codecs not recognised by QuickTime. You can either:
-ask the person who gave you that file which codecs did he use then look for the proper codecs on the net
-use another video player, namely VLC www.videolan.org which has its own internal codec collection

I strongly recommend the second solution, the easiest, by far.

[kadup893]

thanks a lot, VLC seems to work well.

[Uncle Skeleton]

That error comes from the file parser, not the component manager. It means either it's a file type that QT can't read (mkv, ogm, etc), or it's one it can read but is named incorrectly (an mpeg named "movie.avi" will throw that error for example). You can open the file in HexEdit and memorize the way each of the various file types looks, and when wrongly named files show up you can know for sure what to rename them (or you can try names until it works). It's very easy to tell them apart (for example matroska files start with the 8 characters "matroska", AVI starts with RIFF, mpegs start with about 100 pages of nothing after a 00 00 01 BA, etc).

VLC works too of course, and doesn't balk at wrongly named files. But it's always good to have options.