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How to play VP7 video files on a Mac

Written by Scott, about 20 months ago in OS X

I recently downloaded some video files from the internet. After downloading, I opened one of the videos in Quicktime, only to be greeted with a black screen and jerky sound.

I then tried in VLC and received the following error:

main: no suitable decoder module for fourcc VP70.
VLC probably does not support this sound or video format.

From its official website, VP7 is…

Perhaps the world's most advanced video compression technology, award-winning TrueMotion VP7 can be experienced in Skype2.0, AOL AIM, Move Networks, Viewpoint Media Player, and Tencent Messenger/QQ, among others.

For the first time, achieve high quality video at low data rates - as low as 20kbps, and play back 720p HD on 1.5GHz Pentium M and 1080p HD on 2.5GHz Pentium M.

VP7 brings all the benefits that have made TrueMotion codecs industry leaders - from quality and efficiency to flexible implementations and licensing.

While it was hard to get the facts beneath all of that marketing-speak, I'm pretty sure they neglected to mention that there is no official VP7 support for OS X.

Every site I came across on the internet told me I was out of luck and that I had to use Windows. That was, until I came across a post on a forum, on page ninety-twelve of Google, mentioning the possibility of MPlayer for OS X having the ability to play VP7.

MPlayer OS X

I went to the download page for MPlayer and downloaded the MPlayer OS X 1.0rc2 binary along with the the codec package for OS X.

MPlayer played the videos just fine.

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  1. “Thank you very much! I was searching for it :D Congrats”
  2. “I have one question, how do I see the movies there with legends, I went to open the legends and it do not appear”
  3. “you're a star, I love you. THANKS!”
  4. “Thanks. fortunately you appeared on page two of google. dispair was starting to get the best of me!”
  5. “Great info, thanks!!!”
  6. “It worked! Thanks so much!!”
  7. “4th hit on google... so glad I found this post”
  8. “Thanks for the tip off, very very helpful!!”
  9. “Magic, it's pure magic - everyone said it could not be done.”
  10. “only works on intel macs :(”