Recently I had to play some mpeg2 files on my Mac and they just wouldn't play. This was odd as under Tiger they would play fine. I had Final Cut Studio v2 installed and this comes with the mpeg2 codec, so all should have been fine. I tried it on my machine at the office and that did the exact same thing. As one final test I went to a machine that had just had Final Cut Studio v2 installed on a new Leopard install. Amazingly the mpeg2 played. What was the difference?

The difference is. The other two machines had been upgraded to Leopard. After some investigation I found that the machines not playing mpeg2 had the codec in library/quicktime, whereas the machine that did work had the codec in system/library/quicktime. The screenshot below shows how it should be. I simply copies the codec from the working machine to the broken one and removed the old codec from library/quicktime.

Tags: video, Work, macintosh, Leopard