RNOcommctr From United States of America, joined Jan 2001, 825 posts, RR: 4 Posted (8 years 5 days 8 hours ago) and read 1116 times:
I am having trouble downloading and viewing video clips in zip format on a Mac with OSX. When I click on the download link, a small Aladdin icon appears momentarilty and I believe also one almost at the same time that says something about "Stuffit". So then I am left with a desktop icon that does absolutely nothing but reproduce itself when I click on it. How do I view the clip???
Jeez, I'm ignorant enough with Windows applications, much less Mac. Thanks for any help.
AeroWesty From United States of America, joined Oct 2004, 18799 posts, RR: 64 Reply 2, posted (8 years 5 days 8 hours ago) and read 1110 times:
When downloading via a browser, I usually hold down the Control key before clicking on the link, so I get a menu of choices on how to download, usually there'll be something like "download file to ..." to choose from.
If the extension of the file name is .zip, OSX will automatically unzip it for you when you double-click the file. If you're getting a file with .sit, you'll need Stuffit Expander, available here:
If the resulting file comes with the extension .wmv, then you'll need to download and install the Windows Media Player for Mac, that you can download from microsoft.com. If the resulting file is .avi, .mov, .mpg, etc., they'll usually play just fine in Quicktime.
Klaus From Germany, joined Jul 2001, 20845 posts, RR: 55 Reply 5, posted (8 years 3 days 12 hours ago) and read 1062 times:
And here I am!
ZIP files aren´t a problem under OS X. Even the Finder supports them directly, although most people have the free version of Stuffit installed which also supports unpacking them.
Packing files or folders into a .ZIP file can be done as simply as selecting "make archive" from the context menu in the finder. Unpacking them is a simple double-click.
To your concrete problem, RNO:
Having Safari(?) mention Stuffit when downloading the file is normal; When Stuffit is installed, .ZIP files are mapped to it as the unpacking tool.
I´d like to know more about what´s going on when you say the icon is "replicating" itself. In all cases I know about, the contents of the folder would just be unpacked and would then be accessible as usual. What has happened, exactly?
One thing you should do in every case: Go to the Finder preferences and activate "show all file extensions". (It should always remain enabled.) Then look at the .ZIP file and the unpacked one again. What are their extensions?
If it´s a small .WMV file, it could be a streaming link file; In that case it can be fed to the player directly. Some .MOV files work in a similar way. If it´s an .EXE, they were just trying to coax you into installing Windows spyware, which fortunately won´t work under OS X.
You may not need to install the Windows Media Player, by the way. It reports back to Microsoft what you´re watching. There are two Open Source players which can handle most files that can´t be played in the QuickTime Player: VLC media player MPlayerOSX
In addition to that, there are several codec plugins for QuickTime which extend its native playback capabilities (3ivx, divX etc.).
RNOcommctr From United States of America, joined Jan 2001, 825 posts, RR: 4 Reply 6, posted (8 years 3 days 10 hours ago) and read 1049 times:
Thanks for all the help, guys. Never could get Quicktime to play the files, but for some reason, Klaus, the MPlayerOSX did allow me to play the ones ending in .zip and .rm. Thanks again for the help.
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