If you’ve ever (cough cough) just happened to accidentally download a TV show or movie via Bit Torrent or some other mechanism you may have run across some video that Quicktime gave up the ghost on, saying it lacked the proper codec.

DivX is a highly compressed video format also known as MPEG4. For some reason, Quicktime doesn’t include DivX support… I’m sure someone knows why. You can buy a DivX Codec for Quicktime or you can use the free one from DivX Labs…the catch being that it’s only supported Power PC Macintoshes thus far. And unfortunately, Rosetta provides PPC emulation for entire applications, not for pieces of them…so Rosetta can’t make a Power PC application plugin work with an Intel application.

Fortunately, DivX Labs has recently released an updated, Universal Binary, version of their free DivX codec for Quicktime.

You can find it here, on their web site. I’ve tried it out and it works quite nicely on my MacBook Pro. You can use the codec for playback forever without ever buying it.

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