They get an email from somebody, or they get a link to a file that's supposed to be a video, but they try to play it and it doesn't work.

OK, so this is a very common problem for Mac users. What are they, and how can you play them on your Mac? Video Transcript: Gary Rosenzweig: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Not sure which to get? It’s probably safest to go with MPlayerX, it’s dirt simple to use, installs through the Mac App Store, and plays so many different movie formats that you’ll likely never have to download another video player again.Check out MacMost Now 155: How To Play WMV Windows Media Video at YouTube for closed captioning and more options. mov format, letting you play them on an iPad, iPod, or iPhone, or any other Mac, without the need for them to download anything.

One potentially huge bonus that Flip provides though is the ability to convert the wmv videos to. My view is that if you’re going to be downloading a new app to play videos, get one that is multifunctional and that will play everything, that way you won’t have to go hunting around again when you encounter some other video file down the road. It’s a perfectly reasonable solution, but because it’s limited to WMV and WMA formats it’s just overall less useful than going with a free app like VLC or MPlayerX. Last but not least is Flip4Mac, which is a set of video components that install into OS X that allow Quick Time to play WMV files directly. If you want the video codec support of MPlayerX but with even more features aimed at advanced users, VLC is a great choice. VLC’s other benefit is that it works fine with obscure audio formats, and if you’re wanting to stream a video from one computer to another you can easily do that too. VLC is the classic swiss army knife for video files, it will play virtually any video format, it’s cross-platform compatible, it’s quick, and it’s free. WMV files are no exception, but because it supports so many other popular ( mkv, divx, etc) and obscure formats, MPlayer is debatably one of the best free video players available for the Mac platform.

MPlayerX closely resembles the Quick Time user interface but that’s about where the similarities end, because MPlayerX will play just about any video thrown at it with flying colors.

Wmv reader for mac