Satcomer - Thanks (for the hack tips too! I trawled this a few days after buying the machie and found some french site with a drive flash hack but alas that is sadly only good for non-intel variants)! This would seem to be the case. I mentioned maybe on another thread I have perian, Flip for Mac, DivX, MPlayer and VLC but just checking my installed codecs it would appear you are right there - no sign of MPEG-2.
Oddly as I mentioned I can open MPEG-2's every time with VLC and then they will play back in quicktime with sound. If I don't follow this routine I generally get picture only and no sound. I guess for now it's a toss-up on whether I want to splash out another $20.00 to view my tutorials. It seems this whole codec racket is just as scandalous on MAC as it was on windows. That was one of the prime reasons for my decision to switch incidentally. I'm sick of all this racketeering in the media market. I am starting to understand fully now why piracy exists and have to admit I'm getting very very tempted by uncle Darth and the Darkside!
Seems that we are all lambs to the slaughter these days - and I for one hope that the music industry continues to struggle - it's therecord companies that have been stealing from the artists and not the cusomers. The problem being that nowadays the nmoguls no longer have enough extortion money to continue to support their coke-fuelled lifestyles, 10 mistresses and houses in all the major tax havens of the world. This war they're waging 'on behalf' of artists' intellectual rights is a plane smokescreen. Doesn't take a genius to figure that artists are now independently producing their own material and not only making it available in mp3 format but also via all the major Peer to Peer Networking tools. Why? because they we're getting less and less of the take while the record producers got richer and richer. And the Movie Industry is perhaps the biggest joke of all where does any human being justify $7 for a couple of months work atmost? That's absolute insanity and I wouldn't mind but thelikes of Tom Cruise cannot act to save his life- let alone the life of a kitten! Perhaps a very healthy dose of piracy might see the likes of him getting a realistic paycheck for once in his life and bring the movie Industry bosses down a few pegs at the same time!
Okay I've wandered slightly off the path here but I'm right at the point of saying stuff them too! I've had enough of this racketeering across the board and lack of ethics by companies trying to gain the extra buck by flooding the market with 'yet another' codec or media player.
I'm all for supporting small companies trying to make an honest buck out of a new or innovative product but taking what is basically the same product and encoding it every six ways from friday and then charging people for the decoder is downright underhanded and malicios and companies of whatever size deserve to get hit with everything the pirates have to throw at them - and then some. Whether or not you agree with me is fine. Thats everybody's choice. For now I think I can and will have to live with this inconvenience and others such as not being able to make my DVD player multi- region.
I am among many many people who live between different continents and have DVDs encoded for regions 1,2 and 4. This 5 lives thing is a joke and way out of date and wish someone could do something similar to what fengtao did with DVD Region Free on windows and allow you unlimited lives without having to flash the drive or anything quite so drastic. Yes VLC is a temporary but not all that realistic solution for now. I cannot blame Steve Jobs for doing things by the book but wish he could pressure the standards people or the like oin the same way he has pitched mp3 at the music industry. At least he tries to stick with the
'public gets what the public wants' principle and is in touch with his market which is way more than you can say for the fat-cat coke moguls in downtown record companies that are so stoned they have no clue anymore!
Happy New Year!
