Help with playing wm9 vcm files (in avi container) in OSX

[kelman3]

I've got some avi's that are encoded with wm9 vcm in an avi container.

I got errors from my media players:
VLC tells me it can't play wmv3.
MPlayer plays audio but no video.
I've installed FLIP4MAC but Quicktime says an "unknown error occured (-50)".
WMPlayer9 for OSX says the format is invalid.

The microsoft website says it's only supported in windows ( http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/codecs/vcm/faq.aspx#VCM_1_2 ) but the I read of a linux codec available for mplayer.

So I checked the mpalyer website and it have a codec package
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/codecs.html
but I don't know how to install them.

Here's the readme

These are binary codecs for use with MPlayer. They are useless for normal
Windows players (like WMP, QuickTime, RealPlayer, ...) as they only contain
the DLLs without installer and other fancy stuff needed to use them with
common Windows players.

Put the files contained in this archive in a directory where MPlayer will find
them. The default directory is /usr/local/lib/codecs/ ($prefix/lib/codecs/) if
you are compiling from source, but you can change that value by passing the
'--with-codecsdir' option to './configure'.

If you use a prebuilt MPlayer package it will most likely be /usr/lib/codecs,
see the documentation of your package for details.

In the past /usr/local/lib/win32 or /usr/lib/win32 was the default directory,
some packages as well as a few other Unix players like xine and avifile still
use it, refer to their documentation for further details.

I downloaded the mPlayer GUI pre-complied package.
Can someone tell me how to install these codecs?

Thanks.

[ILike2Watch]

http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Bay/8128/

WMV3Server

To play avi files with WMV3/9 video and MP3 audio encoding on Mac OS X as of 2005-01-24 you will need:

Mac OS X 10.2 or later
WMV3Server
Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OS X
An .avi file containing WMV9 (WMV3) video and MP3 audio.


Instructions:
Launch the WMV3Server java application and click the "Open" button.

A standard open-dialog window appears. Either navigate to the avi video file or drag the file into the open window to have the window switch to the folder that contains the avi video file. Select the file and click the "Open" button or press return on the keyboard. The open-dialog window should close.

Next, click the "Start" button. The movie will be cached and WMV3Server will display "Server Started"

Open Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OS X. Pull down the "File" menu on the menu bar at the top of the screen and select "Open URL..." Enter the following address:

mmst://localhost:1755/

Windows Media Player should connect, buffer and play.

[kelman3]

Thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.
When I load the video into WMV3Server it says "creating temp files now" and then it closes (or crashes I'm not sure).
When I open localhost in WMP it says server cannot be contacted.

Any ideas?