Its an undeniable truth. At some point of everyone's life we've either downloaded videos ourselves or inadvertently got our grimy hands on a video that was downloaded by someone else.

For those of us who are relatively 'new' to the Mac platform one of the first things we will realise (rudely or otherwise) is that Quicktime doesn't play all formats or rather the 'popular' formats downloaded movies come in. Notably, wmv, divx or avi.

So, for the benefit of those of us who are swearing at our Macs and how come it cannot play downloaded videos here's a definitive list of free open source codecs and tools that will make life 'bright and beautiful' again:

• Perian
• DivX for Mac OS X
• Flip4Mac