Quicktime AVI Problems

I'm a Mac user. Generally, I love it. Once in a while, I have a problem that's decently irritating. My most recent source of aggravation has been playback of AVI files in Quicktime. Sometimes, depending on the codec, the sound just doesn't work at all.

Up to now, my solution has been to use VLC to transcode files to MP4 with MP4 audio. This time, no luck. So, I decided to be a good computer scientist and actually try to fix the problem instead of hacking away at it. I found a lot of posts online suggesting using the AC52 package or the xvid quicktime components, but none of that worked. Then, and I don't know why I hadn't found this before, somebody pointed me to Perian. Installation was remarkably easy, and voila, problem solved. So, use Perian to solve your Quicktime codec problems! Then, have fun playing back AVI files in FrontRow!