Mac Forum / Applications / Media Player / November 2006

Certainly not. WMP doesn't play anything but stright Windows Media
content.
There are multiple other solutions though, but AVI is tricky, it's a
container format. An AVI file can be encoded using a multitude of
different codecs.

All the folowig solutions are free:
For QuickTime you can start by installing the DivX codecs, the Flip4Mac
WMV codecs, the Perian codecs.

Other players: VLC and MPLayer X.

With that, you should cover most .avi files.

In case it still doesn't work, you can try transcoding the file to other
more Mac-friendly codecs using D-Vision (free) or ffmpeg X (shareware).

Corentin