and the punchline is...

VLC Player works about 50% of the time.
Will someone please standardise AVIs. Thanks.

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Other tip, run the AVI on Quicktime. After the error message pops up, look under movie properties, video, to find out what the codec on the film is. After that, download the appropriate codec, pop it back in library/quicktime, and taaadaaaa!

Still, VLC does take half the frustration out.