In Snow Leopard, when you pressed the Space bar with a video selected, Quick Look would play the file in the Finder. Since upgrading, Quick Look only displays an icon and file details. What’s up?
Quick Look is a great feature that lets you easily view different files in the Finder without opening their parent applications. By just selecting the file in the Finder and pressing the Space bar, a preview dialog will appear and let you watch movies and view photos or other file content.
If it’s not working, it’s probably because another application has taken over as the default program for that file type. You can learn more about changing the default file-handling application here.
Perian allows your Mac to play .avi files.
You might also be missing the right plug-in for the file type. By default, Quick Look can view many of the multimedia files playable by QuickTime, image, and Microsoft Office documents. However, if one of the plug-ins is missing for a particular file type, only the icon, name, date, and size will be displayed in the Quick Look window. For videos (especially AVI), check out Perian, a System Preference pane that lets QuickTime view many different file types, including AVI. For more Quick Look plug-ins, check out qlplugins.com.
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