illovich, have you tried VLC? Since you said you're talking about merely watching videos ... VLC does pretty much everything I need ... and it's built into Democracy, yay! Whenever I encounter a WMV that VLC won't play out of the box (there might be add-on codecs), QuickTime (with Flip4Mac installed) does it. Install the official DivX component for QT, and the QT player does that flawlessly as well. Maybe it would be more user-friendly if these components came included with the OS, BUT: Who knows how high the cost of this would be (Apple would have to buy the licences to do so and pass the cost on to its customers); I would want to pay more than 1 or 2 cents for this convenience, especially now that MPEG-4 works so damn well. I don't care whether my MPEG-4 comes in a QT, AVI or mp4 container, but I don't want to be assaulted by videos encoded with some proprietary codec when there's just no damn good reason for using that codec. I.e. if you have special requirements, e.g. because you're making a high-rez screencast, I'm willing to install some QT component so I can watch it and enjoy the faster downloads due to the smaller file size. But Windows users who send me a WMV instead of an MPEG, or a PPT instead of a PDF, or an XLS instead of a CSV/ODS, will be mercilessly whined at!

(Sorry about posting yet another comment; I'm waiting for yet another render ... ^_^)