I spent literally two months trying to solve this problem, so I wanted to leave a trail for whoever comes next with the same issue. For some reason, you can’t easily export or convert video files from Mac to .avi. I guess because AVI is a Microsoft format? But if that’s the reason, that’s an absolute crap reason.
Why might you need AVI? For me, I needed it to put video files onto an SD card reader. I searched everywhere, and it was finally only perplexity.ai that helped me to resolve it by pointing me to a free Mac utility called Free mp4 converter. It does the job, and can convert from and to many different kinds of video files, plus lets you link a bunch of files together into one, and some other functionality. It’s easy enough to use and not bloated with a million features you don’t need. Best wishes if this is something you need!
Tim B.
also, for anyone stuck on this same path as me: when putting files onto SD cards from Mac, sometimes the card readers will see extra files that are put on there via Mac, where its the file name plus a prepended ._
There are ways to remove this, that are all unfortunately rather tedious. But check out i think the mac Terminal utility dot_clean and see if you can’t get that working.
It’s weird and shitty that this whole process is so weird and shitty!