It all depends on why the .avi files aren’t playing for you.
If they’re poor encodes, especially if downloaded off the internet, there’s a decent chance they won’t play on any hardware player of any brand. Media Player programs on a PC, especially VLC, are quite good at playing “bad” files. However, the hardware players expect the encoding standards to be met and can’t really “fix” bad files.
If it’s a matter that the codecs used in the avi aren’t supported by the chipset, then again, switching players, and even brands, may not make a difference. If another player uses the same chip, that codec won’t be supported there either – the chip supports what it supports. A different chipset might have different codec support, but most of them seem rather standardized.
The best solution is to just use a reliable program to make proper encodes, using supported codecs, in the first place. Then the files will play fine, instead of shopping around trying to see what player might handle the files you have.
