Hey everyone! What video player do you use on your Mac for movies? Looking for something smooth and reliable.
Thanks!
Thanks!
What player do you use on your Mac?
- Thread starter patttraclaaar
- Start date
VLC, Elmedia Video Player and Infuse.
VLC because it can do and play back back pretty much anything, short of making me coffee in the morning. Elmedia Video Player because it’s speedier and has a much more polished UI than VLC, while still preserving my sanity by not trying to harvest my user data. And finally Infuse because of its also-polished UI, library management features, auto-fetching of meta data, auto-fetching of trailers, and availability on all (Apple-) OSs. Infuse on Apple TV is the bee’s knees (for us).
VLC because it can do and play back back pretty much anything, short of making me coffee in the morning. Elmedia Video Player because it’s speedier and has a much more polished UI than VLC, while still preserving my sanity by not trying to harvest my user data. And finally Infuse because of its also-polished UI, library management features, auto-fetching of meta data, auto-fetching of trailers, and availability on all (Apple-) OSs. Infuse on Apple TV is the bee’s knees (for us).
IINA as a quick preview player, and Infuse as a main player for a Plex server.
Infuse is really good.
Infuse is really good.
Quicktime Player, with VLC as a fallback. I'll echo that I'm not sure I've ever encountered a file VLC couldn't play, especially if you have a few codecs installed at the system level. I didn't know about Infuse and will try it out.
The reason I'm using IINA instead of VLC when I want to quickly preview a video file is that IINA supports HDR. As far as I know, VLC still doesn't on macOS.
VLC is an open source app and interface that runs on macOS.
IINA is macOS app and interface that uses open source code.
IINA is macOS app and interface that uses open source code.
Thanks, gonna check both of those out. I've been using VLC since forever just because it always works, but the interface is pretty meh.
MPV, as it allowed a bunch of really nice custom upscaling functions and tricks (especially nice for animated films), though my custom config of that got borked on Apple silicon (probably using a wrong shader that only runs on the CPU or something like that, I just haven't bothered investigating much). Few cons – .config files only for settings, and it doesn't come signed.
IINA, as a more modern alternative to the above. Uses the same FOSS libraries, but comes signed and much more polished than MPV. Though recently it had some worrying developments with adding JS plugin support (nope, I don't need any JS feature creep in a fucking video player, no thanks).
iTunes or its modern equivalent (whatever is it called nowadays, as if I cared), as I still have a full library there.
Never warmed up to VLC, its UI was weird and had too many features I didn't need. Though it's certainly quite versatile, just not for me when all I want is to watch a single video file of a film.
IINA, as a more modern alternative to the above. Uses the same FOSS libraries, but comes signed and much more polished than MPV. Though recently it had some worrying developments with adding JS plugin support (nope, I don't need any JS feature creep in a fucking video player, no thanks).
iTunes or its modern equivalent (whatever is it called nowadays, as if I cared), as I still have a full library there.
Never warmed up to VLC, its UI was weird and had too many features I didn't need. Though it's certainly quite versatile, just not for me when all I want is to watch a single video file of a film.
VLC for most things but it's not perfect. It takes some settings changes to get rid of the annoying UI overlays overtop video, but mainly its because its designed to stream video rather than deal with frame based video. Fine for just playing something but not useful for scrubbing and almost impossible to move around frame-by-frame.
For those times I use SnapMotion which in addition to being one of the few players that doesn't stupidly put the controls right overtop video its really great for generating frame grabs.
For those times I use SnapMotion which in addition to being one of the few players that doesn't stupidly put the controls right overtop video its really great for generating frame grabs.
IINA for playback on Mac, added to TV.app as an mp4 and accessed via Home Sharing on other machines / AppleTVs.