I've not been happy with the state of video playback under MacOS, so I thought I'd just write down the issues with all the video players I've tried and see if anyone has any feedback.

My test environment is a MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo w/ 4GB RAM) with videos hosted on a NAS (a Dell server running OpenFiler) over a 802.11n 5GHz WiFi connection. I have Perian 1.2.1 and Flip4Mac 2.3.6.5 installed.

My base testing is with a 1280x720 1.95GB WMV video encoded with VC-1 and WMA9, and a 1280x720 1.22 MP4 video encoded with H.264 and AAC.

QuickTime Player v10.0(118)

Videos opens quickly — less than 4 seconds from double-click, including starting the app — but just sits at the first frame until I tell it to go. (What kind of insanity is this? Under what circumstances would I want not to play the video that I just double-clicked on?) There seems to be no way to get double-clicked videos to automatically start playing. (In fact, as of v10, there seem to be no preferences at all any more.)

The MP4 plays fine, but the WMV stutters horribly.

There seem to be no keybindings for FF or REW, but clicking on the playback progress bar works near-instantaneously. WMV playback doesn't seem to support random access; I can only skip forward a few seconds. Actually, I think it's importing the entire WMV and won't let me skip past however far it's gotten in the import.

There are not a lot of playback options. Fullscreen is no longer a "Pro" option, at least.

UI is new MacOS undecorated window with no controls unless hovering. Hides the mouse pointer during playback, regardless of position.

VLC v1.1.5

Videos open quickly.

MP4 and WMV play fine. However, certain video files seem to cause problems when seeking: VLC will show artifacts, sometimes not updating the key frame properly, showing new motion on an old image, which is creepy, and sometimes showing total noise, usually pretty geometric patterns. I haven't seen this with any of the other players.

Modifiable keybindings for FF and REW, and the jump lengths are configurable. Seeking takes about 1 second in the WMV and about 3 seconds in the MP4, regardless of the method used. If I hold down the FF or REW key, though, it combines the jumps into a single seek.

Immense number of options, some of which actually work. For example, I frequently want videos to play double-size. VLC has an option for this. However, it doesn't do anything. Really has many more options than any other player, but they are a nightmare to get to. For example, if I want to rotate a video 90°, VLC will do that, but I have to bring up Preferences, click the "All [options]" button, expand "Video", select "Filters", enable the "Video transformation filter" checkbox, expand "Filters", select "Transformation", select "Rotate by 90 degrees", click "Save", then start playback over and seek back to where I was. And if I then find that I wanted "270 degrees" instead, I get to do it all over.

UI is least-common-denominator horribleness, though functional. Only hides mouse pointer in fullscreen playback.

Movist v0.6.8

(Movist supports both FFmpeg and "QuickTime" playback, configurable per codec. FFmpeg playback seems to universally work better, so all of this review is written with FFmpeg enabled.)

Videos open quickly.

Both MP4 and WMV play fine.

Static keybindings for FF and REW (plain, Option-, and Shift-Option- left and right arrow), but the jump lengths are configurable. Seeking is nearly instantaneous.

There are a decent number of playback options, though nothing advanced: no rotation, for example.

UI is QuickTime v9 style. Simple MacOSX Cocoa. Only hides mouse pointer in fullscreen playback.

MPlayer OSX Extended v. rev14 (1410)

Videos open as quickly as the other players by the wall clock, but it seems slow for some reason.

Both MP4 and WMV seem to play fine.

Static keybindings for FF and REW, and no obvious way to change the jump length. (That said, it uses mplayer under the covers, and does provide a way to specify command-line arguments, so that might offer a possible option.) Seeking in WMVs seems to have the same problem as QuickTime, though is instantaneous for the portion that has been decoded. Seeking in the MP4 is problematic. Sometimes it's instantaneous, sometimes it take a second or two, sometimes it stutters for a few seconds after the jump, and sometimes it just gets stuck on one frame.

Playback options are sufficient, though, again, there's nothing advanced, like rotation. (It's possible that mplayer supports some advanced options, but, if it does, the UI to activate them is even more awkward than VLC's.)

UI is also similar to QuickTime 9, though a little more visually busy than Movist's. Only hides mouse pointer in fullscreen playback.

MPlayerX v1.0.0 (r893)

Videos open somewhat slowly — up to 8 seconds for the WMV — to insanely slowly — up to 30 seconds for the MP4 — and frequently cause the OS to beachball for all but a few seconds of that load time.

Both MP4 and WMV playback is horribly slow, as if it's simply not able to either transfer or render the data fast enough.

FF and REW keybindings and jump lengths are static. Seeking in the MP4 takes about a second, and in the WMV takes up to 8 seconds. Successive seeks are not combined, so holding down right-arrow lets me see the frame from every tenth second each for a second or so.

Minimal (though not QuickTime minimal) playback options. No apparent way to hand mplayer options to the binary I assume is underneath.

UI is new MacOS undecorated window with no controls unless hovering. Only hides mouse pointer in fullscreen playback.

NicePlayer v0.96.2(581)

MP4 opens very quickly: around 2 seconds. It's hard to tell how quickly the WMV is opening.

The MP4 plays fine. The WMV opens and doesn't auto-play. When playback is started manually, it's at the wrong resolution and aspect ratio. It seemingly plays back at whatever height the playback window was already at, and forces the aspect ratio to 4:3. WMV also plays stutteringly.

FF and REW keybindings are static, but jump times are configurable. Seek times are either short with a good amount of stuttering after, or long without stuttering, or long with stuttering.

Playback options are pretty minimal, but do allow for changing some defaults.

UI is new MacOS undecorated window style with no controls unless hovering. Mouse pointer only hidden during fullscreen playback.

Summary: MPlayerX, QuickTime, and NicePlayer play certain videos badly enough to be unusable. MPlayer OSX Extended has enough problems with seeking to be, at the least, very annoying.

VLC and Movist both do a good job. Movist is better at pure playback. VLC is better if you need to do some advanced filtering.

Conclusion: Movist is probably the best pure player, while keeping VLC installed for occasional use probably makes sense.

I'm glad I did this. I'd been trying to evaluate all of these players for a while now, but kept getting confused about which had which problems, and I'd decided that all of them were awful. Going back and writing it all down, I was surprised to discover that while it didn't have a lot of playback options that I wanted, Movist really had no problems, so I'm going to be switching to it (from VLC).

I'm sure I'll find that one showstopper for it before too long.

Yeah, VLC is essential to view movies in oddball formats. Example: my Panasonic LX5 with "AVC-HD Lite" dumps its HD videos in a goofy "MTS" file container. A slightly older VLC could play it but with artifacts. The latest VLC plays it flawlessly. Everything else has no idea it's even a video file.

Any chance it will work on my Mac Mini (the last one they made before switching to Intel architecture)?

VLC plays back a lot of stuff, but I haven't experienced it being able to play back anything, other than full DVDs, than MPlayer doesn't handle. It also has a terrible UI and really bad (some non-existant) default key bindings.

I use MPlayer (used to use X nor pretty much always use Extended) most often and don't have any issues seeking in any file unless the file is damaged.

I don't play back any WMV content. For me, WMV might as well be betamax. It really doesn't have great support anywhere. When I encode myself I will now usually use x264 (H.264) inside an MKV.

QuickTIme player sucks, even with Perian, so I don't usually use that exept for look at the properties of a video file - since MPlayer and VLC show jack-all about the content being played.

I'll be giving Movist a try, thanks for the info Bitt. I've always recommended MPlayer (X or Extended) to everyone else, maybe this will change now.

Most of the programs mentioned will (or used to) work on PPC minis. The issue you will have is likely the processing power to decode HD video. I don't believe any of the programs use any hardware acceleration.

VLC and mplayer both use hardware acceleration on Linux. I imagine they might also on OS/X.

Cheers

Until you pointed this out, I had never really noticed. Guess I got used to the default in Quicktime (pre X) and just never changed it. If you want autoplay, the following in Terminal will turn it on.

*edit* Or you can use Secrets preference panel to turn it on, along with giving you access to some other hidden preferences.


This seems to be true for MKV files too. Seems Quicktime really dislikes anything beyond basic containers, like AVI, MOV, or MP4. As for WMV, I don't have anything beyond a few obscure old commercials in that format, and none of the machines I use even have Flip4Mac anymore. Guess it's been a while since I've needed to play WMV. As for the keybindings, the media keys (F7-F9) work for Quicktime X, or you can use the arrow keys. Up and down are volume, left and right are slow seeks, Cmd-left/right sets a fast seek speed, and Option-Left/Right jumps between the beginning and end of the file.


This has been the case since 7.2, released in mid 2007.

I personally stick with Quicktime X + Perian for almost everything. Mplayer OS X Extended is my default for MKV, as Quicktime X was having some playback problems in general with my BluRay rips, and the loading problem was really bad when dealing with a 35gb file. I initially tried making VLC my MKV player, but it too was choking on the rips even after lots of preference tweaking. Thanks for the writeup though, hand't even heard of Movist or NicePlayer.

Sorry not to add much, but this was the primary reason I stopped using the Windows version too. That and the lack of true full-screen (this was a long while ago, I don't know if that have that or not now).

Again, sorry about the off-topic, but I swear by VLC in Windows and haven't had any problems that weren't attributed to poor encoding. The rest of the stuff I completely agree with and definitely applies to Windows, but it doesn't keep me from making it my sole video player.