New MBP owner few Qs

Well I bought a 13"mbp on black friday, saved a whole $101.00 woohoo.
This is my first mac, I've switched over from using PCs my whole life, I am liking it so far and starting to get used to the OS, the trackpad, keyboard etc...
I have a lot of videos, tv shows, ripped DVDs on a HD etc...and most of them won't play on here without the needed codecs, so I am just wondering what a good site is to download these codecs and what sites are recomended and trusted, I would prefer to download a single bulk codec pack if possible. I had GOM video player on my last PC and it basically played every format that I had. Thanks in advance.

 

VLC media player. Enough said.

 

Downloaded, tried it on 3 different formats that cover most of what I have that quicktime wouldn't play and they all worked and have looked great so far, thanks for your help!

 

I run most stuff through VLC, its great.... the only real extra codec I ever install for Quicktime is flip4mac for playing WMV files.

 

VLC is great, but I found it still stutters on high bit-rate 1080p videos on my 13" MBP no matter how I configure the preferences.

I've since been using MPlayer OSX Extended. Just go in to the preferences and set the buffer to max (256MB) and check the dual-core option. Haven't had any probs playing back 1080p video since.

Plex also comes highly recommended and it seems to play 1080p just fine too. It's the OSX port of XBMC but I find the interface takes a lot of effort for just simple video playback. It's good if you want to use your Mac as a true MediaCenter on an HDTV and are willing to put the time into organizing you folders and media files.

 

Hands down Mplayer OSX Extended. More specificially, this build. VLC just can't touch it if you care at all about subtitles or performance.

 

LOL, that's way too much trouble for a media player! Also, the latest build direct from the MPlayer site is newer than that DIY compile (10/18/09 vs 9/9/09).

 

That build is the only OSX video player that I know of that supports mkv ordered chapters. It also uses an updated font library. With step by step directions, a command line interface really isn't much more difficult to follow than an installation wizard.

 

I tried VLC but really didn't like the lack of customizability on the Mac, so I decided to use completely native to the OS and use Quicktime 7 (not that Quicktime X junk) and Perian for the codec support. Quicktime 7 can be found on the SL install disc under optional installs.

 

If you're missing codecs, get perian, it should install most of the codecs you need to play files in quicktime.
I've thrown tons of files and codecs at it, and have had no problems. If you do run into a file you cant play, use VLC, or similiar programs.

 

quicktime/perian sucks when it comes to mkv hd files. it takes a long time before the movie starts playing and it's almost impossible to jump forward or back.
It also doesn't use the cpu native h264 algorithm since apple are blocking it.

 

If you're looking to play mkv's I'd suggest Plex. It's been some of the best mkv playback for me for a long time. Sometimes VLC is better for 1080p content, but generally I leave all my MKV playback to plex.

 

Where do you see the option to check the buffer to max and the dual core option?

 

Setting the cache size is under the "Playback" panel of preferences. For the dual core option, I assume snork is talking about enabling multithreading under "Video"

 

^^^yep...sorry I had my "terminology" slightly off Buffer=cache and dual-core was referring to multithreaded