What is the best app for running videos on mac?

What is the best app for running videos on mac, meaning it can play lots of formats?

 

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

 

The built-in quicktime player is pretty good

 

The built in Quicktime player is only good if you are willing to spend the $18 or something to unlock it to Pro. Without full screen support it pretty much sux.

 

I heard that in Leopard, QT standard will offer full-screen. So tough it out for 3 months instead of coughing up the $...

It depends on what types of encodings and containers you watch.

VLC in general is fast and works well - full compatibility with Apple Remote as well, and tons of features.

On the other hand, if you watch videos with subtitles, VLC cannot handle softsubs well - or should I say at all.

Alternatively, Quicktime itself, like Windows Media Player on Windows, is horrible at compatibility, but you can add plugins and codecs to it.

Perian is pretty much your single fixit for Quicktime that'll let it play just about everything out there. However, Quicktime needs to fully load the entire file before it allows you to play with all features enabled, so if you're watching a 4GB Blu-Ray Rip, you'll be sitting there for 15 min with your system going overtime (fans will kick on ) trying to load the thing. QT is also a huge resource hog while loading too.

Niceplayer is also an option - it also works with Perian. It also allows you to easily combine multiple audio tracks at the same time and selectively add/delete video tracks.

Alternatively, you could try mplayer - it's up to RC1 now, and there are private builds out there that are fairly robust, or you could build your own. But with X11 dependencies, it's not the fastest thing out there, especially for huge high res movies.

For my own needs, I use a combination of all of the above depending on the type of file I'm watching. I've found that even if a certain media file will crash 2 or 3 of the 4 players above (which has happened! Niceplayer and mplayer are especially prone to crashes) at least one will be able to play it.

Of course, if you have a file with multiple language subtitles (i.e. more than 4-5), you'll have a hard time finding a player that works. Mplayer will probably crash. Niceplayer and Quicktime might choose the right file, but you'll have a hard time picking it and reading it. VLC will work just fine, except its subs will overlap and look horrible.

The only other alternative is to use other nonnative software, such as Xine or MPC.

 

I use this version of Mplayer OSX: http://mplayer.andiyar.com/files/MPlayer-universal.dmg
And it's played almost every video file I've thrown at it faster than VLC. Even x264. It only really had problems with one XviD file I tried.

The above build worked fine for files with multiple language subs (about 3-4?) but I don't know if 5+ is the special number. Also, it displays all subtitles I've thrown at it fine. The only problem is getting them to work initially in which case I just copied over the arial.ttf font from my Windows XP boot camp drive and set it up to use it and now it all works perfectly. I've had so many subtitle issues with all these other video players it's rediculous how bad support is for most of them.

 

Yea, I also use andiyar and nonezumi's build. I found it works fine for most, but it still has problems with certain files unfortunately, where'd it just crash on startup.

Also, for huge h264 files (like 4GB-size), at high resolutions, it starts to slow down to the point it's not watchable

 

buy quicktime pro, it is easily worth the money, being able to use it as a little mini editor is pretty useful, not to mention being able to simply download HD movie trailers and do many other things. it is worth the $29 or whatever it costs.

I must admit, it is pretty dumb for the base quicktime to not allow for Full Screen play back.

all the main Codecs like divx and all of that are available for quicktime.

A combination of Quicktime Pro and VLC is a good idea.

 

The latest update to Quicktime 7.2 standard released today for Tiger already lets you view full-screen mode.

 

Quicktime is still meh, even with full screen.

Go VLC.