ToasterMage Wrote:vlc is a terrible media player why do people still use it.

Funny, VLC is the first thing I installed on my new mac.
I've never had any problems with it, and it plays pretty much everything out of the box.

VLC IS a heap of crap and isn't really actively developed for OSX anymore (the nightly build tree breaks for weeks at a time with no one caring).

Get MPlayer OSX Extended or at least Perian. I only keep VLC around for the odd file that doesn't work in anything else (very uncommon). The one Toastermage linked to is very old and out of date (last build 5 years ago!).

http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/ is what you want.

I've seen a few people, mostly on this forum, say that VLC sucks but I don't remember anyone ever giving a reason. Is it unstable? Poor playback quality? Don't like the interface? Resource hog? Don't like the software license? Stupid traffic cone icon?

I don't think VLC is the greatest program of all time, but I've never really had any problems with it. Obviously the lack of support for OSX is not good, but for Windows and Linux, what exactly are the main problems people have?

Maybe just the mac guys think it sux.

kazelee Wrote:Maybe just the mac guys think it sux.

The Mac build probably isn't as good as the PC build, considering that the Mac build is basically an afterthought without enough devs.

I don't like it because the UI is awful/unpredictable (it is only recently that one could disable the playlist window without having it reappear on relaunch), and it's pretty unstable (crashes regularly, especially when playing mkv) and slow compared to the competition.

The best player in terms of interface and stability is quicktimeX + perian, but it's a bit too basic and perian doesn't have quite as good codec support, so I settle for mplayer osx extended.

i have vlc on a mac playing My Girl japanese subs and everything else... I possibly changed the default encoding to simplified chinese unix to get it to work.

Jarvik7 Wrote:VLC IS a heap of crap and isn't really actively developed for OSX anymore (the nightly build tree breaks for weeks at a time with no one caring).

Get MPlayer OSX Extended or at least Perian. I only keep VLC around for the odd file that doesn't work in anything else (very uncommon). The one Toastermage linked to is very old and out of date (last build 5 years ago!).

http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/ is what you want.

Hmmm, I just tried "MPlayer OSX Extended", and can't say I'm overly impressed.
I found 3 bugs within 5 minutes of using it, including one that requires me to "force quit" the application every time I play one set of videos (completely locks up after about 5 seconds into the video).

On the plus side, the subtitles look MUCH better than VLC, once you set "Guess Encoding" to "Chinese" (no Japanese option).

PS: Actually I just realised that VLC has been randomly crashing for me on MKV files (perhaps 1 in 10-15 times I play a video), but overall it's been pretty stable for me.
I'll probably stick with VLC for now.

OS X unforunately has HUGE issues with certain .mkv files, and there's no fix for it.

Other than that, Perian and Quicktime Player is probably your best option on a mac.

avparker Wrote:Hmmm, I just tried "MPlayer OSX Extended", and can't say I'm overly impressed.
I found 3 bugs within 5 minutes of using it, including one that requires me to "force quit" the application every time I play one set of videos (completely locks up after about 5 seconds into the video)..

Try using the beta (currently at test3). The only problem I've had in the past few months was a video that ran choppy for some reason (same video crashed VLC so I used QTX+perian).