With a GUI player I have to navigate menus with a pointer to switch displays and sound, or to select sound and subtitle language, subtitle delay, contrast and brightness, etc.
Mpv also integrates with youtube-dl. You can tune the buffer size to never require pausing because of internet problems, select whatever quality with no auto switching like the native youtube client. Supports playlists and everything.
[1] https://iina.io
[2] https://github.com/iina/iina
[3] Written in Swift and designed with modern macOS (10.11+) in mind
It has clean and well organised preferences that come with sensible defaults.
I have used it for over three years and not had a crash or bug with it ever. Never failed to play a file, even partially downloaded via torrent (so just random fragments of the file it was able to handle properly rather than just error/crash out).
But what I love most is that it is just a media player. It doesn't try to be a capture tool or converter or editor. It plays video and music files and does that job superbly.
If you're a macOS user I can't think of a better media player out there. Plus it is not only free but open source!
There is also mpc-qt, which replicates the classic MPC-HT UI, but with libmpv as the backend. [3]
Personally I found mpv's defaults sane enough to not need a GUI for it, but I did release an unofficial version to the Windows 10 Store with a wrapper that adds file association and macOS-style single instance support. [4][5]
[1] https://github.com/stax76/mpv.net
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9N64SQZTB3LM
[3] https://github.com/mpc-qt/mpc-qt
You'll also find that even on the most powerful of Macs that it will struggle with higher resolution video playback that QuickTime Player, VLC, or straight mpv play without issue.
> For and only for modern macOS.
> IINA is born to be a modern macOS application,
As a policy I stay away from all software whose primary marketed feature is being “modern,” which I wholly consider to be a meaningless term.
IINA is born to be a modern macOS application, from its framework to the user interface. It adopts the post-Yosemite design language of macOS and keeps up the pace of new technologies like Force Touch, Touch Bar, and Picture-in-Picture.
Years ago when VLC was the rage, I could open any video or sound file I wanted in QuickTime Player with an array of plug-ins including Persian, Flip4Mac and a couple others I’ve long since forgotten. That served me well until it became impossible to install and use QuickTime 7 on a modern Macintosh.
IINA quickly filled that hole for me, and was a solid upgrade over a player I never asked much from, readily replicating all the features I cared about and throwing in a few more. If all you want is a media player that lets you double click a file and play it back, IINA is the best there is on the Macintosh today.
- Running videos off of my NAS routinely introduced audio lag even on very small videos (less than 1h long). My LAN and WAN are at 1GbE and my NAS uses ZFS with very adequate caching setup.
- Crashes 2-3 times a week. Pretty rare but annoying nonetheless because I usually leave one huge video to play for the entire day.
- On iOS and macOS it forgets the position of a video played very recently. That one is rather new, <6 months. Still not cool.
Eventfully enough was enough and I moved to MPV just two weeks ago. Rock-solid so far, never lags the audio, snappier animations, quick keys to jump between chapters -- it's all good stuff so far.
I heard a while ago that the VLC team is struggling with a huge rewrite. As a programmer I sympathize but as a user I can't excuse them. Few months of a rocky ride is fine but VLC definitely is not how I remember it from the past, during the last 2 or so years.
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Off-topic: can somebody recommend a tool that scans your videos and downloads metadata and posters for them? We're talking movies, shows, game playthroughs, music videos, and others.
I haven't see such issue in any video players since OG MPC days.
After some quick googling I did find some solutions involving changing some video renderer settings manually, but IMO it's unacceptable for any media player on mainstream OS/hardware.
I do still respect VLC as an OSS project though, they made plenty of important contributions to the open-source A/V field.
I use IINA now (linked elsewhere in this thread) and it's amazing, the rest of the internet seems to have found out about it years ago.
2. Plex for a proprietary solution with good integration and remote access
3. tinyMediaManager for a minimal viable product solving your needs
Report bugs and you may end up getting mocked instead of thanked.
When I reported that on my hardware I need -vo vaapi to get full hd playback without frame drops and stuttering, I was told to get better hardware. They wouldn't even entertain the thought that maybe -vo gpu (their default) needs more work. All I asked them to is to document in the man page that if you get stuttering video with -vo gpu you might want to try -vo vaapi.
This was a few years ago and apparently they did work on -vo gpu in the mean time, but they will never get rid of the stench that episode left.
Since then -vo vaapi has been deliberately crippled. It can not display subtitles and gives a deprecation warning when you try to use it.
It's too bad that mplayer has fallen into disrepair. Didn't they also suffer from toxic dev infighting? I seem to remember even a fork of ffmpeg because the other devs needed to get away from one particularly toxic dev.
Coincidence or what?
