[George]

The Best Free Media Player for Windows is a very busy category on our main site. The preferences of our readers differ a lot. I wonder what the sitution for Mac is in that regard.

I am using a MacMini with my HDTV because it fits so easily in my TV stand and the video driver creates a great picture color and contrast wise.

I store family videos and backups of some DVDs on USB drives. But when it comes to playing them it badly fails because the Apple Quick Time player simply sucks with most of the popular codecs. Usability of that player is also a bummer since it is so different from Windows based applications. (I am not taking a side here, just saying that it is).

Anyways, without VLC Media Player the MacMini would be useless to me in regards to media playing. VLC is available for Mac as well and its a relieve when you wanna play video files. I just love it, it is my first choice media player for Mac.

Another great choice is XBMC Media Center, however, it targets a different user group. It is a full screen media application specifically for large screen (HDTV) use. It is simply beautiful from a graphics perspective and offers a lot of media organization. It played everything I gave it to play, but... Yeah, well, there always seems to be a 'but'. The player embedded in XBMC does not have a positioning slider. Damn, what were they thinking?

I wonder if there are other free players out there. Are there?