Best Free Media Player for Mac

[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?

[jutting]

Hi,

I believe that some of your problems with Apple Quick Time can be solved by downloading and installing the free "Perian" software this provides Quick Time with native support for a broader range of additional media files and formats and it also installs a broad range of Codecs not provided with Quick Time, thus providing it with improved playback of various media types.

It is 100% free and can be downloaded from http://www.perian.org and many other reputable websites.

I also like the VLC Media Player and like yourself use it quite a lot as it can handle most media formats and is easy to use.

Another great 100% free Media Player I really love is called "Miro" it too can handle a wide range of media formats and is easy to use.

It handles Bit Torrent, 6,000 FREE Internet T.V. Feeds, Podcasts, HD Video, Quick Time, AVI, Divx, H.\264, Windows Media Files, RSS Feeds and almost every other major type of media file format frequently used.

Miro can also download and play You Tube and other FLV(flash format) Video files in HD and it automatically converts them into the mp4 format which many media players can play easily, so you will not have the hassle of using media file format conversion software if you wish to play the files using most other media players.

I strongly suggest you give "Miro" a try, you can download it from http://www.getmiro.com and many other reputable websites.

Please note that earlier versions of "Miro" did have a few problematic bugs in the software, But I am pleased to say the latest version of "Miro" is much improved and I have not had any problems at all when using the new version.

Anyway I hope these suggestions help you with your problems.

[mr6n8]

I do not have a Mac, but have suggested Perian to a number of Mac users and they have all been happy with it. I would also like to add that it is open source.

I had tried Miro on my XP and had severe CPU issues and found it used quite a bit of memory. I'll give this latest version another try when I redo the Best Free Bittorrent Client.

Thanks
Steve

[George]

Both sound good. Will definitely try Perian on my Mac.

In regards to Miro, I tried it on my Vista Home 32Bit - big disappointment. It didn't do anyhting for me. It took ages to start up, a simple File-Open of an MPG file did nothing. None of the downloads worked and the fact that it is bloated with useless stuff and constantly phoning somebody on the internet was reason enough to remove it. But maybe that is related to Vista.

[christoph]

Miro:

Nope, I had a very similar experience both on Mint and XP Pro, it does absolutely nothing I'm interested in, and its behaviour toward the net is hardly tameable. At least I couldn't click that fast to prevent it from stopping downloading stuff...

[Anna Brooks]

Hi! Just want to let you know that there is a new free media player for Mac- Elmedia Player http://mac.eltima.com/media-player.html

[garth]

Originally Posted by Anna Brooks

Hi! Just want to let you know that there is a new free media player for Mac- Elmedia Player http://mac.eltima.com/media-player.html

I see the free version doesn't have a full screen playback mode available, and so i don't really see how it could compete with media players mentioned elsewhere on this thread. I'd find it difficult to gauge the playback quality of a media player if i couldn't view video in full screen.

[FrankO]

I have been very happy with MPlayerX available from the AppStore. Looks good and automatically goes to the next file in a series if it exists. Love that feature. Too bad VLC does not do that (as far as I know).

[trainx3000]

Still Think VLC is king. I had mkv files with multiple audio and video streams. Quicktime didn't have the codecs and Divx player was very clunky to use, especially on my hdtv setup (for some reason it would fullscrean to the laptop screen instead) Downloaded VLC and played the same file, and it worked beautifully.