I really don't like Quicktime, what else is there?

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I love it when it comes to streaming video but for downloaded videos, it sucks. I miss BSPlayer. What is like that? What player would allow me to watch .mkv files and turn subtitles on and off, as well? Or how it can play in the desktop background?
 
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I use VLC. Nothing real fancy but it does what its suppose to. it'll play a bunch of different formats including .mkv.
heres the link.

http://www.videolan.org/
 
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Another vote for VLC...
 
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If you want something more full-featured, check out Miro. it supports most formats (including MKV), and has a built-in search function that lets you search sites like YouTube, Google Video, and others. It also has a video channel guide for internet video websites.
 
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MPlayer without a doubt. It will properly play everything you throw at it, including stuff even VLC can't handle. And it remains the only player other than Quicktime using the Perian plugin that can display styled SSA subtitles in MKVs with the fonts/colors/styles they're supposed to have. You can get recent builds for OS X from here:

http://haque.net/software/mplayer/mplayerosx/builds/
 
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MPlayer without a doubt. It will properly play everything you throw at it, including stuff even VLC can't handle. And it remains the only player other than Quicktime using the Perian plugin that can display styled SSA subtitles in MKVs with the fonts/colors/styles they're supposed to have. You can get recent builds for OS X from here:

http://haque.net/software/mplayer/mplayerosx/builds/

I hated VLC on Windows, I'm very sure I'd hate it on a Mac. I'll try this one, does it support dual audio?
 

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I hated VLC on Windows, I'm very sure I'd hate it on a Mac. I'll try this one, does it support dual audio?

If you hate VLC on the PC then I am pretty sure you would not like it on the Mac either. I have it for playing some obscure videos but I do not like the interface.

Wish I could offer more help but for all I do Quicktime Pro with Perian and Flip4Mac works well for me. Never used BSPlayer. I will have to give it a try on my Windows machines.
 
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I hated VLC on Windows, I'm very sure I'd hate it on a Mac. I'll try this one, does it support dual audio?

Yes. Push # (not a typo, I do mean the octothorpe character, so it's Shift+3) to cycle through audio tracks, and press J to cycle through subtitle tracks. And pushing F will toggle Fullscreen, while pressing Q will quit the program. This is primarily a command-line usage program that just kind of had a GUI slapped on it, as you might be able to tell. More keyboard usage than mouse, but it's very intuitive and actually gets to be more convenient in my opinion (It's all I use on Linux). I should mention that to get MPlayer to get styled subtitle tracks to display the right way, you should go into "Miscellaneous" under the Preferences and type this into the Advanced parameters text box:

-*** -embeddedfonts -fontconfig -correct-pts

And for good measure, I'd put these in there somewhere too:

-vo gl -sid 0
The first option makes mplayer call the libass library, which is what makes the SSA/*** subtitles work. The -embeddedfonts tag works with that so it works on embedded fonts and not just external subtitle files. The -correct-pts tag isn't necessary all the time, but some people get weird problems with the sub timing if they don't use it. As for the other two, -vo gl makes mplayer use the OpenGL video output module, which I find scales subtitles for full screen more nicely. And -sid 0 makes it display the first subtitle track by default when it opens a video file, if there is one. And I suppose if you want to (though I've yet to see an instance where I needed it on an Intel Mac), you could add the -framedrop parameter.

Also, it seems I'm getting asterisked out. The parameter I keep trying to talk about is -a s s (without the spaces).

I'll also note that if your only problem with Quicktime is the inability to play MKVs and whatnot, Perian makes it able to do even complicated muti-subtitle-track, multi-audio-track MKVS (Flip4Mac needed for WMV stuff though). The only issue is that Apple didn't make Quicktime to be able to read MKVs at all, so the developers had to do a bit of hacking to make it work, so MKVs end up needing to be completely loaded up front before you can watch them. The current release also does something weird to H264 codec, but that's been fixed in the dev repositories. All in all, I trust MPlayer over Quicktime right now even though I can make Quicktime do what I needed to (I think its subtitle rendered is actually better when Perian is installed, to be honest).
 
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I dunno, I happen to like VLC on the Mac much more than I do on Windows.
 
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I dunno, I happen to like VLC on the Mac much more than I do on Windows.

One advantage the Mac version has is full screen controls... I was appalled to learn the Windows version didn't have them. Of course, Media Player Classic with CCCP on Windows is THE be-all, end-all media player in my opinion and there's no way VLC can compete with it even if it did adopt decent full screen controls. That said, it looks like the OP is a media enthusiast that needs his media player to do everything the way it's supposed to. That is to say, a MPC replacement. VLC fails there since it can't display softsub tracks in MKVs properly. MPlayer is currently the only player on OS X that can fill this role, though Quicktime with Flip4Mac and Perian plugins is getting there (I actually think it would be better than MPlayer if not for the MKV load time up front and the current bug with H264 in Perian).
 

eCh


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I like VLC and thats what i use for watching movies. It does what its supposed to do, and I havent had any probems with it.
 
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As my standalone player, I use MPlayer. I've used it on Linux for the past five years, and it's done everything I needed it to in stellar fashion. You can use the GUI version or the command line version or both. I like the command line version, but then I'm a shell freak. I just love the MPlayer keybindings. You can install it through MacPorts.
 
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If you want something more full-featured, check out Miro. it supports most formats (including MKV), and has a built-in search function that lets you search sites like YouTube, Google Video, and others. It also has a video channel guide for internet video websites.


I just downloaded Miro, and so far like it.
 
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DivX is a great media player. It can play almost any file format you can think of an works great for downloaded torrents.
 

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