Anime fans/Media Enthusiasts... I need your help!

[Discerptor]

Hey guys, it's been a while.

Anyway, I've recently gotten back into the swing of getting fansubbed anime in large amounts. On Windows, Media Player Classic combined with the CCCP (codec pack, not Soviet Union ) let me play back, well... everything. The trouble now is that I realize OS X's media players have a lot of limitations. The files I'm downloading, especially newer ones, tend to have a few issues that I'd like to know if anyone's resolved:

- H.264 encoded with x264 is often completely unplayable in Quicktime because Quicktime only supports 2 out of the 4 flavors of H.264 out there. I can usually solve this with VLC or MPlayer, but those two tend to be worse at the whole CPU usage thing than Quicktime. Furthermore...

- VLC cannot do subtitle files correctly! Especially softsubs (SSA/*** formats). If there are ever more than one line of text that are supposed to be on screen at the same time, VLC just makes them overlap with each other. This is a shame, since VLC is one of the only two programs I have that can open MKV files. This leaves me with MPlayer, which can indeed do subtitles and the H.264 thing but is very bad at using the CPU efficiently. There is no reason a 720p animated feature should be dropping frames EVERYWHERE and doing it in such an ugly fashion. I watch 720p movie trailers all the time and they're never that bad.

Anyway, I've been doing QT component research and have so far made my Quicktime able to do MKV containers and VOBsub subtitle files. Unfortunately, QTsub component is not complete yet so it can't do SSA, and the main effort to get QT to do other kinds of H.264 is still in the beginning stages. I may be able to eventually get Quicktime to do everything I need, but as of now, MPlayer is really my only choice and it's not good with the whole smooth playback performance thing when it comes to HD video.

Therefore, what I'm asking is if anyone knows whether there are more complete QT components I do not not know of, or if there is some way to improve MPlayer's performance (build from source perhaps?). Well, that's all. I look forward to any responses.

 

[kevin_msu]

Hey guys, it's been a while.

Anyway, I've recently gotten back into the swing of getting fansubbed anime in large amounts. On Windows, Media Player Classic combined with the CCCP (codec pack, not Soviet Union ) let me play back, well... everything. The trouble now is that I realize OS X's media players have a lot of limitations. The files I'm downloading, especially newer ones, tend to have a few issues that I'd like to know if anyone's resolved:

- H.264 encoded with x264 is often completely unplayable in Quicktime because Quicktime only supports 2 out of the 4 flavors of H.264 out there. I can usually solve this with VLC or MPlayer, but those two tend to be worse at the whole CPU usage thing than Quicktime. Furthermore...

- VLC cannot do subtitle files correctly! Especially softsubs (SSA/*** formats). If there are ever more than one line of text that are supposed to be on screen at the same time, VLC just makes them overlap with each other. This is a shame, since VLC is one of the only two programs I have that can open MKV files. This leaves me with MPlayer, which can indeed do subtitles and the H.264 thing but is very bad at using the CPU efficiently. There is no reason a 720p animated feature should be dropping frames EVERYWHERE and doing it in such an ugly fashion. I watch 720p movie trailers all the time and they're never that bad.

Anyway, I've been doing QT component research and have so far made my Quicktime able to do MKV containers and VOBsub subtitle files. Unfortunately, QTsub component is not complete yet so it can't do SSA, and the main effort to get QT to do other kinds of H.264 is still in the beginning stages. I may be able to eventually get Quicktime to do everything I need, but as of now, MPlayer is really my only choice and it's not good with the whole smooth playback performance thing when it comes to HD video.

Therefore, what I'm asking is if anyone knows whether there are more complete QT components I do not not know of, or if there is some way to improve MPlayer's performance (build from source perhaps?). Well, that's all. I look forward to any responses.

well... if you can't get a recommendation from anyone here on what to use, it may not exist.
may i suggest Parallels or bootcamp and running it that way until there is a Mac solution to your problem? Unless the computer in your Profile is your only one. then it sounds like you have a switching issue.
i have similar issues with radio streaming. it just doesn't work in Mac. but parallels runs it fabulously and if you max out your RAM, its all good and there is no slow down of any kind.

 

[lifeafter2am]

I use mplayer from darwin-ports. It was what I use on my Linux machine, so I knew it would work. And yes, I did build it from source, and I really dont see any performance issues on my machine.

--lifeafter2am

 

[Discerptor]

I use mplayer from darwin-ports. It was what I use on my Linux machine, so I knew it would work. And yes, I did build it from source, and I really dont see any performance issues on my machine.

--lifeafter2am

Ah, thank you for verifying that. I guess it is worth it to build from source after all. I'd heard some stuff about the standard OS X installer version working a lot more slowly than what you get when you build it from source, but I had to be sure. Thanks.

Update: I installed darwin-ports and mplayer is building as I type. I wish I had known about darwin ports before! It pretty much automates the building process, saving me a lot of typing! We'll see how this turns out.