Xin is an iPhone developer. His wife Olivia and he are enjoying inspirations in their OLIVIDA Studio.
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VLC, MPlayer and Perian are three major choices for playing media files on Mac OS X, most otakus who download and watch a lot videos usually have all of them. If you don’t care about subtitle support, then MPlayer could be good choice, it has fast and reliable seek-n-play for MKV and other H264/X264 videos.
But when subtitle and performance came to a problem, the three players have very different routines to handle.
VLC
Cross-platform media player works on Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS, Solaris, Syllable, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, for various audio and video formats.
Website: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
- A sophisticated control panel to let you configure font render module, type face, style.
- Supports ASS/SRT formats
- Latest version, 0.9.3, seems to have the defects of seeking
- Older version, 0.8.6i, cannot support anti-aliasing font scaling
- Too many clicks in the complicated dialog for opening video and subtitle together, bad user experience
MPlayer
Cross-platform CLI player works on Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS, Solaris, Syllable, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD. On some platforms there are GUI front-ends.
Website: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
MPlayer OS X: http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/
MPlayer OS X Extended: http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/
- Very poor ASS support
- Overall poor subtitle support, MPlayer OS X Extended has some support for customizing font style
- Fast and reliable seeking
- Better H264/X264 framerate compared to VLC
Perian
A free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. For Mac OS X only.
Website: http://www.perian.org/
- Not as fast as MPlayer when play H264/X264
- No way to customize font style, but the default style is really polished and beautiful
- Mature ASS support
- Load subtitle automatically
Conclusion:
For overall experience, Perian is recommended for its relative mature subtitle support and reliable framerate.
Disclaimer:
This post is based on my experience with the three players, I use them mostly for playing MKV and other H264/X264 formats, in HD quality. My testing machine is a MacBook Pro 17-inch with Core 2 Duo 2.5G and 4G RAM.
Feel free to correct me in comments if you find anything wrong in this post.