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Wave Goodbye to VLC
Dec. 8th, 2006 01:30 amFor Mac users, VLC is nice and everything, but it's not the proper way to view movies on a Mac. That of course is Quicktime, the operating system layer for timed media. Going around it is just awkward. Use it, and you get all the benefits that proper operating system integration brings: Finder previews, better video acceleration, etc.
What you need:
Flip4Mac: a Microsoft sanctioned Quicktime component and codec for Windows Media Video. Microsoft's official WMV player sucks so badly that they just gave up and let someone else do it for them.
Perian: Quicktime codecs for Xvid, DivX, 3ivx, FLV and lots of other funny things. Also finally fixes Quicktimes support for variable bitrate audio in AVI files (ie, just about anything useful you might download in AVI format). VBR audio in AVI files actually breaks the spec of the format, so you could say Apple weren't really at fault here. But that's just silly talk.
Niceplayer.app: an open source replacement for Quicktime Player, that also happens to be a lot nicer. (As you might guess from the name).
Sadly, the one thing still missing is Matroska (mkv) playback. Neither the official builds of VLC nor Mplayer handle those correctly either. So we're not completely out of the woods yet.
This an be remedied (kind of) by downloading and building the source for MPlayer 1.0rc1, which seem to play Matroska videos with the audio properly synchronized.
What you need:
Flip4Mac: a Microsoft sanctioned Quicktime component and codec for Windows Media Video. Microsoft's official WMV player sucks so badly that they just gave up and let someone else do it for them.
Perian: Quicktime codecs for Xvid, DivX, 3ivx, FLV and lots of other funny things. Also finally fixes Quicktimes support for variable bitrate audio in AVI files (ie, just about anything useful you might download in AVI format). VBR audio in AVI files actually breaks the spec of the format, so you could say Apple weren't really at fault here. But that's just silly talk.
Niceplayer.app: an open source replacement for Quicktime Player, that also happens to be a lot nicer. (As you might guess from the name).
Sadly, the one thing still missing is Matroska (mkv) playback. Neither the official builds of VLC nor Mplayer handle those correctly either. So we're not completely out of the woods yet.
This an be remedied (kind of) by downloading and building the source for MPlayer 1.0rc1, which seem to play Matroska videos with the audio properly synchronized.
