Yesterday I wrote this post about MPlayer OS X Extended and many people in the comments and on Twitter told me I was wrong, that there was another alternative to VLC, and it wasn’t the app I talked about. It’s always a great thing when you guys suggest me new apps to try and write about.
The app is called Movist, is hosted (again) on Google Code and it’s media player for Mac OS X based on Quicktime and FFMpeg.
First, let me start with the thing I don’t like about it: the icon. What is that? Some 128px icon file found on Deviantart? But most all, why there’s “VLC” written on it? Come guys, ok for the open source thing, but you could use an original icon at least.
Anyway, Movist features a simple and minimal UI, pretty much like MPlayer does, with the control panel and playlist windows appearing as HUD panels. Seems like it’s a trend these days, but it’s ok nonetheless. From the control panel you can adjust video brightness, saturation, contrast and hue, change the play speed, adjust subtitles settings and sync. Simple and straighforward.
Movist has an excellent support for keyboard shortcuts (you can take a look at them in the menubar menus) but unfortunately there’s no support for adjusting audio on-the-fly in 50ms like VLC does with the F and G keys. Hopefully the devs will implement this in the next updates(though the project lacks updates from Decemeber).
Where Movist really outstands the competition is in file support. It’s the only app that played my .mkv files perfectly, even when VLC was crashing. Not to talk about .mp4 and .avi support, pretty obvious. Moreover, Movist plays .wmw files faster than Quicktime, and you can also switch from FFmpeg to Quicktime playback with a single click on a toolbar button. Awesome.
You were right about this application. Movist it’s a beautiful, minimal player, with great support for codecs and, most of all, huge room for improvement. You should go download it here, and enjoy your new media player for your Mac.
#1
That's what Peter said 7 months ago:
Movist is great!!!
Especially with this skin: http://tinyurl.com/ybyvy7t
[Reply]
#2
That's what Julia Altermann said 7 months ago:
Thanks for pointing it out, I had no idea the app existed. Will give it a try since VLC behaves funnily sometimes.
[Reply]
#3
That's what letube said 7 months ago:
Very light, very nice. I found it through iconpaper (nuala skin, seems not to work with v. 0.6.7). Iconpaper I heard about it here
[Reply]
#6
That's what Matt J said 7 months ago:
The Movist guys are (against the licensing) using <a href="http://www.macrabbit.com/goodies/">MacRabbit’s VLC icon set</a>.
[Reply]
Jakob Egger Reply:
February 9th, 2010
I believe that all these stupid licenses are pure crap. By reading this comment, you agree to my opinion.
PS: Maybe they asked for permission?
[Reply]
#8
That's what Jeffrey W. Baker said 7 months ago:
Crashed when I tried to cmd-h hide it while it was playing. *shrug*
[Reply]
Federico Viticci Reply:
February 5th, 2010
@Jeffrey W. Baker, I think that’s one of the known bugs.
[Reply]
#9
That's what Ryan said 7 months ago:
Hmm not impressed so far.
Crashed on first launch and then when I got it working I tried a few BlueRay and DVD films I’ve ripped. They were all out of sync with the sound which made it impossible to watch. In one that has subtitles it displayed subtitles from a completely different part of the film in the top area of the screen.
[Reply]
Federico Viticci Reply:
February 5th, 2010
@Ryan, That’s really weird Ryan, as it’s working just fine here. Which OS are you running?
[Reply]
Ryan Reply:
February 5th, 2010
@Federico Viticci,
Leopard 10.6.2 on an i7 iMac.
Just checked in VLC and everything works fine there. I’ll give their issues page a look, there are a couple entires there about audio/video syncing.
[Reply]
Janey Reply:
February 6th, 2010
@Ryan, interesting.. I’ve had no problems with it yet. You didn’t tell us what format and how you ripped the BluRay discs. Were they into MKV? I’ve generally had nothing but problems with MKV everywhere…
[Reply]
#10
That's what Jason said 7 months ago:
Great program. Accidentally noticed you can adjust the volume using an up-down two-finger swipe on a laptop trackpad
[Reply]
#11
That's what dan s. said 7 months ago:
Movist is great, the reason I started using it is because it was the only player I found that resumes playback of files where you stopped.
Other things to like is that is the only player with reasonable forwarding and rewinding mechanisms.
[Reply]
#12
That's what rand said 6 months ago:
Crashed constantly with random .wmv files downloaded from online (wowmovies.com or something similar) or created with wow (from a few years back). Both VLC and quicktime with plugins play these files no problem.
Tried about 10 different movies, all wmv and all crashed. Will try others when I head home from work, but these crashs and the icon that’s not theirs, is making it likely that it’ll be deleted.
[Reply]
#13
That's what sean said 6 months ago:
I’ve been using Movist for a number of months now and love it!
[Reply]
#15
That's what PS said 6 months ago:
I’m a big fan of Niceplayer personally.
Granted, it hasn’t been updated in a long time, but it works fine (especially with Perian codecs) installed. Super fast, minimal interface, ‘nice’
http://code.google.com/p/niceplayer/
[Reply]
Jay Tuley Reply:
February 5th, 2010
@PS, I’m actually going to start working on NicePlayer again real soon, I just got married this last fall and things we quite hectic in the year before the wedding and have had less free time since but things have settled down. One of the things NicePlayer has had for a while is a plugin architecture for different cocoa video engines and I’ve wanted it to be more flexible but the effort just compiling not to mention porting VLC or Mplayer is a bit much, but I’ve been looking at Movist source prior to this even, and its looking pretty easy to to package the movist rendering engine into a niceplayer plugin. And NicePlayer and Movist are both GPL licensed.
[Reply]
sean Reply:
February 6th, 2010
@Jay Tuley, one thing I really like about Movist is it’s handling of subtitles. For instance, when I have a 2 CD movie but only find a 1 CD subtitle, I can skip through the subtitles to re-sync it to match the second half of the movie… it’s a pain to do it but it’s nice to have the capability. Making it easier would be nice
[Reply]
Randy Reply:
February 6th, 2010
@Jay Tuley, That’s great news! I LOVE NicePlayer!
One of my favorite features is the full screen width scrub bar in all views (even full screen mode). This makes fine scrubbing on a long movie much easier. Perhaps even an iPhone UI trick could make scrubbing even easier! What happens is after you grab the scrubber, the further away you pull away perpindicularly, the more fine the contol gets. In other words, less seconds change per inch.
But still, it would be nicer to have a smooth continual multispeed fast forward/rewind mechanism. Kinda like QT. And speaking of QT, it would be neat to get the rounded corners too.
[Reply]
#17
That's what Tobias said 6 months ago:
Movist wasn’t fluid with any MKV I tried. VLC only works well for streaming. MPlayer Extended has way too many bugs. I’ll stick with the command line mplayer. Sad but true.
[Reply]
sean Reply:
February 6th, 2010
@Tobias, that’s quite strange, I’ve had very little problems with Movist and MKVs…
[Reply]
#18
That's what Nutmeg7 said 6 months ago:
What about Plex?
I started out using MPlayer years & years ago. It worked fine for basic stuff, but lacked advanced features & support for the newest formats, so I started using VLC where MPlayer failed. VLC had trouble with higher-quality, processor-intensive vids on my old G4, though, so when I finally got an IntelMac a little over a year ago, I switched to Plex. It’s not a minimalist player per se. It has a bunch of nifty features & add-ons that you can use if you like, (like plug-ins for Hulu, Comedy Central, Pandora, nearly all the major TV networks, NPR, etc.) but those features don’t get in your way if you don’t need them & still it seems to be a more lightweight player than VLC. Haven’t tried Movist yet (I will now) but so far Plex has played everything I throw at it, including some high bitrate 720p MKVs that VLC choked on. That’s with a 2GHz Core 2 Mini, so you don’t need fancy hardware. I’ve tried AVIs, MKVs, MP4/M4vs, a few WMVs, and AVCHD vids, some with subtitles, all worked fine. Can’t remember if I’ve tried It’s the only player I know of that plays 5.1 audio in MP4s. They’ve got pretty extensive support docs & forums, too.
It’s free & I use it every day, so I figured it was about time I gave them a shout out somewhere. It’s a very well-done little app, IMO.
[Reply]
Federico Viticci Reply:
February 6th, 2010
@Nutmeg7, Thanks for the heads up and the detailed comment. I’ll surely look into it.
[Reply]
Tobias Reply:
February 6th, 2010
@Federico Viticci, Plex lightweight, at 200MB? The UI may work on a TV but is excruciating when sitting at the computer. It also gets styled subtitles wrong and took ages to load the file I tested with. Thanks, but still SVN CLI mplayer for me.
[Reply]
Nutmeg7 Reply:
February 24th, 2010
I don’t think anyone was arguing that Plex is a "lightweight" player, but seriously? You’re complaining about 200MB?
Anyway, for those who find the default UI in Plex annoying, go to Settings -> System -> Input Devices -> Enable Mouse. The UI bugged me, too, at first, so I turned that on…though TBH now that I’m used to the UI, I rarely use the mouse.
@Federico: Thanks for the Movist recommendation. I’m sticking with Plex as my primary player (for the extra features ‘cuz that’s what works for me), but occasionally I’ve used VLC when I wanted to downmix 5.1 audio to 2.0. VLC was pretty choppy playing this vid I was watching tonight (720p/3,352kbps/60fps), so I tried Movist & it is perfectly smooth on the same vid. This might well be the last time I ever use VLC. Movist FTW!
[Reply]
#19
That's what tjdoc said 6 months ago:
I agree. I love movist.
I also agree about your icon statement. Somebody needs to donate a decent icon for those guys.
[Reply]
#20
That's what Gregory said 6 months ago:
Hmm.. nice UI, but other than that I found it uniformly poor.
Crashed twice, then displayed an overlay that said there was a "Windows Media Player Codec Error" (while the video was playing fine I might add) and that it would "redirect me to the windows media website"… except I was just playing an mpeg4 avi.
Then it crashed… again.
Stolen icon, crashes a lot, buggy, won’t play back common formats correctly?
It’s barely an alpha release. Terrible software, and I’m no fan of VLC either….
[Reply]
Federico Viticci Reply:
February 6th, 2010
@Gregory, That’s really weird, everything is working fine. Perhaps it’s your system, and you might want to look into the known issues page?
[Reply]
#21
That's what Sighlent said 6 months ago:
Plex has always handled 1080 MKV files better than any other application I’ve tried, not to mention the wealth of other functionality that Nutmeg7 mentioned. Harry Potter 5 has a sequence at the end of shattered glass flying through the air, which totally choked in VLC, however in Plex it played flawlessly. Thats about all I have to contribute.
[Reply]
Tobias Reply:
February 6th, 2010
@Sighlent, don’t compare anything to VLC. It’s made for streaming and works different from all other players. Because of that they had to adjust a lot of the codecs, which is why it doesn’t work very well. Except for streaming.
[Reply]
Jamshid Reply:
February 9th, 2010
Yup, Plex handled a 1080p bluray mkv just fine on my macbook pro. VLC and this Movist app choked.
Btw a nice feature of Plex over Front Row, iTunes, and Flash is that it’s happy to play a video full screen on your second monitor while you use your laptop screen to browse the web or whatever.
[Reply]
#22
That's what mlover said 6 months ago:
For older G4 Mac, there is nothing that beat the older 0.86f version of VLC to play most avi and divX files and have the necessary speed to show them. All newer VLC version have speed problems
[Reply]
#24
That's what Deocliciano said 6 months ago:
Thanks.
Watched last Naruto episode without major problem.
On my 20" iMac from late 2006 it worked fine.
I love the playlist feature.
[Reply]
#26
That's what Rick Powell said 6 months ago:
Movist also plays RealMedia and .flv files, handles external subtitles a hell of a lot better than VLC, plays Windows Media faster than QuickTime player (I don’t understand that one at all), will restart a movie where you left off, allows you to configure fast-forwarding and rewinding with the left and right arrow keys (a more sensible behavior for these keys that frame by frame advance a la QuickTime Player), actually lets you change the aspect ratio unlike QuickTime Player which states you can but then doesn’t, puts subtitles beneath the movie when you specify letterboxing, will automatically form a playlist from similarly named movies in the same directory, and on and on.
The developers have given much more thought to how people actually watch movies than QuickTime Player or VLC.
Also, mkv files play fine for me if I simply quit some other apps. On a Macbook pro.
I never use QuickTime Player anymore and rarely use VLC, except when I have a damaged avi that movist chokes on.
[Reply]
#27
That's what Chris said 6 months ago:
Nothing gets me excited about a new piece of software like a low resolution, Tiger-era application icon.
[Reply]
#29
That's what Randy said 6 months ago:
Holy crap. I am kicking myself for not using Movist months ago! Why? It scrubs VERY FAST. Now I have Perian & Flip4Mac codecs installed so I’m not sure if that is necessary. I’ll test that out later by removing them.
Even MKV & WMV, you name it. I tried almost all. They all play smooth instantly and can scrub straight to the end middle or any part and not even blink even on my modest early 2009 MacMini! I am sold! Every other player I’ve tried (probably all that there are) took a while to "load" hi def wmv or mkv before I could scrub very far into movie and no matter what it always took so long for it to "catch up" and smooth out. I always thought it was my entry level MacMini’s hardware limitations. This is great news!
[Reply]
#31
That's what dude said 4 months ago:
Best mkv player for mac! One of my mkv videos didnt play with vlc but worked perfectly with movist!
[Reply]
#32
That's what friendface said 3 months ago:
Most comparisons between media players neglect an important part.
How to navigate/skip/jump while watching. I get the impression people start watching and then sit back until the movie finishes. Myself I watch a lot of TV episodes and movies in avi form and I do a lot of jumping, skipping entire subplots in shows and so on.
Thats why I like mplayer because the response in video and sound is immediate, theres no lag, and I get 10 second or 1 minute jumps with 1 finger on the arrow keys which is perfect. Front row for example is horrible for searching; 5 minute jumps. In VLC the short jumps are too short, 5 seconds and the default keys to complicated (3 keys to jump back when you miss a dialogue line?)
[Reply]
#35
That's what mrblue said 3 weeks ago:
Hello,
I think this is the best ever list for mac video player I have seen, also all of them are free to download http://forums.techarena.in/guides-tutorials/1356879.htm
[Reply]
#36
That's what Mitur Binesderti said 4 days ago:
If you’re trying to play MKV files with GPU acceleration try MPlayer Extended. It’s pretty buggy so it’s my player of last resort but if you have a video that’s skipping and pixelating it works best and it’s free.
http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/
[Reply]