Comments on: Movist: The Real Alternative to VLC for Mac

By: Mitur Binesderti

Mitur Binesderti — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:42:37 +0000

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/

By: mrblue

mrblue — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:00:26 +0000

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

By: Movist: The Real Alternative to VLC for Mac | Bangkok Mafia

Movist: The Real Alternative to VLC for Mac | Bangkok Mafia — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:33:22 +0000

[...] Movist: The Real Alternative to VLC for Mac [...]

By: And He Blogs » links for 2010-05-28

And He Blogs » links for 2010-05-28 — Fri, 28 May 2010 18:03:54 +0000

[...] Movist: The Real Alternative to VLC for Mac (tags: video mac software osx vlc player quicktime opensource movist) [...]

By: friendface

friendface — Fri, 07 May 2010 20:52:31 +0000

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?)

By: dude

dude — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 01:40:54 +0000

Best mkv player for mac! One of my mkv videos didnt play with vlc but worked perfectly with movist!

By: MplayerX: Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, Multi-Touch Powered Alternative to Movist and VLC

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:19:33 +0000

[...] Federico Viticci. In the past months we covered some interesting alternatives to VLC for Mac, like Movist and Mplayer OS X Extended, which sported really interesting features and playback support for [...]

By: Nutmeg7

Nutmeg7 — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:07:44 +0000

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!

By: Jakob Egger

Jakob Egger — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:05:38 +0000

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?

By: Jamshid

Jamshid — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:04:35 +0000

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.

By: Randy

Randy — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:09:43 +0000

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!

By: this is the samaBlog » Blog Archive » Gruber and the iPad

this is the samaBlog » Blog Archive » Gruber and the iPad — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:31:57 +0000

[...] play every format of video without issue isn’t lost on Gruber, who proceeds to link to a bit about a new alternative to the VLC player for the mac. The need for such a player is moot if you’re buying all your content from Apple. But nobody [...]

By: Janey

Janey — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:13:11 +0000

@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…

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:44:55 +0000

Nothing gets me excited about a new piece of software like a low resolution, Tiger-era application icon.

By: Rick Powell

Rick Powell — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:58:02 +0000

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.

By: Movist, un completo reproductor multimedia para Mac OS X

Movist, un completo reproductor multimedia para Mac OS X — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:12:40 +0000

[...] Via MacStories [...]

By: Federico Viticci

Federico Viticci — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:05:56 +0000

@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?

By: Deocliciano

Deocliciano — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:09:55 +0000

Thanks.
Watched last Naruto episode without major problem.
On my 20" iMac from late 2006 it worked fine.

I love the playlist feature.

By: links for 2010-02-06 « Crucial Thought

links for 2010-02-06 « Crucial Thought — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:02:22 +0000

[...] Movist: The Real Alternative to VLC for Mac 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. [...]

By: Randy

Randy — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 09:41:46 +0000

@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.

By: mlover

mlover — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 08:33:54 +0000

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

By: Tobias

Tobias — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:52:11 +0000

@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.

By: Tobias

Tobias — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:45:29 +0000

@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.

By: Sighlent

Sighlent — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:26:39 +0000

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.

By: Gregory

Gregory — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:26:22 +0000

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….

By: sean

sean — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:56:09 +0000

@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

By: sean

sean — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:52:44 +0000

@Tobias, that's quite strange, I've had very little problems with Movist and MKVs…

By: Federico Viticci

Federico Viticci — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:36:16 +0000

@Nutmeg7, Thanks for the heads up and the detailed comment. I'll surely look into it.

By: tjdoc

tjdoc — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:39:52 +0000

I agree. I love movist.
I also agree about your icon statement. Somebody needs to donate a decent icon for those guys.

By: Nutmeg7

Nutmeg7 — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:21:03 +0000

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.