Playing Multimedia Video files on Mac OS X

Playing Video files is an issue for most of the newbies because of missing Codecs.

If you know the know-how of the things, playing multimedia is a child’s play.

Playing Multimedia Video files is a easy task in Mac OS X. I’m going to explain with help of icons only. Click on them to visit their respective Homepage.

Option A : QuickTime Player with Perian

QuickTime Player is Apple’s software to play Video files. Like any other player it doesn’t support all codecs. So need Perian (a QuickTime component) that adds native support for many popular video formats. The ability to play movies on Apple Frontrow (with Apple Remote) makes QT the obvious choice on a Mac.

Note: Windows Media files are unsupported, use the Flip4Mac WMV Components.

Option B : VLC Player

VLC Player (Review) is not the first choice for Mac users as it’s quite unstable unlike their Windows version. But the developers have released a new Leopard version which is improved, plays any DVDs from any region and it handles HD movie files even better. It looks better than previous versions or Windows version.

Note: Real Media Files are unsupported.

Option C : MPlayer

It’s more a command-line player but got a good GUI for OS X. MPlayer is the only option on OS X to display MKVs with H264, AAC and ACC soft subtitles correctly. Plays all the major file formats which is a big plus.

I’m going with VLC player but if I’m on Apple Frontrow, then QT + Perian.

P.S: If you’re running Windows, then this guide: Playing media files without any issues (no more codec problems) which I wrote sometime back should help you.

Related Articles:

• How to Play High Definition (HD) Movies?
• Adding Subtitles to Movies
• VLC Player 0.8.4 Review
• Playing media files without any issues (no more codec problems)