When you need to play a video on your Mac, what do you do? Which app do you open? If you’re new to macOS, you might just double-click on the media file and it’s likely that QuickTime Player will start up — good enough for the most common tasks.
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Free AVI Player for Mac. Free AVI Player for Mac provides the easiest and best way to play AVI and other frequently-used video formats like MP4, MKV, MOV, FLV and more with high visual and sound quality. Play 4K/8K/1080p/720p AVI, MP4, MOV videos and audio. Play AVI, MP4, MKV, MOV, MP3, AAC with lossless audio effect.
Soon though you’re bound to feel QuickTime’s limitations. It might be that you’ve transferred a file from your camera that’s not supported, or you want to watch a foreign movie with external subtitles. All this is difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish with QuickTime Player. You need to upgrade.
More top-notch media players for you
Instead of having one VLC player alternative, get an entire collection. Setapp is a Mac apps subscription that gives you a large choice.
- Devices and Mac OS X version. VLC media player requires Mac OS X 10.7.5 or later. It runs on any 64bit Intel-based Mac. Previous devices are supported by older releases.
- 100% FREE Video Player for Mac (macOS Catalina Ready!) Try something fast and different! Cisdem Video Player is a free video and audio player that plays just about any media file (Including 5K and Full HD 1080P video) you can throw at it. No need for additional codecs, plugins.
- Follow the instructions to download AVI player for Mac and start. Go to the official site and click on the “Download AVI player for Mac”. When the download is done, install the package properly. Launch the free AVI player for Mac and add AVI content.
- Free Mac Media Player. Free Mac Media Player – The best free all- in-one media player for Mac users. It assists you to watch any movie/video/audio files on your Mac smoothly with lossless video/audio effect.
What Makes VLC Player For Mac Good
From the first moments of looking for a better media player, VLC for Mac is going to show up in search results again and again. The app is free, has good ratings, and seems to be universally loved. There’s even a version for your iPhone (and nearly every other operating system in existence). What’s not to like?
The official story of VLC player goes back to 1996, when a few students of École Centrale Paris in France developed the app as their academic project. Back then, they called it VideoLAN Client (VLC for short). As VLC player got more and more recognition and became popular worldwide, the original developers released the code under the open-source license, so that anyone could fix bugs and contribute new features.
By now, VLC player is available on Windows, macOS, iOS, Apple TV, Linux, Android, Chrome OS, and Xbox One. The only question left is how to find a VLC for Mac download.
How to get a VLC download for Mac
Unfortunately, due to some licensing issues, VLC player for Mac isn’t available on the App Store (although the iOS version is). With a simple Google search you’ll find that lots of third-party websites offer you VLC for Mac downloads — but beware! Such download files are often infected with various kinds of malware looking to find an easy way into your computer.
The only option that’s 100% safe is to find a VLC download for Mac on its official website:
Go to videolan.org/vlc
Click Download VLC
Double-click the .dmg file in your Downloads folder
Move the VLC icon into Applications
With regards to technical requirements, VLC player is supported by any 64-bit Intel-based Mac that runs macOS 10.7.5 or later (the latest one is 10.15). This covers 99% of Macs in use nowadays. And even if you need to make VLC player work with ancient Macs, older VLC versions are available for download from the official website as well.
To play a video on VLC for Mac:
Open VLC
Either drag the video you like onto the app’s window or go to File ➙ Open File… ➙ select the video ➙ Open
One of the most beloved VLC media player features is adding and fine-tuning external subtitles. When you’ve downloaded the .srt subtitle file you want to use:
In the menu bar of the VLC player, click Subtitles
Add Subtitle File… ➙ select the file ➙ Open
In the same Subtitles menu you can change the text size, thickness, color as well as the background color
With so much to offer, why would anyone choose any other app for their videos than VLC player? True, while QuickTime Player struggles with nearly every video encounter, VLC for Mac handles all the basics pretty well. But there’s so much more to discover in the land of video-playing features: multiple subtitles, audio extractions, ad-free web playback, AirPlay streaming, etc. Let’s see which VLC alternative for Mac offers it all.
Stream anything anytime with Elmedia Player
If VLC media player for Mac is a shell you can open content in, Elmedia Player is a full-on entertainment center. Get any videos you want anytime, thanks to its streaming functionality. The app is able to download YouTube directly to your Mac or play videos instantly using its web-browser extension, which allows to bypass all the ads.
Moreover, any downloaded videos can then be easily played on your AirPlay-enabled devices — watch a movie on a big screen with Apple TV, for example, without the need for USB drives or awkward cables. And while VLC media player might get stuck playing HD videos on a big screen, Elmedia will sail through them seamlessly with the help of hardware-accelerated decoding.
Play, stream, and download video
Get Elmedia Player, a perfect replacement for VLC, which has a streaming feature and a browser extension for direct downloads.
Elmedia Player, simply put, has everything you’ll ever need not to get bored. Even when videos become too much, you can extract audio files and save them as MP3 for easy on-the-go listening.
Gain full video control with Movist Pro
As good as Elmedia Player is, the ultimate VLC alternative for Mac could be a mighty 4K movie player called Movist Pro.
Movist Pro not only effortlessly decodes any video you come across (with an option to select decoders manually if needed) but also lets you configure the perfect video-watching scenario, including the quality and the size of each file.
If you want to watch a high-dynamic-range (HDR) video, but your screen doesn’t support it, the colors will show up dull and faded. Movist Pro features a built-in HDR tone-mapping technology that automatically adjusts colors to what they are supposed to be.
While nearly every VLC alternative for Mac lacks powerful subtitle management that VLC is known for, Movist Pro takes it a step further with support for multiple subtitles at once — invaluable when you’re trying to learn a new language or watching a movie with a bunch of international friends.
Best Movie Player For Mac
Finally, using the Movist Pro Safari extension, you can watch any video right from your browser window, with any of the above personal settings already specified.
How to start with Movist Pro? One step only: simply drag and drop your video onto the app and enjoy.
The best VLC alternative for Mac
So while some might argue that VLC media player for Mac is still good, the truth is — lots has changed since 1996. New entrants like Elmedia Player with its built-in downloader and ad-free streaming, or Movist Pro with multiple-subtitle support and HDR improvement are winning the market. The one you choose should quite frankly depend on the features you’re going to use the most.
Best of all, you don’t need to go all in and buy Elmedia Player or Movist Pro to see how they work. Both apps are available to you on a free seven-day trial from Setapp — a platform with over 150 Mac apps, where each one is the best for a particular task, whether it’s budgeting, retouching, or just getting things done. What might you be watching tonight?
Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.
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With the release of macOS Catalina, iTunes — the go-to Mac video player for most people — is gone. Instead, Apple has broken it up into a few separate apps: Music, Podcasts, and TV, the latter being responsible for all the video content now.
If you’ve already tried using the new Apple TV app, you might have noticed that it works and feels different. No that iTunes was a great player, but it might seem that Apple TV is somehow worse. In any case, you’d be much better off looking for a worthy replacement. So what’s the best iTunes alternative for Mac? Let’s find out.
What’s The Best Multimedia Player For Mac?
Good news is there are lots of apps fighting for the title of the “best media player for Mac.” There are ones that excel at not consuming lots of CPU, or supporting Blu-ray Disc, or streaming content right from the internet, etc. So the choice is there. But the issue is: How do you choose the perfect Mac video player for you?
The danger of downloading just anything online and trying it out is in the proliferation of pirated software that often contains malware, which could damage your Mac. So don’t do that. Instead, download one of the trusted options reviewed below.
Starter: QuickTime Player for Mac
If you’ve only used iTunes before and are searching for the best iTunes alternative for Mac, you might be surprised that there is another viable option already pre-installed on your machine — QuickTime Player.
QuickTime Player is probably the oldest video player for Mac out there, first released in 1991. Still, it does all the basics fairly well, playing videos, music, and even images. All the most popular video formats, such as MOV, MP4, MPEG, are supported. But if you find yourself frequently downloading videos from the web, you might need to get an AVI player for Mac, a format which QuickTime Player doesn’t support at this time.
Another annoyance with QuickTime Player is the difficulty of including external subtitles or audio — which is important for lovers of foreign cinema and language learners. All in all, if you rarely watch videos on Mac, QuickTime is not the worst option. But there are surely better ones out there.
Enthusiast: VLC AVI player for Mac
Perhaps the most common suggestion after you’re ready to graduate from the likes of iTunes and QuickTime Player is VLC.
VLC (stands for VideoLAN Client) is not only a good AVI player for Mac but is also generally known for being able to play a wide variety of video formats: so an MKV player for Mac and MP4 player for Mac all in one.
While an external audio support is not there, VLC boasts robust subtitle integration that’s able to change text size, text color, background opacity, and much more.
Overall, VLC is a decent option for everyday video watching (it’s also a non-profit organization), with all the basics covered, but not too many outstanding pro-level features.
Eclectic: DivX video player for Mac
A more specialized option among many is the DivX Mac video player, which beautifully handles all DivX files but also includes codecs to support other formats and act as a FLV player for Macs too.
DivX video player for Mac offers some advanced options as well, such as the ability to smoothly scroll to your favorite scenes with Chapter Points, switch between soundtracks, create playlists, and play videos in up to 4K quality. In addition, your DivX player download comes with a video converter and a media server to cast your videos to external TV screens.
Video Player For Macbook Pro
If you buy the pro DivX video player for Mac (it costs around $20), you can get the ability to play the AC3 surround sound and stream videos directly from the cloud using either your Dropbox or Google Drive storage — all of which are great features, but the cost seems a bit steep for a Mac video player considering all the other alternatives out there.
Note: Unfortunately, the team behind the DivX player hasn’t yet issued an update for macOS Catalina, and as the player uses 32-bit architecture, Catalina users won’t be able to launch it.
Downloader: Elmedia Player for Mac
Vlc Movie Player For Mac
Too often people who need to download YouTube videos to their Macs resort to simply googling to find a way to do so. This is generally inefficient and could potentially even be unsafe, since most software advertising the ability to download something is the prime candidate for infecting your Mac with malware.
So meet Elmedia Player! Considered by many as the best media player for Mac, Elmedia supports video downloading and streaming natively. Here’s how it works:
When you open the app, click on the download icon at the top
In the search field, either enter your video’s URL or click on YouTube, Vimeo, or Dailymotion links to browse for it manually
With the video selected, choose the quality from the dropdown below and then click Download — the video will automatically be added to your playlist
Downloading is a breeze with Elmedia Player. Next time you’re about to get on a long flight, simply download a whole queue of interesting content and enjoy it on the plane offline.
A Movie Player For Macbook Pro
But Elmedia is not just a simple downloader — it’s a well-rounded Mac video player. The app supports virtually any video format and, using accelerated decoding, is able to smooth out otherwise choppy HD videos. In addition, one of Elmedia’s secret features is the ability to extract audio tracks and save them as MP3s — get those YouTube singles to your Mac in no time!
Prosumer: Movist Pro video player for Mac
Finally, since you’ve already paid a lot of money for your gorgeous retina Mac screen, it would be a waste not to use it to its maximum potential. And when you want things to work at the highest level when it comes to choosing the best video player for Mac, you can’t go wrong with Movist Pro.
Movist Pro puts all the possible control over your viewing experience right in your hands. It lets you choose from a few decoders, easily switch between light and dark modes, and control your subtitles (with an option to add more than one subtitle track at once).
In terms of other interesting features, Movist Pro automatically adjusts the colors on your non-HDR monitor to match an HDR video. The app also supports web-browser streaming (using an extension), so you can watch online videos with all the comfort and custom settings of Movist Pro. Unbeatable!
So what’s the best multimedia player for Mac? Depends on your needs and the kind of videos you tend to watch the most. While QuickTime Player and VLC cover the basics pretty well, DivX allows you to watch specific video formats. Elmedia Player and Movist Pro in the meantime are the best at giving you precise controls as well as streaming and downloading videos for watching offline.
One last point. With videos, you never know what kind of format might come your way, and quite often your preferred Mac video player won’t be able to play it. For times like these you need Permute.
Movie Player For Macbook Air
Permute is the most capable converter currently on the market that’s incredibly easy to use as well. Just drop your video onto its pane, choose the format you want to convert to, and click the play icon. Done!
Best of all, Elmedia Player, Movist Pro, and Permute are all available to you absolutely free for seven days with a trial of Setapp, a platform with over 150 essential Mac apps to improve your Mac interactions in no time. And why not start with video?
Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.
Movie Player For Mac 10.6.8
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