Video playback other than QuickTime Player

With the demise of the old QuickTime 7 Player, I now have to use the latest QuickTime Player to watch mp4 files (such as Zoom call recordings).

However, the latest version of QuickTime Player has the very annoying feature of tracking gestures even when the window is not active. As a result, I frequently accidentally scan forward or back just by sloppily mousing over the window. This is at best, annoying. There doesn’t seem to be a way of turning this feature off.

What do other TALKers use to watch video files on a Mac, particularly while you’re using the computer for other tasks at the same time? Thanks in advance.

VLC (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/) is OK.

Jeremy

I use mpv player which is quick and fast.

| Gordon Meyer bb1
June 16 |

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With the demise of the old QuickTime 7 Player, I now have to use the latest QuickTime Player to watch mp4 files (such as Zoom call recordings).

However, the latest version of QuickTime Player has the very annoying feature of tracking gestures even when the window is not active. As a result, I frequently accidentally scan forward or back just by sloppily mousing over the window. This is at best, annoying. There doesn’t seem to be a way of turning this feature off.

What do other TALKers use to watch video files on a Mac, particularly while you’re using the computer for other tasks at the same time? Thanks in advance.

Seconded. Been using VLC for years. Don’t even know what QT Player looks like anymore. Don’t care either.

I used to use VLC, but I now use IINA.

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Another vote for IINA here. Fabulous player. Won’t play HEVC footage though (crashes whole application on load). Keep a copy of MPV around (pre-built Mac binaries). Both are great players. Reminder to self: must donate some money to both projects.

MPV plays by default 4K HEVC smoothly but at non-Retina/HiDPI resolution. Playback at 4K works if the monitor is set to native 3840 x 2160 resolution.

Here are some interesting custom configuration tips for MPV on Macs. The custom configuration makes HEVC 4K video playback in 4K on a Retina screen but at 17fps not 60fps. This is with a Radeon RX580 on a CMP 12 x 3.33 on Mojave 10.14.6 without custom hardware acceleration kexts.

What IINA does play, it plays at Retina resolution troublefree.

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A post was split to a new topic: Problems recognizing discs in a CD/DVD player

Yet another vote for IINA. Really nice app, with a great native interface (I always found VLC a bit awkward on the Mac). Handles all sorts of video files such as mkv, as well as mp4.

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My case is that I’ve got a live Zoom gathering on Sunday mornings, where I combine live interaction with playing .MOV files that provide content. I use Zoom screen sharing for it.

QuickTime Player is abysmal for this task. I want 7 files available and ready to go. QT Player doesn’t seem to have a playlist function (or if it does, it’s one of those wretched “we put it in there and we hope you somehow find it in the interface” deals), so on my secondary monitor I have seven black rectangles with no title bar stacked like Darth Vader’s playing cards. Yesterday was the first time I’d done this in Catalina (new iMac, moved from High Sierra) and I swear it was worse.

So I spent yesterday afternoon looking for a replacement, and came across Elmedia Player. Free for most functions that don’t involve editing or timeline manipulation.

It produces a playlist that can be separated into a new window, and can be set to play individual selections and then pause. The playlists can be saved (unfortunately with the same extension that Music uses). I can set up my share to a single player window instead of the previous workflow where (in Zoom) I had to select the individual player window, then in QT use the Window menu to select that window again before I could start playing the video I wanted.

It seems pretty straightforward (VLC would have been another choice, but sometimes it feels like it belongs on my workbench instead of my presentation stage).

1 Like