Command Line Video Player
github.comI use mpv (and mplayer before that) from CLI and I find it the best user experience. Sure, it takes some time to read the man and play with it, but now I start it with a bash alias on the display I want and the sound output for either: TV + big sound system or monitor + desktop speakers, depending on whether I am at my desk or on the couch. With a cheap wireless mini keyboard I get all the shortcuts one single key press away.
With a GUI player I have to navigate menus with a pointer to switch displays and sound, or to select sound and subtitle language, subtitle delay, contrast and brightness, etc.
Mpv also integrates with youtube-dl. You can tune the buffer size to never require pausing because of internet problems, select whatever quality with no auto switching like the native youtube client. Supports playlists and everything.
IINA [1] is an open-source [2], native [3] modern video player for macOS based on MPV [4].
[1] https://iina.io
[2] https://github.com/iina/iina
[3] Written in Swift and designed with modern macOS (10.11+) in mind
IINA is close to perfect software for me. It has a minimal (invisible until I need it) UI with just the options I need a click away. Yet powerful with all the advanced features available in the menu bar should I need them.
It has clean and well organised preferences that come with sensible defaults.
I have used it for over three years and not had a crash or bug with it ever. Never failed to play a file, even partially downloaded via torrent (so just random fragments of the file it was able to handle properly rather than just error/crash out).
But what I love most is that it is just a media player. It doesn't try to be a capture tool or converter or editor. It plays video and music files and does that job superbly.
If you're a macOS user I can't think of a better media player out there. Plus it is not only free but open source!
For Windows users, there's mpv.net, which adds a GUI for configuration editing and a command palette. [1][2]
There is also mpc-qt, which replicates the classic MPC-HT UI, but with libmpv as the backend. [3]
Personally I found mpv's defaults sane enough to not need a GUI for it, but I did release an unofficial version to the Windows 10 Store with a wrapper that adds file association and macOS-style single instance support. [4][5]
[1] https://github.com/stax76/mpv.net
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9N64SQZTB3LM
[3] https://github.com/mpc-qt/mpc-qt
I use SMPlayer. Despite somewhat "ugly" UI, it's a very capable MPV skin.
SMPlayer is a GUI for the (quite old now) MPlayer.
IIRC a long time ago mpv was based on mplayer, though probably no shared code exists anymore.
No, you can choose to use MPV or Mplayer. The default is MPV too IIRC (on Windows, as the parent comment mentioned).
What's the benefit over VLC?
iina is a really nice player, but unfortunately maintenance of it seems to have slowed quite a lot. There's a lot of piled up issues and pull requests.
You'll also find that even on the most powerful of Macs that it will struggle with higher resolution video playback that QuickTime Player, VLC, or straight mpv play without issue.
> The modern media player for macOS.
> For and only for modern macOS.
> IINA is born to be a modern macOS application,
As a policy I stay away from all software whose primary marketed feature is being “modern,” which I wholly consider to be a meaningless term.
Meaning often comes easier when sentences are finished.
IINA is born to be a modern macOS application, from its framework to the user interface. It adopts the post-Yosemite design language of macOS and keeps up the pace of new technologies like Force Touch, Touch Bar, and Picture-in-Picture.
Many other media players were once born to be “modern” macOS applications. What happens when all of those things cease to be apple’s current recommendations? Will IINA cease being modern? Will there be any compelling reason to still use it?
I can’t think of a single other video player competing on macOS UX adherence over the last 20 years, source/name a couple of these many others so we can see how they died. Because it would die.
Yes, if IINA is no longer modern, it will cease being modern.
If IINA doesn’t adhere to modern macOS UX standards, but advertises that it does, there will be a compelling reason not to use it.
In general, macOS apps require constant updates every year in order to run on new versions, period. The idea that an app that competes on UX would continue implementing updates solely in the non ui realm and as a result fall out of current macOS UX practices year after year is unlikely, to say the least. It’ll just die normally.
That’s not a bad policy but it’s solid software, basically a Cocoa wrapper around MPV which as it turns out, is a fairly solid idea.
Years ago when VLC was the rage, I could open any video or sound file I wanted in QuickTime Player with an array of plug-ins including Persian, Flip4Mac and a couple others I’ve long since forgotten. That served me well until it became impossible to install and use QuickTime 7 on a modern Macintosh.
IINA quickly filled that hole for me, and was a solid upgrade over a player I never asked much from, readily replicating all the features I cared about and throwing in a few more. If all you want is a media player that lets you double click a file and play it back, IINA is the best there is on the Macintosh today.
What makes it better than VLC?
I tried hard to think of a good answer, but I’ll be honest: I haven’t tried VLC in 15 years. My vague recollection of it was that I didn’t care for the widgets, it wasn’t as responsive as the native, preinstalled and extensible video player I already had (meaning it didn’t open and play files as immediately as I was already used to) and that it had too much window chrome for the simple task of playing back one video or sound file.
So for all I know, 15 years later VLC might actually be the best media playback player on the Macintosh and I’m just too set in my ways to realize that because I went basically straight from QuickTime 7 to QuickTime X to IINA and IINA was already such a solid upgrade that I’m not looking for another replacement.
IINA is abandonware man
Just recently I finally got sick of the various defects VLC developed on macOS:
- Running videos off of my NAS routinely introduced audio lag even on very small videos (less than 1h long). My LAN and WAN are at 1GbE and my NAS uses ZFS with very adequate caching setup.
- Crashes 2-3 times a week. Pretty rare but annoying nonetheless because I usually leave one huge video to play for the entire day.
- On iOS and macOS it forgets the position of a video played very recently. That one is rather new, <6 months. Still not cool.
Eventfully enough was enough and I moved to MPV just two weeks ago. Rock-solid so far, never lags the audio, snappier animations, quick keys to jump between chapters -- it's all good stuff so far.
I heard a while ago that the VLC team is struggling with a huge rewrite. As a programmer I sympathize but as a user I can't excuse them. Few months of a rocky ride is fine but VLC definitely is not how I remember it from the past, during the last 2 or so years.
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Off-topic: can somebody recommend a tool that scans your videos and downloads metadata and posters for them? We're talking movies, shows, game playthroughs, music videos, and others.
I use Subler [https://bitbucket.org/galad87/subler/wiki/Home] and when it confounds me I opt for MetaTV or MetaMovie [http://www.appfacture.com/en/]. I've also heard of iFlicks but never tried it [https://iflicks.app].
Thanks a bunch, much appreciated.
You're welcome!
The last time I used VLC to do some testings (on Windows), it doesn't even playback a typical video color range correct out of the box (TV range did not convert to PC range properly).
I haven't see such issue in any video players since OG MPC days.
After some quick googling I did find some solutions involving changing some video renderer settings manually, but IMO it's unacceptable for any media player on mainstream OS/hardware.
I do still respect VLC as an OSS project though, they made plenty of important contributions to the open-source A/V field.
Agreed, they've done a lot in the past and they have my respect. It's saddening that they're struggling nowadays and are dropping the ball. :(
100% with you, VLC on Mac is unusable and often won't even play things when I open them anymore - black screen, audio only, corrupt looking, I thought my media had the bits flipped or that something horrible had happened.
I use IINA now (linked elsewhere in this thread) and it's amazing, the rest of the internet seems to have found out about it years ago.
1. Kodi for an open everythin-included solution
2. Plex for a proprietary solution with good integration and remote access
3. tinyMediaManager for a minimal viable product solving your needs
Thanks a lot, didn't know about `tinyMediaManager` and will check it out.
i use metaX for my movie and show database, game playthroughs and others might need different tools
There's a more up to date fork: MetaZ [https://metaz.maven-group.org]. Which claims to be 'Two letters better than MetaX'. heh ;-)
Thank you! Will check it out.
It's also worth noting that you can use this with libcaca [1] to get a truly command-line video player, i.e. one that plays videos in an 80x20 terminal, with --vo=caca. (Note that not all distributions compile this in, I guess to save space as most people probably don't actually want to watch videos via an ssh pipe...)
This project has unfortunately been crippled by toxic devs who value their opinions more than actual technical arguments.
Report bugs and you may end up getting mocked instead of thanked.
When I reported that on my hardware I need -vo vaapi to get full hd playback without frame drops and stuttering, I was told to get better hardware. They wouldn't even entertain the thought that maybe -vo gpu (their default) needs more work. All I asked them to is to document in the man page that if you get stuttering video with -vo gpu you might want to try -vo vaapi.
This was a few years ago and apparently they did work on -vo gpu in the mean time, but they will never get rid of the stench that episode left.
Since then -vo vaapi has been deliberately crippled. It can not display subtitles and gives a deprecation warning when you try to use it.
It's too bad that mplayer has fallen into disrepair. Didn't they also suffer from toxic dev infighting? I seem to remember even a fork of ffmpeg because the other devs needed to get away from one particularly toxic dev.
Interesting they went with this title, the initials are VLC backwards.
Coincidence or what?
It's called mpv. "Command line video player" is the description.