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.
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
Vlc Media Player For Mac
Instead of having one VLC player alternative, get an entire collection. Setapp is a Mac apps subscription that gives you a large choice.
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?
Mac users interested in Vlc player for mac 10.5.8 generally download: VLC media player 3.0 Free VLC media player is one of the most popular video players on the market. This open source utility is packed with a wide range of useful features. VLC media player for Mac is an open-source cross-platform multimedia player that plays most multimedia files, as well as various streaming protocols. Safe, powerful, and completely free, the VLC app can play a range of media, including video and music files, in multiple formats directly on your Mac. The Best Free Video Players app downloads for Mac: VLC Media Player SmartPSS for Mac (64-bit) Apple QuickTime Player 7 Flip Player 5KPlayer KMPlayer H.
The most popular audio/video player for Mac is VLC Media Player. The VLC player for Macbook has stayed on top of the list for a long time. However, we also have many alternatives for it as more and more software has developed with more abundant functions than VLC. 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. Note that the first generation of Intel-based Macs equipped with Core Solo or Core Duo processors is no longer supported.
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.
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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VLC Media Player can play any video or audio format, including MPEG, WMV, AVI, MOV, MP4, MKV, H.264/AVC, FLV, MP3 and OGG, along with many others. It also supports Blurays, DVDs, VCDs, and several different streaming formats. Additionally, VLC Media Player is capable or reading incomplete files if they are corrupted or partially downloaded.
The application also supports several subtitle formats, like SRT, ASS, and other files extracted from disks. It allows you to customize the style, size, and placement of the subtitles on the screen.
The interface is plain, but you are able to customize it with the skins that are available. Because VLC Media Player can be run by command-line interface, Telnet, or a web navigator, its functionality goes above and beyond that of other media players.
Vlc Video Player For Macbook
Useful VLC Media Player features you might not know aboutVlc On Mac
VLC Media Player is one of the most-used media players now available, not just for its stability and versatility when it comes to playing all sorts of multimedia files, but also for the number of extra features it includes. These are some of the many features that lots of people don’t know about for the player from VideoLan, such as the option to change the format of your videos, do live captures of what’s happening on the screen, download YouTube videos, or even record disks in physical format.
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