So, Mac people, what do you use to watch fansubs on Mac OS X?
Quicktime is pretty much a joke - you have to register it to get even such basic features as fullscreen viewing, and its AVI demuxer is apparently intentionally broken to cripple playing AVIs with MP3 sound, and since that's pretty much the standard for fansubs, that sort of kills it right there, never matter trying to find a reliable XviD codec.
VLC and mplayer both seem pretty shaky. Mplayer's never been the easiest program to deal with at the best of times, even though it's pretty capable. Both also have this horribly annoying idea of placing the video view and controls in different windows, which annoys me to no end.
So is there a decent player out there that I have just never heard of, or is there a fix for any of these annoyances? A proper AVI demuxer for Quicktime, for instance? A recent ffmpeg-based video codec for Quicktime? Anything?
Mplayer2 OSX and VLC. That's about it. Usually the former, it seems to handle video errors with less of a "kamikaze" approach to it.
If only somebody would make a decent GUI for mplayer, I'd be pretty happy with it.
I have registered QuickTime Pro. I thought it was worth the $20, especially since I like to tinker with video from time to time. But if you don't wanna cough up the cash, try this:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050430024234333
(Also check out the comments)
Or this:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20020722081156794
But perhaps the simplest solution is to install the free RealPlayer; besides Real media, it also will play QuickTime-compatible files just by piping the video through to QuickTime. Just use its Full Screen feature. (Press Escape to get out of it; Command-W does nothing, frustratingly.) And the latest version of RealPlayer for Mac repents on many of the user interface sins committed by its predecessors on both Mac and Windows.
As for playing DivX/XviD files, I just use the OS X DivX components from http://divx.com . They seem to have pulled them from their site for some reason, but you can still download them at http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/8270 . I've never had any problems with them. But if that doesn't work, there's also 3ivX: http://www.3ivx.com/download/macos.html It hasn't been updated for a while, though, so it may trip over movies made with newer encoders. (I only use 3ivX for encoding MPEG-4 files as it blows away QuickTime's stunningly sub-par MPEG-4 encoder.)
Hopes this helps.
Well, none of that will fix the broken AVI demuxer.
I did find XinePlayer, though, which has a decent GUI and plays most files just fine. It has some curious omissions, though, like not telling you how long a file is. Overall, though, it works pretty well.
Next problem: No codec for WMV3 in AVI on Mac OS. WMP will only play WMV files.
Okay, perhaps I'm not understanding your problem. Could you perhaps be more specific on what exactly you're trying to do that the DivX components I mentioned above won't let you do? With them installed, QuickTime treats AVI/DivX movies just like any other movie; at least on my end.
This is mostly from what I've read, and not really from personal experience, but apparently the AVI demuxer in QuickTime is broken in such a way that AVI files with VBR MP3 audio have horrible sync problems. This has been reported again and again to Apple, and they won't fix it, leaving most people assuming that it is intentionally broken to discourage the use of AVI.
So I've decided to be discouraged from using QuickTime.
...this is also the reason there exist a number of program for converting AVI files to QT files by pure stream copy and no re-encoding: The same data in a QT file will work much better than in an AVI file. But that is definitely not something I'll be using.
AVI was never meant to have VBR audio streams anyway. They're probably taking the lazy tack and thinking, "well, it's not in spec anyway..."
Well, WAHa, you can't believe everything you read... I'm telling you, I just install the DivX codec files, and the times when I come across an AVI file that QuickTime Player doesn't play or won't play properly are few and far between. It won't kill ya to just try it...
As for WMV3 in AVI... Have you tried just giving the AVI file a .wmv extension? I seem to recall having a similar problem in the past and successfully fooling WMP by doing that.
Well, I wouldn't take it too seriously except for the bit where people write whole programs to get around the problem. That really does mean something is wrong. And since VBR MP3 is pretty common in fansubs, I really don't need any extra grief.
Plus, the third-party players play OGM, MKV and softsubs.
Hi. I've got an avi file that divx can't repair. I went online to look for alternatives. There aren't any for a mac. It's a real pain because there are thousands for a pc. And because I've keyed in MAC into the search I expect the results to match. But I'm directed to dozens of sites expectantly to finally realise it's for windows only. It does my head in..!
kind regards - Ken
>>7
http://shsc.info/PlayingVideoFiles#titelanker3
I use MPlayer from CVS anyway, and installing DivX will make it load avi/mp3 files. Although I should mention the XviD thingy for that, and the DivX 6 beta.
Gah, codec jungle. Somebody really needs to make a proper FFmpeg-based codec for Quicktime, and a new AVI splitter. Also, subtitle filters, I have no idea if Quicktime supports those.
Also:
> We're hard at work on the DivX Create Bundle for Mac and the DivX Play Bundle for Mac. Rest assured that we’ll let you know the second they are ready for release. In the meantime, please continue to use DivX 5.2.1 or DivX Pro™ 5.2.1 for Mac OS X.
> DivX 5 does not support Mac OS X 10.4 or QuickTime 7. We are working with Apple to resolve several compatibility issues
Quicktime has its own support for subtitles. It should be theoretically possible to convert a .srt file into a Quicktime subtitle track which can then be put into a movie which contains the subtitle track and the video track by reference (so the video remains in its original file).
> Gah, codec jungle. Somebody really needs to make a proper FFmpeg-based codec for Quicktime, and a new AVI splitter. Also, subtitle filters, I have no idea if Quicktime supports those.
There is an FFmpeg thing, but it only supports MPEG-4 and is rather outdated.
For 10.4: http://download.divx.com/labs/DivXFusionBeta2.dmg
It is (and it supports everything you could ever want and times accurate to the PCM sample), but writing an srt import codec is just as impossible as any other codec for QT.
Also, it can't handle drawing things on top of video, unless it works better with CoreVideo support than it does on my laptop. This requires adding black bars, which is sort of ugly.
Nobody wants to convert anything. Well, at least not me. Either the player loads it through its codecs, or I don't use it.