![]() You can get round Apple’s hamstrung Quicktime Player by using NicePlayer along with the Perian and Flip4Mac components, though Windows Media support is still less than satisfactory as Flip4Mac has to index the entire file before it can seek through it, using plenty of CPU while it’s indexing, so expect jerky video if you’re playing HD content or your Mac’s over a year old, and forget about skipping forward. (Seriously, what is up with that? You’ve just spent a large chunk of money on a machine and they won’t let you play a movie full-screen easily without shelling out more cash? Sheesh.) so by default won’t play full-screen thanks to Apple’s cheap-ass decision to cripple its media player. You’ll have discovered that the options are limited: there’s the “official” choice of Microsoft’s awful Windows Media Player for Mac, which they’ve now stopped developing, or its successor in the limited-but-free Flip4Mac components, which work through Quicktime. If you’re a Mac user, like me, at some point you’ll probably have had the misfortune to trying to play Windows Media Videos (WMVs). I’ve also finally re-added the binary downloads (built from the trunk as of ), please leave a comment letting me know if they work for you (or not)! ![]() Update: I’ve overhauled this article to reflect the various changes that have happened since its creation. Not sure which to get? It’s probably safest to go with MPlayerX, it’s dirt simple to use, installs through the Mac App Store, and plays so many different movie formats that you’ll likely never have to download another video player again.Update (): New binaries, including mencoder x264 support (hopefully) and a link to the MPlayer Extended frontend. mov format, letting you play them on an iPad, iPod, or iPhone, or any other Mac, without the need for them to download anything. One potentially huge bonus that Flip provides though is the ability to convert the wmv videos to. ![]() My view is that if you’re going to be downloading a new app to play videos, get one that is multifunctional and that will play everything, that way you won’t have to go hunting around again when you encounter some other video file down the road. It’s a perfectly reasonable solution, but because it’s limited to WMV and WMA formats it’s just overall less useful than going with a free app like VLC or MPlayerX. Last but not least is Flip4Mac, which is a set of video components that install into OS X that allow Quick Time to play WMV files directly. ![]() If you want the video codec support of MPlayerX but with even more features aimed at advanced users, VLC is a great choice. VLC’s other benefit is that it works fine with obscure audio formats, and if you’re wanting to stream a video from one computer to another you can easily do that too. VLC is the classic swiss army knife for video files, it will play virtually any video format, it’s cross-platform compatible, it’s quick, and it’s free. WMV files are no exception, but because it supports so many other popular ( mkv, divx, etc) and obscure formats, MPlayer is debatably one of the best free video players available for the Mac platform. MPlayerX closely resembles the Quick Time user interface but that’s about where the similarities end, because MPlayerX will play just about any video thrown at it with flying colors. ![]()
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