IgloONotes

Update 2: So now it's bee another month since my last update, and I just discovered this hidden gem. The gem is called MPlayer OSX Extended. 

Update: So now, after 3 months, this entry has been rendered almost useless. There has been some impressive headway made on all the video players previously featured.

VLC: As of a week ago, VLC has hit 0.9.4. And since 0.9.3, it has made some impressive improvements. VLC now supports ASS subtitles (yay!). And watching Gundam 00 is enjoyable. Infact, the improvements are so good, that I am torn between using VLC and MPlayer. There are some notable annoyances. 

First off, it takes VLC longer to load the MKV file than MPlayer. The player also feels a bit slower too. And there's some really obvious artifacts that show up in the beginning of the file, after that it's pretty good.

Second, when you pause in the middle of dialog, your subtitles disappear! This is really annoying especially when you haven't read the whole subtitle, and you need to go to the loo for a break. Then you have to rewind and watch that segment again to catch what you missed. 

Lastly, the navigation is not as nice as MPlayer. I've gotten so use to skipping through shows using just the directional keys that if feels cumbersome to use the mouse to skip through. Now, there's no onscreen GUI with MPlayer, but the speed at which you can skip through, is very nice. I'm sure that you can customize VLC to do the same thing with MPlayer, but who want's to sift through 50 pages of developer notes just to do that?

MPlayer:

Seeing that there hasn't been an update to this player since I last reviewed it, there's nothing to report. However, I have noticed some artifacts that appear periodically on the anime I watch from time to time. It's a problem with Mplayer, because opening up the same file to the same time stamp in VLC shows nothing except crystal clearness. So now I am waiting for the nerds to update this player. 

Perian:

Perian, I pretty much only use it in conjunction with quicklook. It views everything, and it's convenient when i am just searching through episodes. The the base problem lies with Quicktime (as stated before), so it's not Perian's fault. 

That's the end of the update, Perian has some updates, but it take so long to open any file, that I just haven't bothered using it to play video. Not that it doesn't work, it's just that I am impatient. 

I like Macs, I really enjoy OSX, however, if there's one thing that has bloody irritated me is that it took me so long to find a good video player for it. Windows has a few like Media Player Classic, zoom player and CCCP (which integrates well with Media Player). Mac has errr, Quicktime, and getting that to work with different codecs is like trying to pin an alligator covered in synovial fluid. The bottom line is that there is NO perfect video solution to this conundrum, but this is the best thing that I've been able to come up with so far.

I use a combination of three programs. They are VLC, Perian and MPlayer. I'll be going through them one by one, listing off their qualities and quirks. Each quirk i've mentioned i'll be listing solutions that I've managed to come up with, that way you don't have to scourge the interweb for the solutions (Google, you're my best friend).

VLC:

I discovered this program during my XP days, when (ironically enough) I was looking for a video player that could play Quicktime without me having to install the actual stupidly bloated and refuses-to-play-in-full-screen-except-when-you-spend-$20 player (tho, Apple have finally realized that people like full screen play and fixed it). Its good, but not great. When you were in full screen, there was no seeker bar, and all I used it for was for Quicktime. Oh the irony, now I wanted to use it for everything but Quicktime. The Mac version was vastly superior in pretty much every way than the Windows version of old.

There's now seeker bar during full screen, and it uses your iRemote for basic functions. This was great in every way, and it served me well. One quirk was that it couldn't play the old fashion AVI files (not divx, but the old Audio Video Interlace files from the 90's). Quicktime handled them well, so I wasn't bothered as much. VLC served me well, up until the MKV container file caught on in popularity with the anime community and spread like wild fire in the past 13 months. I was left quite high and dry. 

VLC could handle MKV files, for the most part, however there was a problem. Imagine this, watching through 10 minutes of dialog in Macross Fontier, and finally getting to the really sweet battles. The VF-25's launch, and just as they are going to lay the smack down, everyone suddenly develops Parkinson's and stutters his way through the battle. Talk about ruining the moment.

Also, the rendering of the subtitles is horrendous. Subtitles suddenly overlap each other when 10 characters talked at the same time was pure agony. After some digging, I found out that the majority of Subber's use ASS subtitles (yes that's a real acronym), and that VLC's renderer couldn't handle it. This started my search for another video player, which landed me happily at Perian (albit only temporarily). 

Perian:

Perian is a codec pack and requires Quicktime to play. Just like how CCCP is to Media player, it will integrate itself with Quicktime. This, for one was really cool, because it allows you to view all kinds of video files from Quicktime and it integrated with Quicklook! Now I can just watch videos by just hitting the spacebar. Perian allows you to quicklook MKV files as well, but there's some extra fiddling that is required that I haven't figured out yet.

Not only that, but it could handle render ASS subtitles!! All along, I was forced to read the craptacular subtitles from VLC. But with Perian, they were animated, rendered and placed on the screen correctly as the subber intended them to be. They had different colours, they were animated (a real treat when song lyrics are shown during Macross).

 You were also treated to the different chapters that some of the subbers set in the anime. Which allowed you to skip to the opening, the middle or the end of the show. One minor issue was that you had to wait for Quicktime to index the entire file before the playback was smooth. It's tolerable, but this is an issue with Quicktime, and not Perian.

All was good again, until Quicktime updated. The update to 7.4 suddenly brought Parkinson's back. This was frustrating as Macross Frontier was getting even better. There was a fix that was released, and it took me a while to find it. However, the release of Quicktime 7.5 forced me to find a alternative solution. And this lead me to MPlayer. 

Mplayer: 

I encountered MPlayer previously when I found Perian, but I couldn't figure out how to get subtitles to work. So I abandoned it. As things turned out, I was lead back to MPlayer. It played MKV files as smooth as a bat's stomach, and it could render subtitles, which was good. However, out of all three solutions, I had the biggest amount of growing pains. 

It's a pretty basic player, lacking in almost every possible GUI interface imaginable. MPlayer comes from the nerd world of Linux Land, and hence devoid of any sort of luster. Requiring you to memorize command line code and keyboard shortcuts. The help file is helpless, and forced me to spend a good 30 minutes tapping each key like a twit to figure out what command they activated.

 Hunting down the keyboard commands wasn't any fun either as they were buried within someone else's website. Oh, and did I mentioned that the aside from the left and right arrow keys, the  controls are totally un-intuitive. Get this, to activate your subtitles, you hit the 'J' key. I don't get it, how come they didn't map it to, oh, I don't know the 'S' key? 

But once you get over the keyboard commands, it's a decent player. It can play every imaginable code even WMV and WMA files! I also liked how the text and seeker bar (there is one, but it's controlled by the keyboard only), and system text were surrounded by a haze of contrasting colour. It was a nice touch. I also liked how it was stutter free and you didn't have to wait for the video to be indexed. The only problem was with the subtitles.

 They were rendered like VLC (except no overlapping), and didn't take on the styles that Perian was able to render. I tolerated this until Macross Frontier 12, the episode was going great until Ranka showed up and started singing. Suddenly the screen was filled with 5 lines of subtitles. One for the song, one of the song translated, one for Zentradi translated, one for Alto and one for whatever random guy was shouting. I got totally crosseyed and was yet again fed up. I really missed the proper subtitle rendering. 

This was only a temporary fix, and off I was to find a solution. After going through numerous forums, I read that there was a way to get MPlayer to render ASS correctly. The however as luck would have it, they didn't offer the solution and it took me another hour to finally find the solution. And like typical Linux Land tradition, the fix was all command line. But I didn't care! Everything rendered correctly, the playback was smooth and I could now comfortably watch Macross Frontier 12 (or any anime), Parkinson-less, and non-crosseyed. 

Closing:

So there you go, if you want to use your iRemote for basic Divx playback, use VLC. For quicklook stuff, use Perian. And for everything else use MPlayer. At the bottom of the page, I've set some instructions on how to use and setup MPlayer. Think of it as me passing on an Evolution Stone to transform MPlayer from a Cranky Charizard to a faithful and passive Charmander...wait that was the other way around. Well, you get my drift. 

MPlayer Tips:

To get MPlayer to render ASS files, go to:

- Prefences--> Hit the Misellaneous tab. 

- From there there's the advance setting's box (Gasp!).  

- Check the "Additional parameters" (a.k.a. the I-know-what-I-am-doing) box

- Then paste the following line--> -ass -embeddedfonts -vf-add ass 

Close, restart and voila! Enjoy your anime in all the ASS goodness!

Keyboard Shortcuts: http://www.keyxl.com/aaa2fa5/302/MPlayer-keyboard-shortcuts.htm

Where to Find:

VLC: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Perian: http://perian.org/ 

MPlayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html 

Tags: ASS, Divx, Mac Video, macbook, macbook video, MKV, Mplayer, Perian, quicktime, quicktime video, Video, VLC