Why is VLC better than Quicktime Player for playback?

No, that's not what they take money for. They take money for being able to export, create and otherwise manipulate QuickTime media. No one should buy QuickTime Pro simply to PLAY any media, there are far too many free options out there.

VLC and MPlayer are good at playing non-standard video formats, so if you want to play non-standard video formats, you should use them. If you want to play QuickTime movies and other standard video formats, you can use QuickTime Player.

If you want to convert one QuickTime or other standard format movie to another standard format, get QuickTime Pro. If you want to convert any non-standard video... well, get a program that specifically handles non-standard formats.

I used to be one of those waiting for a version of QuickTime that would seamlessly play AVI's as well as other players. Now, I just use the right tool for the job and I'm a much happier person!

I understand your point of view but its hard for me to agree witch it. So u think that Quicktime Player is generaly not a player? If its for manipulating madia why its called Player and what is the purpose of free Quicktime? In free version you are not even allowed to save a file, you can simply do nothing but watching in window. Have you ever seen a demo of word processor where you cant write???
In this context I should ask is apple offering any player for their os?

And even if you are right about the purpose of quicktime, why cant it be fast? Does the option of exporting madie have to influence on speed of playback? Maybe its not the main goal of quicktime programmers but I think that they could work a bit harder for people who bought quicktime so they dont have to get another player for simple watching the media!

No, the QuickTime Player is a player of QuickTime content, much in the same way that the Windows Media Player is a player of Windows Media content and a record player is a player of records.

I agree with the original poster.

When I upgraded to QT 7, movies that had played fine skipped and halted, .mov files, .avi and others. The old QuickTime Player 6.5.2 app plays the files smoothly, as do VLC and MPlayer, all using the QT 7 codecs and so forth.

The QT 7 player must add a lot of overhead, especially on older hardware without the latest graphic accelerator chips. You might give the older version of the player a try. You don't need to downgrade everything - QT Player 6 is compatible with QT 7. Perhaps Apple will optimize for older hardware in a future release, or maybe they're hinting we need to upgrade to G5s...

For a while, the 7.0.2 player worked OK on my system, but now it's skipping again since the last software update. If anyone has hints?

I believe changes are being made to QuickTime so that they'll fit into the 3D compositing world of the OSX interface. I believe (I could be wrong) that the latest QuickTime goes through the graphic hardware to display frames on a polygon instead of just marking off a place on the screen where playback is going to occur.

Changing a polygon's image 30+ times a second is going to be rough on hardware without the graphics to support it, but the benefit is that, since video is being composited like everything else, CoreImage/CoreGraphics can be used to do things like PhotoBooth and will lead to cooler apps in the future.

Ive tried Quicktime7 on different machines (with and without core image support) and there was generally no real difference in playback.

I would like to believe that there is a real good reason for Quicktime 7 to be slower than its previous version and VLC/MPlayer on the same codecs. The quality of playback seems to be the same. Tell us Apple - whats the reason?!

I agree 100% with Maciej.

VLC plays almost everything as good or better than QTP. In fact, it plays things that QTP can't play at all. The argument of forcing the user to find specific tools to play different files is antithetical to the whole Mac philosophy.

Apple presents Mac as the ultimate user-friendly multi-media system. Mac users should be able to assume that QTP will play ANYTHING better than any other player--****, it should play WMV better! (You can buy a third-party plugin that helps, but isn't perfect, and how many people know this?)

The added insult is that an open-source project proves it can be done. Apple should be ashamed by this.

And the whole requirement to purchase a "component" to play MPG2--that is so lame.

Apple should LEAD in areas like this, but instead it follows--and never catches up.

BTW...I am not a Windows troll--I am a Mac aficionado since 1985.

==wd

I think "using the right tool for the right job" fits well within what I need to do with my computer. If I want to play standard media, I use QuickTime. If I want to play nonstandard media, I use VLC, I personally have no difficulty with this. Or maybe I want to play standard media in a way QuickTime doesn't allow? (ie fullscreen if you don't own QuickTime Pro) Again, VLC is perfect for this.

Now if they could fix the problem where it crashes at the end of a Keynote exported QuickTime movie, it'd be even better. Strange, QuickTime doesn't have a problem with this at all. WHEN oh WHEN will someone get off their butt and fix this glaring omission in VLC???

Oh, wait, I'll use QuickTime Player, nevermind 🙂

Yeah, you see, that's what I'm talking about...the people who should be burdened with defining and determining what constitutes "standard media" are called "Windows users". As a Mac user, I like to depend on my computer to just PLAY stuff. I don't want to know what a "codec" is, I want to watch a video.

The developers of VLC don't have a stake in creating and refining the "Macintosh experience", so I don't expect them to cover issues like you mentioned with Keynote.

What they have done is shown that an app can be made that plays pretty much anything you throw at it on Mac...so why can't Apple achieve the same thing? Again, if I want to search around for tricky little utilities just to watch a movie, I'll save thousands and buy a PC--or even build my own...with neon case lighting! ;^)

==wD

PM-G4 500x2, PB 17 2005, PM-G5 2gx2 Mac OS X (10.4.2)

No one has to be burdened with what is "standard" media, just use VLC and be happy! No harm, no foul! 🙂

Unfortunately, if a Mac user wants to watch video that was encoded with any one of the Windows "codecs of the day" over the past many years, then they will NEED to be versed in codecs, which ones are available, which ones cause problems, which ones are better, because that's what NOT adopting a standard media format forces you to do and if a Mac user wants to play any of this content (because, I don't know, they don't want to buy the DVD?) then they'll have to work to do it.

Back to the topic, VLC IS most certainly most assuredly better than QuickTime Player for playback. Why? Because it handles improperly coded non-standard video far better and, like it or not, most of the content people WANT to see on the internet is NOT QuickTime (and not standard), so why expect that QuickTime would be the best player for it? Additionally, because VLC is cross-platform, it's method of drawing to the screen doesn't fully take advantage of certain OSX technologies. Whether or not this will end up being advantageous for QuickTime in the future remains to be seen, but for now, VLC will generally get more fps than QuickTime.

Have you noticed how many people who don't have a clue about computers go out and buy PCs because they get so much "more" for the buck? Then they get it home, and can hardly do anything with it, because it so so nasty, technical, obscure and kludged together that they can't figure it out?

This is the brilliance of Mac...plug in a mouse, and it works. Plug in a drive, same deal. Poor PC people spend so much time just screwing around trying to make their computer do what it's supposed to do; Mac just does it.

Just think of all the Mac users out their who know nothing of the mere existence of VLC--suddenly, they are Junior Tech Support, just like all the Windows victims, trying to figure out what trained engineers should have figured out for them.

Part of the problem in this discussion is semantic: QT Player plays QT perfectly! As a user, I don't care what QT is, I want to watch my pr0n, or whatever, it can have an mov, or an mpg, or an avi, or wmv, swf...you name it...at the end of its name, just play the dang thing!

So I'll restate it: Apple needs to include as part of its basic install the...wait for it...."Mac Media Player"! MMP plays QT of course--and everything darn thing else that it's possible to ever play on any computer! MMP replaces QTP because it's a superset; QT goes back to referring to the technology itself. (You may recall the days of the "Movie Player"--I do! I'm old!)

"Yea right..let's have it make cappuccino while we're at it..." No--a nearly-universal player is possible, because we've seen it: VL-freakin-C!

I LOVE Mac, and in my house, words critical of the Great Steve are quickly and harshly punished.But with all this talk of the "digital media" hub, when I click a media file and get the "Sorry, we can't find the components..." box, I feel ashamed.

I'm not--and hopefully never will be--a Windows sufferer. I don't want to comb the net looking for something to play media files! I want to make fun of Windows users for being forced to do that!

==wD

PM-G4 500x2, PB 17 2005, PM-G5 2gx2 Mac OS X (10.4.2)

But what you're advocating for is that the kludging be spread to the Mac at the expense of the elegance of QuickTime. For all it's shortcoming's it's QuickTime's adherence to standards again that makes dealing with video almost effortless when you're dealing with standard video. Also, by sticking with standards, Apple forces the creation of standard video (for those that want to use QuickTime. If you want to use .AVI, have at it and you get what you deserve!)

To introduce all of those non-standard formats into QuickTime would make it just as bad as the Windows video situation (with their "codec packs" and probably would have meant that MPEG-4 wouldn't be based on QuickTIme).

Additionally, VLC can do what it does BECAUSE it's free. If it was a commercial enterprise, they'd have to pay licenses for all the video types included (it's a million dollars a year for MPEG-4 decoding alone), and certainly wouldn't be free...QuickTime is free to us, but Apple licenses all the standard technologies included. It's a nice idea, just don't think it's something that can happen realistically.

If you double-click on a QuickTime .mov file and it doesn't play, then yeah, something seriously wrong is afoot. If you double-click anything else and it doesn't work, don't blame Apple, blame the guy that didn't use QuickTime to encode it! 🙂

i personally feel kinda sickened that i am downloading windows media player

also, with all the other brilliant software provided with mac ox x, surely quicktime could be better - who cares that they're non-standard, quicktime should CREATE standards-compliant files but still be able to view non-compliant files.

imagine if safari wouldn't render pages unless they validated perfectly! madness!

g4 ibook 12" Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Unfortunately, that's the real world that we live in. It is accepted that all browsers have to, in some way, support the broken rendering that is inherent in Internet Explorer, but greater use of non-IE browsers by money laden web surfers are forcing some websites to change their format so as to be more standard. This is actually a good example because, like VLC, Safari is meant to "playback" web content, not edit or create it. Playback is easy because you don't have to be concerned about how one type of coding on one page might be inadvertently affected by the coding on another page, because you're not using Safari to mix 'em together.

People view QuickTime Player as a "player" application just because on the surface that's what it seems like it is. Heck, it's even got Player in the name! But it also has QuickTime in the name which informs that this is a Player of QuickTime. QuickTime, however, goes much further and deeper than that. Because of QuickTime, when you write an application for OSX, it has the capability to create video, even if it's not a "video" app (PowerPoint on the Mac can create QuickTime video. On the PC, it can't even create .AVI's) The application also has access to all these file types:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42617
And they're handled, for the most part, seamlessly.

So, the choice is a robust way of dealing with any type of standard media and ease in converting, say even a set of .bmp's to a movie for the iPod in H.264 format OR the ability to view non-standard media (which is, on the whole, questionably legal in the first place).

The reason why much of the brilliant software for the Mac works is due mainly to a solid, standard QuickTime foundation, do you want to give THAT up?