Movist

Movist plays your movies when QuickTime can't has long held the crown of "best free, handle-anything media player" for Mac OS X.

Macworld Dan Frakes 2010

Still, Movist has replaced VLC for much of my day-to-day viewing of video that QuickTime can't handle-and even some that it can.

Macworld Dan Frakes 2010

In my testing, Movist handled most video files with aplomb, although on rare occasion the program crashed when viewing a video that VLC played without issue.

Macworld Dan Frakes 2010

Movist also provides many playback features you won't find in QuickTime Player, as well as some features QuickTime Player lost in the transition from version 7 to Snow Leopard's version X.

Macworld Dan Frakes 2010

However, you can't save playlists, and if you drag a video file directly into Movist, rather than into your playlist, you lose any playlist you've created.

Macworld Dan Frakes 2010

Movist also provides lots of other settings (though not quite as many as VLC), as well as support for the Apple Remote.

Macworld Dan Frakes 2010

Movist also offers the most-flexible subtitle controls I've seen in a media player: After choosing the subtitle track, you can customize the fonts, the vertical margins, the synchronization, and the position of subtitles.

Macworld Dan Frakes 2010

I like that for movie formats that both FFmpeg and QuickTime can handle, Movist lets you switch between the two to see which provides better results.

Macworld Dan Frakes 2010

As with most media players, you can choose the size of the video-playback window; however, when in fullscreen mode, Movist lets you choose how the movie fills the screen-by expanding or cropping.

Macworld Dan Frakes 2010

I like that for movie formats that both FFmpeg and QuickTime can handle, Movist lets you switch between the two to see which provides better results.

Macworld Dan Frakes 2010