Multimedia on Apple

VLC is recommended, but Perian (sadly discontinued) and Flip4Mac give QT Player the ability to play a lot more formats.

I personally use Movist for most of my visual entertainment needs.

Forkjulle said:

If Media Player and Quicktime are rubbish with multimedia support, then why are they included? Am I missing something?

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Both players support their native formats, in Windows it is the Windows Media format (.wmv and .wma) and in Mac OS X it is .mov and .mp4 using the H.264 codec.
QT Player (7 and X) is for playing those formats (.mov and .mp4), as they are used by Apple to distribute video (excluding iTunes and its .m4v format).

Forkjulle said:

I know I can google this stuff, but this IS a discussion forum and I prefer the real-time experiences and opinions of people like you.

Being new to Apple, I know that multimedia is a bit of mystery to me. On Windows, Media Player doesn't play most things, so one tends to resort to VLC. Does Apple suffer from the same "codec issues" as Windows? Do most video formats work in Quicktime, or is VLC recommended again?

What are your experiences with Apple and multimedia compatibility?

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VLC is the swiss army knife for Apple. There are plugins to allow Quicktime to play almost everything but I find it cumbersome when compared to VLC. That being said, after a while I got fed up with the fact that most of my anime shows and old movies wouldn't play in iTunes and more importantly on my iPad so I converted everything into MP4 files. MP4Tools is a handy little program that so far has been able to convert everything I threw at it, including mkv and ogm files, subtitles you name it. It can convert either to mp4 or to the iTunes container format (iTunes will play both, so I chose mp4 to be compatible to other devices).

www.emmgunn.com/mp4tools/mp4toolshome.html

You can either edit the tags in iTunes itself or use some of the handy tools that are out there (the names of which escape me right now).

There are also tools that allow you to convert PDFs in to ePubs but so far I have been too lazy to use them....

Forkjulle said:

Conversion to MP4 sounds cumbersome, but it also sounds effective in the long run (since other platforms play MP4 too). Have you noticed a quality difference after conversion?

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Nope, I just use very high bitrates on audio and video to avoid recompression artifacts. So far it's worked out fine for me. The differences are hardly noticeable. With the settings I use the files are usually twice as large as before but with how cheap external storage is these days, that's hardly a reason not to do it. I have all my video and audio sitting on a 10TB RAID1+0 NAS so all my computers can access the files. It's even rigged so that I could theoretically access it remotely from anywhere in the world. The conversion is actually not that bad, MP4Tools has the ability to convert in batches. Just make sure you use the latest beta as he changed the programming language and made some additional tweaks that significantly speed up the conversion process.

I used to be all into the different formats and all that but after a while it just gets annoying, especially when your mobile and streaming devices don't support it. The only thing that stopped me from going to MP4 for many years was lack of a good program that also supported subtitle conversion. MP4Tools supports almost any format known to god and you can even decide whether you want to burn them of softcode them.