Why is QuickTime so crap?

[leonb]

It doesn't play most files without codecs, which you have to download piecemeal, and which come bloated with players you don't want and shouldn't need. Even then it's hit and miss - I've been burning DVDs to mpg, to avoid compression/loss of quality, and while these start up and run along ok, the application freezes if you attempt to skip forward. Other (avi) files play squashed and indecipherably, though these same files work fine on other players.

I've been searching for answers through Google, and everyone says to use VLC, which I've downloaded. The problem is VLC won't allow multiple instances, so you can only open one video at a time - this is configurable on Windows, but not on a Mac, because the OS won't run the same application more than once. So VLC is unsatisfactory (because of the OS), and QT won't play most files properly.

Windows is rubbish in all sorts of ways, but Apple always shows off about how it "just works", and clearly if I have to hunt down bloated codecs, which don't fully work, and if I can't do something as simple as running multiple video files simultaneously, then this claim is somewhat suspect. It's really disappointing when Apple screws up like this - and this has been the situation for years, so I guess they don't think it's a problem (should I stop using my computer like this?).

Please someone tell me I'm wrong, and that I'm missing something simple.

[simsaladimbamba]

QuickTime is not as robust playing third party encoded video as VLC or Movist.

To circumvent the multiple instances or windows limit, I for example duplicated Movist twice, thus I have three copies of it to open my videos with. I seldom do need more than that.

I guess you already tried Perian? And you did not specify which QT and Mac OS X version you are using, maybe doing so can get you better answers?

[leonb]

I'm using a brand new late 2012 iMac 27 (3.4GHZ i7, 32GB memory, 2GB graphics, 768GB SSD) with the latest QT 10.2 on it.

I went to the Perian website - it says no guarantees it'll work with Mountain Lion, that there's to be no more support for the software, and that mkv files will take an age to open and mpg files may not play at all thanks to QT's basic design. I'm not keen on downloading unsupported codec packs which the developers themselves do not believe solves all the problems.

I know I could run scripts to allow multiple instances and/or duplicate applications, but this is also unsatisfactory. Is it really too much to expect the bundled video player to work out of the box?

[torana355]

I used to use perian and it worked great but now they have dropped support ive moved over to VLC.

[Dave Braine]

Perian do say that it may, or may not work with ML. Have you tried it? Have you tried niceplayer? You can have multiple windows with it.
http://code.google.com/p/niceplayer/

[JGRE]

I've been searching for answers through Google, and everyone says to use VLC, which I've downloaded. The problem is VLC won't allow multiple instances, so you can only open one video at a time - this is configurable on Windows, but not on a Mac, because the OS won't run the same application more than once.

I do not understand way you would want to run more than one movie at the same time. It is only a player, not a remuxer or likewise.
One thing you could do is make multiple installs of VLC, so you can run more than one window. Perhaps not the most elegant solution, but if this works for you.....

[dusk007]

I think for mkv VLC is the only really good option. All other suck a bit more or less. Quicktime often takes forever to open files even if you get it to open them.

MPlayerX isn't so bad either but it lacks the horizontal scroll implementation of VLC. It has one but a useless one. Hardware acceleration is better than in VLC. Between the two VLC usually creates more load.
In VLC I still use the old pre 2.0 version.