Alternatives to VLC player?

[mikeheenan]

I have a 17" MBP i5 with 4gb memory (the latest model), and sometimes when watching 1080p mkv rips, VLC struggles with playing them, freezing and blocking for a while then resuming playback, and this happens throughout videos. Is there another alternative to VLC?

 

[miles01110]

Movist, but it's still a beta. Trying it would at least help determine if VLC is actually the problem.

 

[arjen92]

Although I think VLC is better than the following solution, you could install perian (perian.org) to play the files with quicktime. Quicktime needs time though to "decode" the mkv file. (you can see the timeline loading).

 

[motulist]

Is this movie file sitting on a network drive, or on your computer's internal hard drive? Because that's the only scenario where I've ever seen vlc stutter on a modern computer.

 

[mikeheenan]

I always watch them from the computer hard drive. Sometimes they play through fine 100%, but it seems sometimes it clogs up the memory so much that the computer is incapacitated when I quit and close VLC and it seems it takes almost 10 seconds or so for things to normalize.

 

[yoak]

Movist is a much better player than vlc in my book. Try it out

 

[jbyun04]

I've always thought VLC for Mac was the best thing ever... never had any problems with playing 1080P MKVs.

VLC for Windows is BRUTAL though.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Is this movie file sitting on a network drive, or on your computer's internal hard drive? Because that's the only scenario where I've ever seen vlc stutter on a modern computer.

Then increase the file cache to 3000 ms (milliseconds) in the VLC prefs.

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I've always thought VLC for Mac was the best thing ever... never had any problems with playing 1080P MKVs.

VLC for Windows is BRUTAL though.

What? There is no difference, compared to the Mac version (ok, the Windows version has hardware accelerated VC-1 (WMV3) and H.264 decoding on systems with supported graphics cards).