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Most efficient media player?

Razer(x)

Razer(x)

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 7, 2014
204
13
What is the most efficient media player? i have been using Movist for a year

I've been reading about 5Kplayer, MplayerX and Cisdem
 
VLC, Elmedia Player, Player... there are tons of good media players. What does "efficient" mean to you? Are we talking about CPU cycles, RAM use, ease of use, time to launch?
 
I'd say VLC ... Would never use any other. The only time i think about efficiency is when my apps crawl to a halt with spinning beach balls. Apart from that, i don't really care that much... a bit of increase in ram... it's ok,, or cpu... as long as noting pegs or increase dramatically. Same thing with any app... I'm not gonna stop using one just because i notice a 5% increase in memory.
 
MacGizmo said:
VLC, Elmedia Player, Player... there are tons of good media players. What does "efficient" mean to you? Are we talking about CPU cycles, RAM use, ease of use, time to launch?
Click to expand...

I'm referring to the energy consumption, since i'm using a Macbook that's important to me
 
Razer(x) said:
Just tried, it uses 30% more energy compared to Movist
Click to expand...
I use MPV as well (local build of the release 0.17.0 and all of the additional components it requires using compiler flags -Ofast -march=native) and have the best results with it so far. But you need to configure it properly, at least set it to use the Video Toolbox framework for the decoding acceleration.

here's part of my config - ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf
Code: 
# Video
# OS X 10.8+: VideoToolbox
hwdec=videotoolbox

# Video Output
vo=opengl-hq
#vo=opengl
If you want even better performance (but the difference doesn't seem to be very big) you may use the video output mode "opengl" instead of "opengl-hq". You may also try to add the videotoolbox-format option and try how it performs with different values (nv12, uyvy422, rgb0). nv12 is the default one and usually provides the best performance.
See https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#video and https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#video-output-drivers
 
Last edited:
mag01 said:
I use MPV as well (local build of the release 0.17.0 and all of the additional components it requires using compiler flags -Ofast -march=native) and have the best results with it so far. But you need to configure it properly, at least set it to use the Video Toolbox framework for the decoding acceleration.

here's part of my config - ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf
Code: 
# Video
# OS X 10.8+: VideoToolbox
hwdec=videotoolbox

# Video Output
vo=opengl-hq
#vo=opengl
If you want even better performance (but the difference doesn't seem to be very big) you may use the video output mode "opengl" instead of "opengl-hq". You may also try to add the videotoolbox-format option and try how it performs with different values (nv12, uyvy422, rgb0). nv12 is the default one and usually provides the best performance.
See https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#video and https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#video-output-drivers
Click to expand...
This may be complicated for many to set this up. The latest build I see is 0.16.0.
 
Sure it isn't very user friendly one - very limited GUI and almost everything has to be specified either as command line argument or in that ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf file. But usually there's no need to customize a lot of settings, I've got there those 2 (hwdec, vo), then subtitle codepages (sub-codepage) and 2 window options (keep-open, autofit-larger).

Regarding the build, I was using those from http://sva.wakku.to/~chris/mpv_builds/ but since that page doesn't seem to be updated since February I decided to try to build it myself. But you don't really need to do that. You can still use the latest build from there, or have it built via Homebrew, MacPorts or use the Fink binary...
Latest release is 0.17.0 at the moment, you can see them here: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/releases

But it performs even slightly better than Movist - at least for me (2012 Ivy Bridge MBA)
 
The Mac version of Vlc player has taken a back seat to IOS/TVOS dev in recent months as updates are now very rare and bugs remain.
 
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