I’m sure if I compared IINA and VLC’s features, VLC would win. For instance, you’ll probably recognize the Apple picture-in-picture icon, and clicking the gear icon displays all the key video settings in one place. While VLC has to provide a cross-platform interface for the Mac, Windows, Linux, and even OS/2, IINA is made solely for the Mac, so as a Mac user, you’ll be immediately familiar with its conventions. The astute among you will point out that VLC is also based on FFmpeg, so why bother switching? Well, they’re both free, so it’s not an either/or situation, but I’ll let you see what both look like in action. Since mpv is based on the free software project FFmpeg, it supports all the file formats and codecs that FFmpeg can handle, which is just about everything you can imagine, including the formats Apple is discarding. Thankfully, the installation of IINA doesn’t require anything fancy just open the disk image and drag the app to your Applications folder. You’ll have to run mpv from Terminal, which offers some advantages, but for most of us, those don’t outweigh the convenience of a graphical interface. If you fancy yourself a Terminal wiz, you can easily install mpv on your Mac any number of ways, with my favorite being Homebrew. What does this have to do with IINA? Well, mpv is the engine that drives IINA. That project has mostly been abandoned and superseded by mpv, a Unix command-line video player that offers unmatched performance and extensibility. In the 2000s, MPlayer (not to be confused with the media player for Windows or the gaming service from the late 1990s-yes, I’ve used all three) was the gold standard for video playback in the open-source world. What’s not to love? Building on MPlayer, mpv, and FFmpeg It’s free, it’s open-source, it’s built for the Mac (written in Swift even!), and it hit 1.0 at the end of 2018 (I’m reviewing version 1.03). There are many open-source video players, the most popular being VLC, but there’s one that’s both better and Mac-exclusive: IINA. And even if you aren’t, you may very well have old videos in obscure formats, as might have happened with video taken with a flip phone. But if you’re used to dealing with transcoding video (or let’s be honest, downloading it from shadowy sources), you’re probably wincing right now. Thankfully, the industry has now largely settled on H.264 and H.265.
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