VLC, while it often just works, is one of the slowest players I know. I often have a lot of jittering, esp. when doing some CPU/IO intensive work in the background but also without. Sometimes when I play from a Samba share, it may also because of slow connection, whereby the connection should be fast enough to play it in real-time without a problem. I already played a lot around with settings like skipping frames, cache size, etc. but I never really got it removed completely. And the UI, esp. controls like play/pause, also feel a bit laggy. E.g., when I hit pause, it still plays for about half a second.
MPlayer is among the fastest players I know. One good sign of that is that I can normally play Xvid/H264 videos with it on my 350MHz PII with an onboard graphics card (Riva128) in Xorg without any problem. And on my normal PC, it never has any performance problems, no matter what I do in the background. And it also responds really fast. When I hit pause, it instantly pauses.
Only problem with MPlayer: It often does not integrate that well, at least on MacOSX (maybe most of this is Mac related). And there are no real official binaries and the ones which exists are outdated. Also, all of the available GUIs often have further problems and make the performance a lot worse (which I don't really understand).
Anyway, why I am writing this: Often enough, I have thought about that the VLC GUI and OS integration (also including automatic updates, etc.), with MPlayer as the engine, would be the best thing.
Likely a Mac related problem. I have no trouble with VLC on my Windows machine nor on my work iMac. However, the home iMac has issues.
In my administrator account on the machine the video is fine, but in my wife's non-privileged account the video can stutter. And all video stutters--flash, VLC, QuickTime. And it comes and goes with various OS updates.
What I also experienced under Linux: It eats more power. When playing videos just on battery on my notebook, I could play much longer with mplayer and the CPU cooler stayed very slow/silent. This difference was very notable on my PowerPC notebook but also later on x86 notebooks.
Weird, I find VLC to perform much better on my 2009 MBP than MPlayer. I tried switching and gave up after 15 minutes of constant stuttering in MPlayer OSX Extended.
And I really wonder why the difference is so immense. Maybe the MPlayer OSX Extended GUI totally sucks. But all the other GUIs I have tried seem also to suck performance-wise or with other problems.
VLC, while it often just works, is one of the slowest players I know. I often have a lot of jittering, esp. when doing some CPU/IO intensive work in the background but also without. Sometimes when I play from a Samba share, it may also because of slow connection, whereby the connection should be fast enough to play it in real-time without a problem. I already played a lot around with settings like skipping frames, cache size, etc. but I never really got it removed completely. And the UI, esp. controls like play/pause, also feel a bit laggy. E.g., when I hit pause, it still plays for about half a second.
MPlayer is among the fastest players I know. One good sign of that is that I can normally play Xvid/H264 videos with it on my 350MHz PII with an onboard graphics card (Riva128) in Xorg without any problem. And on my normal PC, it never has any performance problems, no matter what I do in the background. And it also responds really fast. When I hit pause, it instantly pauses.
Only problem with MPlayer: It often does not integrate that well, at least on MacOSX (maybe most of this is Mac related). And there are no real official binaries and the ones which exists are outdated. Also, all of the available GUIs often have further problems and make the performance a lot worse (which I don't really understand).
Anyway, why I am writing this: Often enough, I have thought about that the VLC GUI and OS integration (also including automatic updates, etc.), with MPlayer as the engine, would be the best thing.