Nice alternatives to VLC: MPlayerX and MPlayer OSX Extended. But...

[HitTheRoad]

MPlayerX and MPlayer OSX Extended are good alternatives to VLC.

There's only one annoying thing:MPEG-2's played in these players end with a short mechanical clicking sound (while the video display dissapears). Not all MPEG's end this way, but most of them do.

This only happenes to MPEG-2's.

I exported some of these MPEG-2's to AVI, DV and MPEG-4. When played in MPlayer there's no mechanical click.

Is this a known issue?

[Ai Haibara]

I don't think I've encountered that, using MPlayerX - but then, the only MPEG-2 video in MPlayerX I've played is from ripped DVDs. I took a quick look through this page: http://code.google.com/p/mplayerx/issues/list, and I don't think I noticed anything relevant.

I keep both VLC and MPlayerX on my system, though VLC seems to have issues with my ripped DVD menus, for some reason; shouldn't have to always fall back on DVD Player.

[jman98]

I keep both VLC and MPlayerX on my system, though VLC seems to have issues with my ripped DVD menus, for some reason; shouldn't have to always fall back on DVD Player.

I do not rip on Macs so I haven't encountered this, but the last time I bothered to try this it was ridiculously easy to cause VLC to crash hard by having it play a VCD on a Mac and trying to jump forward by clicking on the time bar to go to a later point on the VCD. I can tell you that VLC on Mac does NOT use the same code base as the Windows and Linux versions. It is quite a few releases behind at a minimum if not using different code altogether. It's also poorly maintained. I feel a little bit guilty about bitching about a free program, but it is frustrating that things just seem so half assed with VLC on Mac when it works so well on Windows and Linux.

[Ai Haibara]

Can't say I know if that's definitely the case; while I do have VLC installed on my Windows systems and keep it up-to-date, just in case, I almost never use it. It sees a little more use than that on my Mac and Linux systems... but even on those, it's not the primary/default player, either.

It wouldn't be the first time I've seen something like that happening, though. One of the most recent examples might be the Linux and Mac versions of Flash paling in comparison to the Windows version.