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I want to watch videos on my Mac but I don't like QuickTime. I was wondering what the community recommends.

In particular, I was interested in some granular ability to slow down the video or speed it up. It seems that QuickTime can only double the speed. I wish I could, for example, say, increase speed to 1.5 or 1.25 (like YouTube). Sometimes I end up just uploading it to YouTube and watching it there - which is, I think, a little dumb.

Also, if it has any additional ability to rotate videos and save them, or concatenate two videos together and save the result; that would definitely be a plus, though not a requirement.

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This answer will be short: VLC. Has everything you need except the rotation. It's a media player, not a video editor.

To alter the playback speed in VLC: Go to to Playback → Playback Speed. You can also alter the playback speed using ⌘= and ⌘-.

For rotation, as user Iwillnotexist Idonotexist notes in the comments below, you can go to Window → Video Effects → Geometry → Transform.

Bonus: A list of some VLC keyboard shortcuts for OS X.

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    @Charlie Parker You can even have a rotated view: Window -> Video Effects, tab Geometry, checkbox Transform then pick your rotation or flip. This holds true at least of VLC 2.1.5. I don't know if you can save that however.
    – Iwillnotexist Idonotexist
    Nov 7, 2014 at 2:41
  • You can, everything VLC can display, it can save in a multitude of formats.
    – Kroltan
    Nov 8, 2014 at 2:58
  • To emphasize on VLC, I have to add that there are many addons that can improve/modify the functionality of the software.
    – Pouya
    Nov 8, 2014 at 10:59
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I use mplayer in its Cocoa form MplayerX like VLC it can't edit the video but just plays it. (There is a version in the Mac App Store but it is old as Apple does not now allow some of the functions the are needed (although I had no issues with it until I upgraded to Yosemite)

To increase speed go to AVS->Increase Speed (or decrease) or ⌘] or ⌘[

I prefer the interface to VLC, it feels more OS X integrated to me. Also I use skip forward or back a lot and that seems to be better than VLC's version of it.

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    MPlayerX works much better for me than VLC. It chokes sometimes on larger files and/or multiple audio tracks, but works more reliably. VLC locks up my Mac and causes system-wide crashes every once in a while, requiring a reboot.
    – user11633
    Nov 11, 2014 at 19:45
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I use Movist. It's a native video player that used to be free but is now sold at the App Store. Old versions can still be downloaded for free, but they use an old version of ffmpeg that doesn't even support Hi10P, and the application has changed a lot since then.

Both Movist and MPlayerX have nicer UIs than VLC in my opinion, and they are also faster at seeking and at opening files. Both Movist and MPlayerX also support restoring the playback position but VLC doesn't. Movist is a bit more customizable than MPlayerX though: it supports for example centering subtitles vertically and using a custom implementation for full screen windows.

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I recommend IINA - The modern video player for macOS. It's Open source, supports URL streaming, Picture-in-Picture mode and other features.

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  • This is so underrated. The customizability yet native feel is amazing. It feels like one of those apps macs should ship with by default.
    – anonymousaga
    Mar 5, 2022 at 2:06

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