This may be a dumb question, but are both of these software safe? Particularly with MPV, it requires downloading of third-party builds which is what make me vary vs downloading yt-dlp.
I need to play MKV files but native players don’t support it, which is what I use. And while I’m at it, is there any way to judge a tool myself, whether safe or not?
VLC works really well too for MKV files.
But MPV is safe to install and use. HDR requires effort to play it well on it but if you’re on Mac, other apps are much simpler and easier to use.
Try MPC-HC and you will never want to use VLC ever again.
VLC on PC introduces visual artifacts, displays wrong colors, and breaks intensive subtitles, for anime related stuff at least where the issue is very documented
Seems to be outdated with lower-quality rendering, with or without madVR. Though don’t quote me on that
There are official builds on GitHub.
The original official MPC-HC project is discontinued, but there’s a maintained fork on GitHub user clsid2’s profile: Releases · clsid2/mpc-hc · GitHub (only available for Windows unfortunately)
On MacOS, IINA is also popular choice: GitHub - iina/iina: The modern video player for macOS. · GitHub
On macOS, I’m using Movist Pro and Infuse because HDR playback is important to me. I wish there was a good open source alternative here.
Could you guide me how? Github redirects to their installation page which recommends shinchiro build for windows, and is third-party build as they describe it. Many recommend it so that’s what I was going to use but it’s still not “official” build like yt-dlp which you can directly install with no third-party involved
Click on my link, scroll down to Assets, and download the version you need.
Ah, found it. But the official build seems very bare-bones vs shinchiro, former being for testing purposes and infrequently updated. I guess I’ll just test the official first, see if it fits my needs. Thanks
You can install yt-dlp as a standalone binary via winget/directly. You don’t need to use shinchiro builds for that.
I don’t use Windows, but compiling a media player takes 2-3 minutes.
I guess if for some reason you need encoding in the player.
It’s called a stable release. You can download the latest updates, but sometimes they might have bugs.
