6.2 Video

You can install any of several X11-based open source applications for viewing various formats of video by using the Fink package manager (see Chapter 11). These applications will run under Apple's X11 environment. Also, some open source video applications have been ported to Mac OS X using Aqua, rather than relying on X11.

6.2.1 Open Source Video Players

MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu), a popular audio/video player among Linux/Unix users, can be run under Mac OS X. In addition to being among many packages that are being ported to Mac OS X by the Fink Project, a Mac OS X binary distribution of MPlayer, MPlayerOSX, is available at http://mplayerosx. sourceforge .net/ and sports an Aqua GUI.

After you've downloaded and mounted the disk image, drag the MPlayer OS X application to your /Applications folder, and then unmount and trash the disk image if you don't plan to install it anywhere else.

To play videos with MPlayer OS X (shown in Figure 6-3), you can drag and drop a video file on the MPlayer OS X icon in the Finder, or select a video from the MPlayer OS X menu bar by using File Open.

Figure 6-3. MPlayer OS X

Another popular open source, cross-platform multimedia player, VLC (shown in Figure 6-4), has been ported to Mac OS X and sports an Aqua-native GUI. VLC, distributed by the VideoLAN project (http://www.videolan.org/), supports a wide variety of video and audio formats. To play a video using VLC, choose either File Open from the menu bar or drag and drop the video file onto the VLC icon in the Finder.

Figure 6-4. VLC

VideoLAN supports some formats that Apple's QuickTime Player does not. If you find that QuickTime does not support a particular file, you may want to try installing VLC or MPlayer OS X.

In some cases, a QuickTime component or plug-in may be available to allow QuickTime Player to handle a codec that it does not ordinarily support. For example, unlike QuickTime Player, VLC supports the audio codec Ogg Vorbis right out of the box. However, in this case, a QuickTime component is available at http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/. Once you download the component, you just need to drop the file OggVorbis.component in your /Library/QuickTime (or ~/Library/QuickTime ) folder.