There was a time when video files all conformed to some basic requirements and could be played without protest using any media software. As technologies change and licensing becomes more restrictive and specific, simply playing a video file has now become a challenge and thanks to the plethora of obscure proprietary formats now available, finding a media player that works for the majority has become more hassle than it’s worth. Thankfully the open source community have come up with a solution in the form of VLC, otherwise know as VideoLAN.

This cross platform player doesn't strike as particularly good-looking when put side by side with Windows Media Player or Winamp, but you'll appreciate its far superior usability within moments. Its power can be demonstrated with any video files you happen to be downloading, which can be played in whatever form they exist, be it an actual video format or an unclassified temporary one. As you preview a video, it will skip the parts that have yet to be downloaded and let you see the rest – Media Player in comparison, can't preview files in this way.

Apart from playing incomplete videos, because lets face it not many people want to do that anyway, VLC has support for a huge range of video formats. If it doesn't recognize the file type it will try playing it anyway often successfully or if it's an encrypted file it will display the scrambled video in its raw form. The interface is stripped down to the bare bones, with the apparent objective of making it as unobtrusive as possible. With superb hotkey support, you can do practically everything you want without touching your mouse.

Put simply, VLC is a video player that doesn't stray in to other areas. You won't find any media catalogs or fancy visualizations thrown in and although there is one alternative skin available, all it will take is one look and you'll quickly be switching back to the default.

This free player should appeal to true cinephiles who want as little distraction as possible from their viewing experience. Being open source it's free to use and thanks to a small file size and a friendly installation process, we would recommend it to absolutely everyone as their "backup" or "catch-all" video player.

Download VLC Media Player 0.9.3 in Softonic

FireANT is an RSS video aggregator and media player that helps you keep up to date with the latest internet TV channels and programming.

With the FireANT Player, you can subscribe to any RSS 2.0 channel and automatically download fresh media content to watch and listen to. In this way, you don't need to keep checking your favorite channel - whether it be CNN or ESPN - to see whether there's anything you want to watch on as FireANT delivers it all to you in much the same way as Google Reader tracks your favorite blogs.

The other big draw of FireANT is that the media player is incredibly versatile - rivaling VLC Player in some respects - as it's able to play just about any format without the need for codecs including Quicktime, Windows Media, Flash, Real Media. FireANT can even sync downloaded files with portable media players such as iPod and Sony PSP.

In addition, FireANT player comes with an integrated Yahoo! Video Search function. When FireANT was originally released this was probably quite useful but now that Google is king, you probably won't find much use for it. You can also interact with video creators by sending comments to them based on their content although I'm sceptical as to whether this actually works properly.

A format free and fun way to keep track of your favorite programming, FireANT is maybe a bit dated now but better than having to keep checking channels for new content yourself.

Download FireANT Beta in Softonic

Apple ships a Remote Control with the Mac. With only six buttons the Apple Remote is the ultimate in simple sophistication.

The standard functionality is limited to controlling just a couple of applications. Sofa Control breaks this limit. With Sofa Control you are able to control any application on your Mac and trigger whatever actions you like. Sofa Control puts you in control.

Out of the box Sofa Control comes with support for a number of applications. Applications like Keynote, Powerpoint, Safari, Preview, Acrobat, VLC, EyeTV, and many more.

Download Sofa Control 2.6 in Softonic

If Quicktime is your default media player, then Perian is the tool you need to make sure it plays any media file type you want.

This discreet little component adds support to a wide range of formats including MKV, FLV, DivX and WMA or even less known formats like Xiph Vorbis or Flash ADCPM. It also offers subtitle support for SSA and SRT so you can enjoy films in their original version in Quicktime. Users also like that Perian offers AVI support for H.264 and audio files like MP3 or AAC.

Perian is very easy to install and works automatically once it's set up. While VLC is usually the recommended media player on Mac because of its wide support for all sorts of media file types, having Quicktime with Perian is also an excellent choice to play any sorts of media.

Some users have complained that Perian 1.1 happened to crash with Quicktime 7.4.1 but apart from that Perian performs seamlessly. We encourage you to install to be able to enjoy all sorts of videos on your Mac.

An excellent and free Quicktime component, Perian lets you enjoy almost any media format, including subtitles and a number of audio files. Highly recommended.

Download Perian 1.1 in Softonic

NicePlayer takes advantage of QuickTime and all of the codecs available to it, but without any of the nag screens. That means that you can play anything QuickTime can, and with our plug-in support even more -- including DVDs.

With an interface that only appears when you need it, NicePlayer makes it more convenient and easier to play all of your media. Double click on the window to change to full screen. Right click to pause. Use the scroll wheel to change the window size.

Because NicePlayer allows you to use the scroll wheel to adjust playback of your movie to arbitrary sizes, you can easily do your work while watching a movie. You can even adjust the size of the window when playing DVDs -- so when you come across one of those widescreen DVDs encoded in full frame, you can zoom in so that you don't get black bars on all four sides of the movie when watching on your Powerbook or Cinema Display (using NicePlayer's "Fit Width" command also simplfies this more in most cases).

Use the playlist to queue up multiple media files and have them play sequentially, automatically.

QuickTime doesn't support playing the files you want to watch? NicePlayer has an open plugin architecture to support other media playback engines as well. That means that anyone can create a plugin to embed another media playback engine so NicePlayer can go be extended past QuickTime (i.e. DVD Playback, VLC).

Download NicePlayer 0.94.1 in Softonic

MacLibre, a rigorous selection of free, legal software for Mac OS X. MacLibre is an Open Source Software Distribution for Mac OS X developed during the Google Summer of Code program mentored by the WinLibre project.

Create

Audacity

Blender

Gimp

Inkscape

Internet

Adium

Colloquy

Cyberduck

Fire

Firefox

Nvu

Thunderbird

Vienna

Multimedia

HandBrake

MPlayer

VLC

Office

AbiWord

NeoOffice

Utilities

ClamXav

DesktopManager

iTerm

VirtueDesktops

X11

Download MacLibre 2.0.2 in Softonic

XinePlayer is a multimedia player for Mac OS X. It is based upon the stable and mature xine multimedia playback engine. It is designed to be a free replacement for QuickTime Player and DVD Player.

Features:

• DVD playback (using the VideoLan libdvdcss decoding library)
• DVD menu support for advanced navigation features
• Playlists
• Fullscreen playback
• Software deinterlacing

Download XinePlayer 0.3 in Softonic

This handy little widget lets you control your VLC player remotely. It is useful when you can't reach your Mac or if you feel like activating VLC from one Mac to another.

Download VLC Remote Interface Widget 0.2 in Softonic

It's considered to be a must have free video player. It can play any type of video including 192 video codec and 85 audio coded - like VLC player, but with a nicer interface. It is also supposed to optimize CPU usage and use as few resources as possible. The package contains optimized builds for Pentiums, Athalons and Dual Core processors. You just select the one suitable for you during the installation process.

The package installs both MPlayer and the front-end SMPlayer, which is the same program but with a nicer looking interface. A number of useful features are included: the subtitles option for example, allows you to load subtitle files and link them to a video. You also have many options to deinterlace, denoise and apply filters to improve the video rendering.

I've noticed minor usability issues: when you stop the video for example, the pointer in the status bar should restart from the beginning, whereas with this player it just stays at the point of the film you stopped it, making no difference with the pause function. Also the program doesn't remember the volume of the sound when you close and re-open the application.

MPlayer supports 192 video codec and also video streaming, QuickTime and RealAudio files making it the perfect choice if you don't want to mess around with a different player for each video format.

Download MPlayer OS X 2.0 b8r5 in Softonic