Reading over an article on TidBITS today, I’ve now discovered a new media player that may take the place of the venerable VLC Media Player. I’ve simply lost count of the number of years that I’ve been using VLC (and recommending it to most of my clients), it was probably some time in the early 2000’s that I first started using it.

While VLC will play just about any media file that you throw in it’s direction, it’s clear from the user interface that it’s not an app that was designed for macOS, but rather one that aims for wide, cross platform compatibility.

Enter from stage left, IINA. The modern media player for macOS.

IINA is designed and built exclusively for macOS, so follows a lot of the general conventions set out by Apple, such as picture-in-picture support, a more streamlined (some may say restricted) interface and support for Dark Mode on Mojave. It also supports the Touch Bar on current Mac laptops, uses mouse and trackpad gestures for media control and can tie into the media control keys on the keyboard.

Under the hood, IINA uses mpv which is an up-to-date media playing library that will also handle nearly any video format it’s given. It supports things like GPU acceleration for video playback and is under active development to ensure the code remains clean and fast and supports newly developed video and audio formats.

Check out IINA and let me know what you think…

Source: Prepare for Apple Dropping Old Media Formats with the IINA Video Player – TidBITS