IINA Is My Favorite Media Player for Mac
VLC is a staple in every Mac user’s life at this point. And it’s a good video app. It will play just about anything you throw at it, and it’s free and open source. But at the same time, the situation has not changed much in more than ten years, and with the latest Apple Silicon MacBook VLC can sometimes work quite slowly. Apple’s modern design language and fast M processors make VLC seem completely out of place.
If you feel this way too, maybe it’s time to try IINA . Like VLC, it is a free and open source application that is updated regularly. But the trick is that it’s modern, fast, and works as if Apple had created its own version of VLC. It has that signature speed and sophistication that is evident in Apple’s apps. If you’re thinking about switching from VLC, here’s why you should try IINA.
Fast and customizable interface
VLC may be annoying to you, but IINA wants to get out of your way once you start using it. While VLC can sometimes take a while to start playing a large 4K movie file (showing animation on the video’s timeline as it fully loads), IINA is instantaneous. You upload a file, it starts playing, and after a couple of seconds the interface disappears. That kind of speed is something VLC doesn’t currently offer.
In addition, the interface itself is largely inspired by the QuickTime player, but with its own characteristics. You have similar dark translucent elements, but they do much more than QuickTime offers.
Go to settings and you can quickly customize the entire interface. In the General section, you can enable a feature that automatically opens media files in full screen when you start playing. You can also pause media playback when exiting full screen mode.
In the User Interface section, you can also enable a feature that allows you to always play media on top of every other window (no need to manually enable Picture-in-Picture mode, which the app also offers).
By default, the app has a QuickTime-style floating toolbar menu, but you can dock it to the top or bottom to make it less distracting. The toolbar itself is quite customizable, and you can add additional controls to it for subtitles, full screen mode, and screenshots. My only complaint here is that the toolbar buttons are too small, and it’s easy to forget that the Playlist feature is hidden behind a small toolbar button, even though it’s an important element in VLC.
Helpful welcome screen
I’m not a fan of welcome screens in apps at all. Sometimes they can feel like an extra step before you can begin the task at hand. However, the IINA welcome screen has one useful feature. It saves a history of the items you’ve recently played and offers to resume playback from where you left off (you only get this in VLC after opening a video file manually). And, of course, playback is instant. From the welcome screen, you can also start playing any online stream.
Elevated subtitle downloader
For years, VLC included a subtitle downloader, but as a plugin. As a non-native speaker, one of the first things I do when downloading media is to look for subtitles, and anything that can keep me away from spam sites is a God send. I had good luck with VLC, but IINA is much better. The subtitle download feature is built-in, looks like it was designed in this century, and is quite fast.
Overall, IINA’s speed and quality make it a modern option without losing the performance found in VLC. That is, if you are using a Mac. Unfortunately, IINA is not available for any other platform, not even iPhone or iPad.