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+--- Thread: Which Video Player should I use for best playback performance and color rendition? (/Thread-which-video-player-should-i-use-for-best-playback-performance-and-color-rendition)
Which Video Player should I use for best playback performance and color rendition? - Gunther - 2020-06-29
LRTimelapse focuses mainly on quality when exporting videos. The exports are meant to provide the best quality for further editing. Most of the video editing programs (Davinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut etc.) offer proper support for the advanced video formats, resolutions and the wide color space that LRTimelapse supports. But many of the stand alone video players are quite limited.
"Consumer" video players like Windows Media Player are usually focused on playing back simple consumer videos in default resolutions, aspect ratios and colorspaces. They are quite limited in terms of color rendition and therefore not a good option for playing back master timelapse clips.
That's why you should install and use a good video player to watch and evaluate your timelapse clips.
- On Windows I recommend the MPC-HC player. It's the best player that I know. There is a Community on Github which is still actively developing and maintaining this player on an open source basis, which is fabulous. If you are on windows, you should definitely install the latest version of MPC-HC and set it as default player in Windows. You won't need anything else anymore. Make sure to activate Color Management by right clicking on the player, then Renderer-Settings -> Color Management -> Enable.
- On Mac the default player is Quicktime. Unfortunately even while it got better in the last years, there are still problems, especially with interpreting the gamma of H.264 file correctly, see: https://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Thread-colour-shift-after-export?pid=55632#pid55632
The best video player I know for mac is IINA, it's free and open source, color accurate, has a nice interface and plays lots of formats, check it out: https://iina.io/https://iina.io/
RE: Which Video Player should I use for best playback performance and color rendition? - mopperle - 2020-06-29
Thanks a lot for pointing us to the MPC-HC Player. One of its great features is that it plays also Blu-Ray Discs. At least for me, VLC is history now
RE: Which Video Player should I use for best playback performance and color rendition? - rodrigo - 2020-08-09
Unfortunately MPC-HC cease to carry on developing back in 2017 due to the lack of developers, but you still can get the player.
RE: Which Video Player should I use for best playback performance and color rendition? - Gunther - 2020-08-09
There is a fork at GitHub which is still being actively developed and updated. That's the version that I use: https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases
RE: Which Video Player should I use for best playback performance and color rendition? - Giuseppe - 2022-07-15
MPC-HC is amazing. It can properly run 8K Prores clips without problems.