VLC Media Player offers different mechanisms to zoom into a video. We can use interactive zoom to magnify a portion of the media. It might not seem to do anything if the video is open in full screen or in the maximized window mode. But if the video is in the Window mode, it will have an effect. To use the zoom feature that comes with VLC. Similarly, MPEG-4, which is a standard Blu-ray and DVD format, can be easily played on a VLC player. As the software supports full HD display and surround sound, it affects the overall view, because it is important to note that the MPEG-4 file format offers unique video quality in VLC Media Player. If Control Bar and Menu Bar are disappeared and went missing from your VLC Media Player then your VLC Media Player looks like the above-given figure. In that case to Fix this issue use given steps on your system. Firstly, open VLC media player on your PC and right-click on its blank screen anywhere.
When you need to play a video on your Mac, what do you do? Which app do you open? If you’re new to macOS, you might just double-click on the media file and it’s likely that QuickTime Player will start up — good enough for the most common tasks.
Soon though you’re bound to feel QuickTime’s limitations. It might be that you’ve transferred a file from your camera that’s not supported, or you want to watch a foreign movie with external subtitles. All this is difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish with QuickTime Player. You need to upgrade.
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Instead of having one VLC player alternative, get an entire collection. Setapp is a Mac apps subscription that gives you a large choice.
What Makes VLC Player For Mac Good
From the first moments of looking for a better media player, VLC for Mac is going to show up in search results again and again. The app is free, has good ratings, and seems to be universally loved. There’s even a version for your iPhone (and nearly every other operating system in existence). What’s not to like?
The official story of VLC player goes back to 1996, when a few students of École Centrale Paris in France developed the app as their academic project. Back then, they called it VideoLAN Client (VLC for short). As VLC player got more and more recognition and became popular worldwide, the original developers released the code under the open-source license, so that anyone could fix bugs and contribute new features.
By now, VLC player is available on Windows, macOS, iOS, Apple TV, Linux, Android, Chrome OS, and Xbox One. The only question left is how to find a VLC for Mac download.
How to get a VLC download for Mac
Unfortunately, due to some licensing issues, VLC player for Mac isn’t available on the App Store (although the iOS version is). With a simple Google search you’ll find that lots of third-party websites offer you VLC for Mac downloads — but beware! Such download files are often infected with various kinds of malware looking to find an easy way into your computer.
The only option that’s 100% safe is to find a VLC download for Mac on its official website:
Go to videolan.org/vlc
Click Download VLC
Double-click the .dmg file in your Downloads folder
Move the VLC icon into Applications
With regards to technical requirements, VLC player is supported by any 64-bit Intel-based Mac that runs macOS 10.7.5 or later (the latest one is 10.15). This covers 99% of Macs in use nowadays. And even if you need to make VLC player work with ancient Macs, older VLC versions are available for download from the official website as well.
To play a video on VLC for Mac:
Open VLC
Either drag the video you like onto the app’s window or go to File ➙ Open File… ➙ select the video ➙ Open
One of the most beloved VLC media player features is adding and fine-tuning external subtitles. When you’ve downloaded the .srt subtitle file you want to use:
In the menu bar of the VLC player, click Subtitles
Add Subtitle File… ➙ select the file ➙ Open
In the same Subtitles menu you can change the text size, thickness, color as well as the background color
With so much to offer, why would anyone choose any other app for their videos than VLC player? True, while QuickTime Player struggles with nearly every video encounter, VLC for Mac handles all the basics pretty well. But there’s so much more to discover in the land of video-playing features: multiple subtitles, audio extractions, ad-free web playback, AirPlay streaming, etc. Let’s see which VLC alternative for Mac offers it all.
Stream anything anytime with Elmedia Player
If VLC media player for Mac is a shell you can open content in, Elmedia Player is a full-on entertainment center. Get any videos you want anytime, thanks to its streaming functionality. The app is able to download YouTube directly to your Mac or play videos instantly using its web-browser extension, which allows to bypass all the ads.
Moreover, any downloaded videos can then be easily played on your AirPlay-enabled devices — watch a movie on a big screen with Apple TV, for example, without the need for USB drives or awkward cables. And while VLC media player might get stuck playing HD videos on a big screen, Elmedia will sail through them seamlessly with the help of hardware-accelerated decoding.
Play, stream, and download video
Get Elmedia Player, a perfect replacement for VLC, which has a streaming feature and a browser extension for direct downloads.
Elmedia Player, simply put, has everything you’ll ever need not to get bored. Even when videos become too much, you can extract audio files and save them as MP3 for easy on-the-go listening.
Gain full video control with Movist Pro
As good as Elmedia Player is, the ultimate VLC alternative for Mac could be a mighty 4K movie player called Movist Pro.
Movist Pro not only effortlessly decodes any video you come across (with an option to select decoders manually if needed) but also lets you configure the perfect video-watching scenario, including the quality and the size of each file.
If you want to watch a high-dynamic-range (HDR) video, but your screen doesn’t support it, the colors will show up dull and faded. Movist Pro features a built-in HDR tone-mapping technology that automatically adjusts colors to what they are supposed to be.
While nearly every VLC alternative for Mac lacks powerful subtitle management that VLC is known for, Movist Pro takes it a step further with support for multiple subtitles at once — invaluable when you’re trying to learn a new language or watching a movie with a bunch of international friends.
Vlc Player Mac Download
Finally, using the Movist Pro Safari extension, you can watch any video right from your browser window, with any of the above personal settings already specified.
How to start with Movist Pro? One step only: simply drag and drop your video onto the app and enjoy.
The best VLC alternative for Mac
So while some might argue that VLC media player for Mac is still good, the truth is — lots has changed since 1996. New entrants like Elmedia Player with its built-in downloader and ad-free streaming, or Movist Pro with multiple-subtitle support and HDR improvement are winning the market. The one you choose should quite frankly depend on the features you’re going to use the most.
Best of all, you don’t need to go all in and buy Elmedia Player or Movist Pro to see how they work. Both apps are available to you on a free seven-day trial from Setapp — a platform with over 150 Mac apps, where each one is the best for a particular task, whether it’s budgeting, retouching, or just getting things done. What might you be watching tonight?
Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.
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VLC Media Player offers different mechanisms to zoom into a video. We can use interactive zoom to magnify a portion of the media. There are also options to use zoom, crop, and aspect ratio to change the size of the on-screen media. We can also find options to scale any video in the advanced preferences section of VLC. Finally, we can use your OS’s accessibility feature like magnifier to enlarge what is on the screen. Zooming videos will allow us to see the tiny details that we might miss. We can also magnify a section of interest to better see it. There is also a possibility to change the window size to give it a desired zoom ratio. All these will enhance your video playback experience. Now, let us look at the various ways we can zoom videos in VLC Media Player.
Interactive Zoom
Interactive Zoom is by far the easiest and the most useful zoom feature we found in VLC. It is also very popular with the users. It is mostly used to see a section of a video. One can easily drag the zoomed portion. It will enlarge different part of the playing video interactively.
Here is how you can access and use Interactive Zoom in VLC Media Player-
- Go to Tools > Effects and Filters [Hotkey- CTRL + E].
- Click on The Video Effects tab.
- Navigate to the Geometry tab under it.
- Check the ☑ Interactive Zoom checkbox.
- Hit Save and Close.
The interactive zoom feature is now activated. You will see a small picture-in-picture like video on the top-left section of your media window. There will be a rectangle on it that denotes the area that is magnified. Use the mouse to click and drag the rectangle. Moving the rectangle around will change the area that is being zoomed. You can do this when the video is being paused or played. It is quite helpful to enable us to see something in greater detail.
Zoom Through Video Menu or Hotkey Z
Some users will find the Zoom option under the Video menu useful. It might not seem to do anything if the video is open in full screen or in the maximized window mode. But if the video is in the Window mode, it will have an effect.
To use the zoom feature that comes with VLC, do the following-
- Open a video in windowed mode (it should not cover the entire screen area).
- Navigate to Video > Zoom > (1:4 Quarter, 1:2 Half, 1:1 Original, 2:1 Double). [Hotkey- Z or Shift Z to cycle these options].
- The window size changes to quarter, half, double or original of the video resolution.
Not everyone will use the window size altering zoom feature. It can be useful if you want to see how your video looks in different resolutions. It is also a feature to stack VLC’s window on the screen real estate. Zooming this way for a 1080p video to 1:2 half will change it’s size to half of the resolution i.e. 1080/2 = 640px width and 1920/2 = 960px height. The area it takes up on screen will depend on your monitor’s resolution.
The best way to cycle through the video menu is to use the hotkey Z and Shift-Z. You can quickly switch through different zoom resolutions this way. Also, using other related hotkeys for Aspect ratio (A) and Crop (C) might suit your requirement.
Advanced Preferences
There is also an Advanced Preference to set the default zoom. We found it that it doesn’t have effect on the currently playing video. It does however impact the visualizations.
To access the Zoom option hidden in Advanced Preferences, follow these steps-
- Go to Tools > Preferences [CTRL + P].
- Under Show settings (bottom-left), choose All.
- Navigate to Video in Advanced Preferences.
- Scroll down (on the right side) to the Zoom video option.
- Set the zoom factor like 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2 and 5.
- Hit Save.
Using Magnifier in Windows
If you are in a Windows device, then the accessibility tools might come into handy. There is a tool called Magnifier. What it does is magnify everything on the screen. So, if your video is on the screen, it will make it appear bigger. The magnified area will follow your mouse pointer by default.
To use the accessibility tool called Magnifier in Windows-
Vlc Player Mac Full Version
- Click on Start.
- Search for Magnifier.
- Click and open it.
- It will overlay on top of your current window.
- Hit the Plus (+) button to Magnify and Minus (-) to Unzoom.
Vlc Video Mac
Keyboard shortcut to Zoom- Windows key and +
Keyboard shortcut to Zoom Out- Windows key and –
How To Download Vlc Player On Mac
You can zoom from 100% to 200% to 300% …. to 1600%. It will increase/decrease the zoom percentage by 100% for every + or – button pressed. It might get overly zoomed and confusing if you zoom it too much like say 1600%.