unflyingobject

It turns out that for my needs, the best x-format media player out there right now is the command-line version of MPlayer. It plays anything, is infinitely customisable, has proper support for subtitles (with live interactive retiming!) and most importantly, allows me to easily create the perfect UI for it, tailored exactly to my needs. In most cases this means "play this file" or "play this file and use this other file for the subtitles".

So I created an Automator action (just unpack to ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder) which, after a "Get Selected Finder Items", runs this little AppleScript:

on run {input, parameters}

  set args to ""

  

  if length of input > 1 then

    repeat with i in input

      if name extension of i is in {"avi", "mp4", "ogg", "divx", "mkv"} then

        set video to i as string

      else

        set subs to quoted form of POSIX path of (i as string)

      end if

    end repeat



    set args to " -sub " & subs & " -subfont-text-scale 4"

  else

    set video to (input as string)

  end if

     

  set video to quoted form of POSIX path of video

  do shell script "/usr/local/bin/mplayer -framedrop -mc 0.001 -af volnorm=2 " & video & args & " &> /dev/null &"

  return true

end run

Now I simply select the file(s) in the Finder and Ctrl-click > Automator > Play in MPlayer.