Undoubtedly one of the best tools for HTPC’s (the windows variety) is ffdshow, a package of codec’s, encoders/decoders, and post processing filters that can produce images that rival expensive ‘up-scaling’ standalone DVD players. I’m sure some of you already know ffdshow isn’t available for Mac’s and likely won’t ever be. So what’s a media loving Mac fan to do? One alternative (with some further development) is MPlayerOSX, which is based on ‘MPlayer’ for Linux. Currently MPlayerOSX doesn’t offer quite the sophistication or function of ffdshow, but it’s still one of the better candidates for a real top notch OSX based, player/decoder for DVD playback, at least until Tiger, if then.

For the Mac HTPC community to grow, projects such as these need your full support. By all means try MPlayerOSX out , but be sure to give the developers your feedback for this and any other Mac HTPC software project. I’d love to hear about any other current or up-coming Mac software projects of this type.

B.Greenway

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2005 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.