While these days a lot of people simply watch online video through their browsers, there’s still a place for dedicated video playback apps, whether you’re looking to download and save YouTube videos or just want to access your old collection of video files in various formats. Eltima Software’s Elmedia Player (free), just updated to version 6.0, lets you playback just about any video file on your Mac, with support for a wide range of video formats including MP4, FLV, AVI, WMV, DIVX, and more. In addition, the built-in web browser and ability to open videos from any URL makes it a handy YouTube or Vimeo video player, as well.
It also lets you listen to music and view fully interactive Flash (SWF) videos in full screen mode. Elmedia also uses your Mac’s hardware accelerated video decoding capabilities, so even HD video playback should run smoothly and in sync.
The free version of Elmedia also provides a couple of nice advanced features, including the ability to adjust video playback to create frame-specific loops and adjust audio delay to sync up video and audio, a video tuner to fine-tune your viewing experience, an audio graphic equalizer, and support for external audio tracks.
It also handles subtitles, allowing you to customize their appearance, adjust their delay to sync them up, and load subtitles from an external file automatically or manually. A $20 pro upgrade adds even more features to the app for power users, including the ability to download videos from YouTube and other online video sites, easily extract audio from a video — even an online one — capture high-quality screenshots or whole sequences of screenshots from videos, and convert Flash projector EXE files into SWF format.
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