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There's never been a better time to trade your cable company's rented DVR for your own Mac-based solution. A once-sparse market for Mac DVR apps now overflows with increasingly powerful and user-friendly choices for recording your favorite TV shows, via antenna or cable. We've sifted through the growing pile of Mac DVR solutions to compare the two top contenders: veteran EyeTV and relative newcomer Plex. EyeTV has power and finesse. Plex has speed and style. But only one of them is your best bet for squirreling away hours of The Walking Dead.
A quick word about the also-rans
The other players in the Mac DVR arena have their merits, but they all fall short in key ways. It's important to note that no Mac DVR apps, including EyeTV, Plex, or any of the following rivals, can currently display or record encrypted premium cable channels such as HBO, Showtime, or Starz, even if you're a subscriber. The cable industry demands hefty fees for the keys to unlock those codes, and none of the current Mac apps has yet been willing or able to shell out that much cash.
Channels DVR records video on your Mac, but will only stream it to an AppleTV, iOS devices, or a web interface. It also offers built-in, non-destructive commercial skipping, a feature with which Plex and EyeTV both struggle. At $8 a month, it's one of the most expensive long-term options for Mac DVR service.
SiliconDust, makers of the popular HDHomeRun TV tuners, have built DVR service into their standard TV app. At $35 a year, HDHomeRun offers one of the cheapest Mac DVR options, and unlike Plex, it can play and pause live TV from your Mac. SiliconDust says it also hopes to enable premium channels like HBO. But HDHomeRun's interface is just so-so, and it lacks Plex's other media-aggregating abilities and EyeTV's fine-tuned recording skills.
If you're particularly tech-savvy — or just have a high threshhold for aggravation — you can turn to MythTV, a Linux-spawned free DVR app. TV listings cost $25 a year through SchedulesDirect. I endured MythTV's lengthy, byzantine, frustrating installation process only to find its interface subpar at best, and I wouldn't recommend it.
Meet the contenders
EyeTV's been around for more than a decade, first from Elgato and now from Geniatech. It was the first Mac DVR solution, and for a long time, the only one. It works with Geniatech's own hardware, which is designed for European markets, as well as third-party tuners from SiliconDust, Hauppage, Pinnacle, and more. EyeTV also boasts built-in AppleScript support, which Plex lacks.
While Plex has offered Mac media server software for years, it's only recently added live TV and DVR functions. Along with TV shows, Plex will aggregate your photos and DRM-free movies and music (which excludes anything you've purchased from the iTunes Store, alas), pulling in artwork, episode descriptions, and other cool info automatically. For U.S. viewers, Plex also offers apps that can serve up any free episodes streaming online from ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, the CW, and more. At present, Plex's DVR and TV features only work with SiliconDust's HDHomeRun CONNECT, EXTEND, and PRIME tuners. I used an HDHomeRun PRIME to test both apps.
Cost
EyeTV 3 software costs around $90. After the first year, each year of TV Guide channel listings will run you around $20. To stream live TV or recordings to iOS, you'll need the $4.99 EyeTV app from the App Store.
Plex's software is free, but live TV and DVR require a Plex Pass subscription, which costs $5 a month, $40 a year, or $120 for lifetime access (for a limited time; regularly $150). Plex Pass subscribers also get discounts on useful cord-cutting equipment from various manufacturers; at the time of this writing, those deals included a limited-time coupon for 30% off a new HDHomeRun tuner. Depending on which model you buy, that could nearly save you the cost of an entire year's Plex Pass subscription.
Assuming you purchase the $40 annual Plex Pass, here's how Plex and EyeTV's costs stack up over time:
Plex is cheaper for the first three years, but adds up quickly after that — so if you're planning to stick with Plex for the long haul, consider a lifetime pass, which amounts to free service after the first three years. Plex will even prorate the cost based on any remaining credit from your current monthly or annual subscription.
WINNER: PLEX
If you like using Plex, a lifetime pass will cost you less overall than three years of EyeTV. The up-front cost to try out Plex is far lower as well, and the extra discounts don't hurt.
DVR Setup
Once you install the EyeTV software, a friendly guide will walk you through setup. If you're using EyeTV and an HDHomeRun PRIME, bear in mind that because EyeTV only officially works with HDHomeRun's other two-tuner models, it will only recognize two of the PRIME's three tuners. Though it's not officially supported, I've never had a problem using the PRIME with EyeTV, and I've rarely if ever needed to record more than two shows at once. But if you do, this may be a dealbreaker.
Once it finds your tuner, EyeTV will scan your channel lineup — very, very sloooooooooowly. It took roughly 24 minutes to identify all my channels.
You'll sign up for a free EyeTV account, which the program uses to serve your channel listings and give you access to remote streaming. Finally, you'll enter your zip code, pick a local TV provider, and — you guessed it! — wait a few more minutes for EyeTV to download a complete program guide.
In contrast, setting up Plex took just a few minutes. First, sign up for a free Plex account at http://plex.tv. After that, upgrade to a Plex Pass under My Account > Settings > Subscriptions. Then download the Plex Media Server, which runs in the background on your Mac to record and stream shows. Log in to the server with your Plex account, tell Plex which folder on which drive should store your TV shows, and you're up and running.
Under Settings > DVR, Plex can automatically detect your tuner and offer to set it up as a DVR. Plex downloaded my channel lineup in seconds, and let me pre-select the channels I wanted from that list. After that, downloading guide listings took a brief three minutes.
From there, you can browse or watch recorded video through the Plex server's web interface, or download the Plex Media Player for Mac for essentially the same experience.
Both the Server and the Player downloaded and installed quickly. However, I did have to reinstall the Server after realizing I'd accidentally downloaded an older, non-Plex Pass edition that didn't support Live TV, and couldn't automatically update it.
If you have older recordings you want to include in Plex, they won't show up in your library unless you use the right folder structure and naming conventions. I had to rename and reorganize a few exported shows I wanted to save, which took time but wasn't particularly painful. Here's an example of how to set up any given episode file:
[Your TV Shows Folder Name] > The X-Files > Season 03 > The X-Files - s03e04 - Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose.mp4
Finally, if just one tuner isn't enough for you, EyeTV and Plex can both work with multiple tuners to record even more shows simultaneously. On EyeTV, this feature's experimental and not officially supported, and EyeTV warns it may not always work. Plex has no trouble with multiple tuners as long as they're all the same type — antenna or cable, but not both.
WINNER: PLEX
Though both programs made setup relatively painless, Plex found my tuner and loaded my channels light-years faster than EyeTV.
Look and feel
You can tell with one glance that EyeTV's been around since 2002. It's not ugly, and it conforms well to the Mac design standards of yesterdecade, but it wasn't built to look good on a big-screen TV.
Plex's interface isn't particularly Maclike, but it's sleek, appealing, and easy to navigate. My only complaint: In fullscreen mode, the interface glitched badly on a screen with a resolution higher than a typical HD TV.
WINNER: PLEX
EyeTV's stuck in the past. Plex feels fresh from the future.
Watching live TV
EyeTV makes watching live TV fairly simple. Click on a channel name in its Program Guide, and — if the program doesn't suffer one of its sporadic hiccups and claim it can't find the channel, forcing you to try again — start watching. EyeTV maintains a buffer to pause or rewind live TV.
Plex doesn't yet support live TV viewing via Mac app. You can watch, pause, or rewind live TV through a Web browser or iOS devices with a Plex Pass. In my tests with Plex's web interface, live TV required about 10-15 seconds of stop-start playback before it began smoothly streaming the channel I was watching. And since you can't easily switch channels on Plex without stopping one program and selecting another, you can expect that little bit of lag every time you change to a different live program.
WINNER: EYETV
But keep an eye on Plex to see how quickly it catches up.
Browsing TV listings
EyeTV displays a classic grid of programs on your channels. You can jump forward up to 14 days to see upcoming schedules, though I often found incomplete or nonexistent listings after 12 days or so. Type a title in the search bar to zero in on a specific show and see a list of upcoming episodes.
Plex, at least on the Mac, focuses on shows and ignores channels. Its Program Guide screen shows you what's on right now and what's coming up next, along with upcoming movies, news shows, and sports programming on your available channels. You can find any upcoming shows or episodes within Plex's 14-day listing window by searching for their titles in Plex's search field. Like EyeTV, I often had to wait a few days for programs at the far end up the listing window to actually show up among my scheduled recordings.
WINNER: TIE
Which approach you prefer likely depends on your personal tastes. I liked how Plex breaks out individual shows, but I missed the clarity of a programming grid, and I found Plex's almost complete lack of channel info odd.
Recording and watching shows
EyeTV uses Guides to find shows to record, and Playlists to sort existing recordings. To record a series or episode on EyeTV, click on its box in the Program Guide and hit 'Add Schedule' for one episode or 'Record All' to create a Smart Guide, which looks for every episode of a series you haven't already recorded. (If you delete an episode after watching it, EyeTV may re-record any subsequent reruns.)
Smart Guides have the option to deposit their shows in a matching Playlist. You can also create custom guides and Playlists with a long list of Boolean criteria, the same way you'd filter messages in an email client. For example, you can record every new HD episode of 'Grizzly Bear House Flippers' that airs on Thursdays, or make a playlist for every episode from season 2 of 'Rotund Comedian Loves Very Thin Wife.' This comes in handy when, for example, you want EyeTV to watch for specific episodes of a series to add to your collection, and snag them whenever they air.
EyeTV records unaltered video straight from your cable stream — likely MPEG-2 video, possibly MPEG-4 — and saves it as a proprietary .eyetv file that other programs can't play.
Recording in Plex is easier and simpler, but somewhat less powerful. Click a show in the Program Guide, or from a search result, then hit the Record button and specify whether you want just the one episode or every episode. Advanced settings let you specify whether you only want HD, replace SD episodes when HD versions air, and restrict those recordings to a particular channel or airtime.
Every series is sorted automatically into its own playlist under your TV Shows library, with individual seasons broken out within that. You can also mix and match episodes by creating custom playlists. Sports fans will appreciate Plex's ability to record all available events involving a given sport or a given team.
Plex captures unaltered MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 video streams as a .ts transport stream file, which the free app VLC can play, and the also-free app Handbrake can convert to other, more accessible formats. Plex also accepts regular H.264 MPEG-4 files, MPEG-2 files, .avis, .movs, and a host of others.
Only EyeTV lets you watch a recording while it's in progress; on Plex, at least for now, you'll have to wait until it's over to see any of it. Both EyeTV and Plex let you watch one previously recorded show while recording one (or more) others. And both offer parental controls to restrict certain content from eager young viewers, based on its rating: Plex by supporting multiple users with different permissions, and EyeTV via a passcode you can enable for shows above a certain rating in its Preferences.
In years of using EyeTV, I occasionally endured spotty recordings. Sometimes the program guide just didn't update, so new episodes never showed up to get recorded. Sometimes EyeTV spontaneously forgot the external drive where I'd stored its recordings and scheduling data. EyeTV claimed it could turn my Mac on and off to record shows, saving energy and wear and tear on the hard drive. But that feature never worked right until I dug up and installed a few user-created AppleScripts, including one I had to use every time I shut down my Mac, whether EyeTV was open or not. Sometimes, even after all that, shows still didn't record, for no apparent reason.
Plex, in contrast, requires an always-on computer, which uses a bit more power but largely avoids such headaches.
WINNER: EYETV (by a nose)
The greater power and flexibility of EyeTV's recording engine outweigh its extra annoyances and unreliability compared to Plex.
Commercial skipping and editing
You can download the free and fairly easy-to-install ETV-comskip plugin to automatically skip commercials with EyeTV, but unless you're prepared to experiment and fine-tune its text file full of settings, its commercial-finding guesswork varies wildly from 'pretty much perfect' to 'go home, Comskip, you're drunk.' Comskip takes a few minutes to work its mojo, but you can watch the unaltered recording while you're waiting for it to add commercial markers.
EyeTV does include built-in editing tools to let you fine-tune those markers frame by frame, add new ones if needed, and (with all the lightning speed of a tranquilized Galapagos tortoise) create a new compacted file without the marked sections, saving space on your hard drive. Whether you've compacted a file or not, marked sections get excluded when you export EyeTV files to another format.
As of November 2017, Plex offers built-in commercial skipping. With roughly 15-25 minutes of behind-the-scenes processing for an hourlong recording (depending on whether it's in 720p or 1080i), Plex obliterated most if not all ads. In some cases, a handful of seconds -- or even a minute or two -- were occasionally trimmed from the end of a commercial break. That may happen because Plex's algorithm mistakes a black frame within the show for the end of yet another commercial.
I don't know whether Plex's commercial skipping is based on the same Comskip technology EyeTV uses. If so, it may sometimes mistake very short segments at the end of half-hour shows for commercials, and cut them out entirely. Episodes won't show up in Plex until they're done processing, so if you want commercial-free goodness the instant a show's done recording, you're in for disappointment.
WINNER: EYETV
Plex's solution is built-in, but EyeTV's is easy to install. And only EyeTV lets you edit commercial breaks after the fact; once they're gone in Plex, they're gone for good.
Exporting videos
EyeTV has built-in support to export your recordings in a variety of sizes and formats, including presets for iPhones, iPads, and H.264 in 720p or 1080p. This process is, yet again, slower than molasses. On a 2012 Mac mini, exporting a 20-minute 720p MPEG-2 file to H.264 took a hefty 17 minutes in EyeTV — far slower than the 10 minutes total it took to export the file in its original MPEG-2 form, then convert it with QuickTime Player. Your best best: Export files as MPEG Program Streams, which require no transcoding, then use QuickTime or Handbrake to further compress them.
Plex has an experimental feature that supposedly lets you compress files as you record them — but a recent change to how the program recorded files seems to have rendered that feature inactive as of this writing. Nonetheless, you'll find the shows Plex records sitting in whatever TV Shows folder you've designated, ready to be popped into Handbrake for further compression or conversion. Plex can also manually optimize individual episodes to work better with streaming or fit better on iPhones or iPads, using presets or a custom setting. Just click on the '..' in the lower right corner of any episode, then select 'Optimize' from the menu that appears. Creating a slimmed-down version of a given show took only a few minutes of background processing.
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WINNER: PLEX
When it comes to exporting, anything EyeTV can do, Plex can do better (and faster).
Remote streaming
Both EyeTV and Plex let you stream recorded content and live TV to iOS apps over your local network or via a secure Internet connection, as long as your Mac and the program are running.
EyeTV charges $4.99 for its app, which works on both iPhones and iPads. To watch a recorded show remotely, you'll need to tell EyeTV to optimize it, then wait while the program grinds through that minutes-long process. The app's interface looks great, and worked fine on my home network, but streaming away from home belly-flopped, big time. On a Wi-Fi connection strong enough for high-quality Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Video streaming, EyeTV sputtered, buffered, and just wasn't watchable, whether I chose live TV or a supposedly optimized recording. Frankly, I wanted my five bucks back.
Plex's iPhone and iPad app is free, and with a Plex Pass subscription, so is local and remote streaming. On the same network where EyeTV crashed and burned, Plex performed like a champ, sending smooth streams with minimal up-front buffering. Live TV endured only a few brief hiccups in some instances, but came through fine overall. Plex also makes it easy to invite friends to view some or all of the content on your server, even if they're not on your network. I experienced occasional, but not consistent, issues with audio and video not synching up when remotely streaming unoptimized 1080-resolution video files on Plex, but closing and restarting either the show itself or the app seemed to fix it.
WINNER: PLEX
There's just no comparison.
Overall DVR winner: Plex
EyeTV boasts many superior individual features, like live TV and more precise scheduling. If you want to fine-tune your recording schedules, or more easily automate your recordings with AppleScript, you may want to go with EyeTV despite its idiosyncrasies and its hefty up-front price.
But for most users, EyeTV's strong suits aren't strong enough to outweigh Plex's good looks and impressive ease of use. EyeTV hasn't seen a major update in years — and likely won't, since it was recently sold to new owner Geniatech, which seems uninterested in investing too heavily in its development. Meanwhile, Plex is already working on bringing live TV to its Mac app in future versions. Its ability to incorporate music and movies, and especially to stream your content anywhere you go, leaves EyeTV eating its dust.
Streaming TV: The Cordcutter's Ultimate GuideMain
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It used to be all the rage to photograph in excruciating detail the “unboxing” of a new piece of gear, especially hardware that few people (or no one else) yet had. Unboxing was great, but it’s sort of like a wedding or a birth: The actual event is relatively brief, and the really important stuff comes afterwards, as you spend years together.
Likewise, unboxing a new Macintosh may be exciting, especially if it’s a surprise. But the important part comes next. While Apple includes quite a bit of software, and offers more for free download via the Mac App Store, what else should a new user or a fresh system get?
As a nearly 30-year veteran of Mac ownership, I have 10 solid suggestions that will make your life better by shaving off the little irritations that remain in Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite and in Apple’s bundled software. A new Mac user will be happier than otherwise, and a veteran user looking to refresh a system will find the time and effort savings quite rewarding as well.
LaunchBar
While OS X’s Launchpad and Spotlight can, in different ways, let you quickly find and open apps, documents, and other things, they can be maddening. Launchpad’s interface is hardly useful when you have more than a handful of apps, and Spotlight searches everything, rather than specific categories and in specific ways. Instead, pick LaunchBar ($29 individual, $48 family), which indexes and links to all sorts of stuff: music, contacts, apps, emoji, search history, bookmarks, and more.
LaunchBar can be invoked from a keystroke—I use the default Command-Escape. Then you just type a few letters to select the thing you want, and press Return to launch it or open it with the appropriate app. LaunchBar’s bar, however, also lets you perform most Finder actions with a Command-shortcut and carry out calculations.
LaunchBar can also add Clipboard depth, turning into something like the old pre-OS X Scrapbook: You can revert to and cycle through previous items you’ve copied or cut.
Best Free Apps For Mac MiniDefault Folder
There are three elements of Yosemite itself that I spend more time interacting with than any other: the Open dialog, the Save dialog (and variants like Export), and Finder window navigation. Default Folder ($35) enhances all of these to your advantage in efficiency and organization.
When installed, the app wraps your open and save dialogs in a bunch of extra interface items. On one side, you can select from volumes and special locations, Finder windows, favorited locations, and recently visited folders. The file-navigation dialogs can also be set to snap to the last document opened or other locations, while pressing Option plus the down or up arrow cycles backward or forward through recent folders. Another item allows a variety of Finder-style file actions directly within the dialog, like rename, duplicate, and move to trash.
A pane at the bottom reveals a preview, Spotlight comments, tags, and permissions, as well as file data like creation date and whether the item is locked or not. There’s a host of other options, too: Tap a key combination, and the current folder is opened in the Finder. With Default Folder installed, you never have to painstakingly navigate your drives and folders.
TextExpander
I know this is crazy talk, but what if you could replace the tedious repetitive typing of common phrases with a few keystrokes? Such shortcutting dates back decades—once known as “macroinstruction expansion” or “macros”—and TextExpander ($35 individual, $45 family) is the modern mature version of it.
Start with figuring out a few characters to type instead of your name or mailing address. Advance to using its tools for tapping a few keys to insert the current date, formatting it as you like. Move to employing prefabricated AppleScript to tap into URL shorteners, handling the roundtrip from clipboard to a tiny path. Graduate to its fill-in forms, which allow you to compose a message with selectable fill-in values to automate replies.
Smile revised its iOS version, TextExpander Touch ($5) to work within the add-on keyboard approach in iOS 8. Snippets can sync using Dropbox among Mac and iOS devices.
1Password
Security pundits, including yours truly, recommend that you create a unique strong password for every site or service you use. That’s impossible for a human to manage, but an integrated password generator and secure storage app like 1Password ($50) handles that with ease. It can create random password according to rules you set, or those absurd ones imposed by sites, and then securely store them for you.
That would be perfectly dandy, but not terribly useful if that’s all it did. However, 1Password also comes with browser plug-ins for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, which let you invoke the app while visiting a site. Tap a keystroke, and it either prefills a username, password, and more, if there’s only one match; or lets you choose among multiple accounts for a site. When creating an account, the password generator can be invoked in the same way.
1Password also stores and can fill in one or more identities (address information), as well as credit-card details. Versions are available for Windows, iOS, and Android, and a password database can be synced among them. (The App Store version is required for iCloud sync with OS X and iOS.)
The similarly featured LastPass is an alternative for those who want to be able to gain access to passwords via website, which 1Password doesn’t offer.
Dropbox
Keeping files up to date among multiple computers was a pain for many years. It wasn’t until Dropbox (free tier with 2 GB to 16 GB; 1 TB Dropbox Pro, $10/month or $100/year) appeared—a harbinger of cloud storage—that it became simple. Dropbox has a single folder into which you can place anything, and it’s copied to its Internet storage in your account, while also synchronized to any computer logged into the same account. (You can selectively omit specific subfolders on each machine.)
That would be enough, but Dropbox also offers two kinds of sharing. Shared folders sync the contents to any members who have joined the folder. A shared link allows any recipient to download a file or folder, or browse a folder’s contents.
Because Dropbox keeps a copy centrally, it keeps track of every change. Older versions and even deleted files are available for up to 30 days after a change or removal, and a $39-per-year upgrade to Dropbox Pro, called Extended Version History, extends that to a year. Dropbox’s iOS client lets you browse its cloud-stored versions, forward files, and download them to the app or open in other apps.
Skype
You already have FaceTime available on your computer and iOS devices. Why would you need Skype (free)? Because not everyone you know has a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, and because FaceTime doesn’t come with a calling plan, even though in Yosemite, OS X can access your iPhone to make and receive calls to landlines and cellular numbers.
Skype has a tattered history of Mac updates, but it remains the lingua franca for person-to-person and group Internet telephone calls. The service also has inexpensive calling plans for making unlimited phone calls to specific countries (such as the US and Canada), and cheap per-minute rates without a plan or to countries not included in a plan. You can pay for one or more incoming “real” phone numbers, too, placing them in countries in which you routinely receive calls, making it a local call for residents there.
It offers audio only and video calls, as well as screen sharing, file transfer, and instant messaging, along with SMS. I’ve used Skype for years as my main incoming and outgoing business line to avoid the fixed cost, and as it’s typically higher quality than a cell call.
CrashPlan
CrashPlan can back up any selection of files to a locally connected drive, a local-area network volume, a peer’s drive elsewhere, or its cloud service—in any combination. Only the cloud storage comes with a fee attached, $4-$6/month individual, $9-$14/month family. The family subscription option lets you pull in any of your otherwise backup-adverse relatives without them having to manage the details of a separate account themselves.
The peer-to-peer option lets you push your encrypted files to someone else’s drive anywhere on the Internet. That other person gives you a code, and off your files go onto their backup volume or a separate volume you could provide, offering true offsite backup without a recurring fee.
CrashPlan isn’t a full-system clone. For that, Time Machine or Super Duper ($28) is a better option. Rather, CrashPlan is best at archiving your documents, preferences, and applications, and can store endless revisions of the same files for recovering older drafts.
I have about 1.5TB stored with CrashPlan’s cloud service across my own and several family computers, and have relied on restoring files from the cloud and local drives many times, both through its Mac interface (including over 600GB after a recent drive failure) and its iOS app.
CrashPlan’s major downside is that it continues to require Java, an extra installation in OS X for years. Installing Java for CrashPlan is safe, because it’s not enabled for use on the Web without extra steps. Still, if that’s a stumbling block, Backblaze (unlimited storage, $4–$5/month per computer) comes highly recommended by many colleagues.
Airfoil
AirPlay is one of the best things about Apple’s ecosystem of audiovisual-friendly devices, and many strictly audio devices support AirPlay audio playback, too, including a Yamaha receiver I purchased a couple of years ago. But AirPlay has a number of limits. iTunes is the only Apple software that has a specific AirPlay option, which includes simultaneous playback to multiple devices. Otherwise, you’re limited to choosing a single device from Sound preferences to which to shunt all system audio.
Airfoil ($25) works around this limit by letting you take just the audio output of any software or audio input device and route it to one or more AirPlay-compatible receivers, including an Apple TV or AirPort Express. Better still, Rogue Amoeba offers Airfoil Speakers apps, free software for receiving Airfoil audio for Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and Linux.
VLC
VLC (free) is the Swiss Army knife of video playback software. QuickTime Player can handle popular formats in a straightforward way, but everything it can’t, VLC can. VLC can play Internet streaming video of all sorts, read various disc formats, and convert some files it can’t read. If you deal with older file formats, say, those used by people that eschew H.264 because of patent issues, or video created or distributed for Windows and Unix variants, VLC is a one-stop shop.
Beyond video file support, VLC can open and convert tons of audio formats, which you might find in sorting through several decades of cruft on the Internet and in your own digital history, depending on your age. It can also directly open YouTube URLs, subscribe to podcasts, make video playlists, and play Internet radio stations from a large, built-in list.
GraphicConverter
As VLC is to video (and audio) formats, GraphicConverter ($40) is to image files. While Apple’s Preview offers a decent subset of image viewing and manipulation controls, GraphicConverter has more in common with Photoshop without the subscription fee now required for Adobe’s graphical-editing pioneer, nor nearly as steep a learning curve.
GraphicConverter can open just about anything, offers photographic (non-linear levels) and image-editing (gradients, fills, and like) tools, and the basics like cropping, canvas resizing, and up- and downsampling. I often turn to GraphicConverter’s Browse command to view images in a directory, where I can preview and see file data, as well as rename or delete them.
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You can directly import images from scanners and cameras (including in RAW format), and GraphicConverter can upload directly to Google+, Flickr, and other services. And if you need to process a number of images—converting a folder from TIFF to JPEG, for instance—the program has simple batch processing, with more advanced options available to those who need them.
Best Free Art Apps For The Mini Mac
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