At this point, VLC is a staple of every Mac user’s life. And it’s not a bad video app. It will play virtually everything you throw at it, and it’s free, and it’s open-source. But at the same time, it hasn’t really changed in more than a decade, and with the latest Apple Silicon MacBooks, VLC can sometimes feel quite slow. With Apple’s modern design language, and the fast M chips, VLC feels quite out of place.
If you’ve felt that too, it might be time to try out IINA. Like VLC, it’s also a free, open source app that’s regularly updated. But the twist is that it’s modern, fast, and kind of works like if Apple made its own version of VLC. It has that trademark swiftness and polish that’s evident in Apple apps. If you’re considering a switch from VLC, here’s why you should give IINA a shot.
A swift and customizable interface
VLC can be quite in your face, but IINA wants to get out of your way as soon as you start using it. While VLC can sometimes take a while to start playing a large 4K movie file (showing the animation in the video timeline as it loads up fully), IINA is instantaneous. You drop in a file, it starts playing, and the interface disappears in a couple of seconds. That swiftness is something that VLC just does’t offer right now.
Plus, the interface itself is heavily inspired by QuickTime player, but with its own spin to it. You have similar dark, translucent elements, but they do a lot more than what QuickTime offers.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Jump into the Settings and you can quickly customize the entire interface. From the General section, you can enable a feature that automatically opens your media in Full Screen as it starts playing. You can also choose to pause media when leaving full screen mode.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
From the UI section, you can also enable a feature to always play media on top of every other window (no need to manually engage Picture-in-Picture mode, which the app also offers).
By default, the app has a QuickTime style floating toolbar menu, but you can choose to dock it to the top or the bottom, making it less distracting. The toolbar itself is quite customizable, and you can add to it with optional extra controls for subtitles, full-screen mode, and screenshots. My only complaint here is that the buttons in the toolbar are too small, and it’s easy to forget that the Playlist feature is hidden behind a small toolbar button, while it’s a big focal point in VLC.
A useful welcome screen
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
I’m generally not a fan of welcome screens in apps. Sometimes they can feel like an additional step before you can get to the task at hand. IINA’s welcome screen, though, has one useful feature. It keeps a history of your recently played items, and offers to resume playback right where you left off (you only get this in VLC after opening a video file manually). And of course, the playback is instant. From the welcome screen, you can also start playback for any online stream.
An elevated subtitles downloader
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
For years, VLC has included a subtitles downloader, but as a plugin. As a non-native speaker, one of the first things I do when I download media is to look for subtitles, and anything that can save me from spammy sites is a god send. I’ve had varying degree of luck with VLC, but the whole experience is much better with IINA. The subtitles downloader feature is baked-in, looks like it was designed in this century, and works quite fast.
Over all, IINA’s speed and polish makes it a modern option, without losing any of the performance that comes with VLC. That is, if you’re on Mac. Sadly, IINA is not available for any other platform, not even iPhone or iPad.