Elton One

This video is amazing. The last bit is the best so keep watching.

So co-ordinated at video game dancing but the complete opposite at walking.

After several years of using a multitude of applications under OS X to play videos locally and over a network, I have come to the following conclusions:

• Quicktime is a nice application but has limited support for a large number of file types (avi, divx, flv) and despite the availability of additional codecs (such as FlipForMac for Flash) I have never been able to consistently play all the file types I have. Network playback is also very hit and miss, and without the ability to change the cache size playback that does work is often very jittery. Not being Open Source and with the newest versions supporting DRM really puts the nail in the coffin, although Quicktime is a powerful application.
• VLC is also a nice application with good support for all the file types I use and a great deal of options but it is hard to find what you are looking for in the preferences and documentation. Local playback is great but network playback is not so good and despite playing around with the cache size, playback is almost always jittery and I get the following error:
  

  

  
  On checking the forums it seems a large amount of OS X users have similar problems and the developers, despite VLC’s awesome cross-platform support, are not so interested in developing further to solve this problem (see here).

• MPlayer has consistently proven to be very effective for both playing files locally and over a network, and with simple visual preference options backed up by advanced command line
  functionality and good online documentation it is a powerful application. Cache size can be altered in Preferences/Miscellaneous by ticking Additional Parameters and entering
  -cache 10000
  with the value representing kilobytes. 10000 works great for me with minimal load time and no jittering. This will load the specified amount before playback commences and continue to stay that far ahead as playback continues unlike VLC which loads the amount specified in the cache but after this amount has been played the jittering kicks in (the cache seems to be a one time pre-load).

  

  N.B. It is important to note that for this to take effect in MPlayer “Use cache (slow media)” needs to be ticked in Preferences/Miscellaneous, otherwise you get jittery playback regardless of specifying the cache size in Additional Parameters.
  
  

Conclusion

If you want to play local and network video using OS X with no jittering or other playback errors, MPlayer with the additional cache parameter is your best bet.

I have been using MPlayer Version 1.0 rc1 with OS X 10.4.8 on an Intel machine and MPlayer OS X Version 2.0b9r5 on OS X 10.4 & OS X 10.4.11 on a PPC machine.

Intel machine is great, PPC machine plays back with no jittering but audio is half speed and through the left channel only. I will endeavour to solve this problem.

I like stop frame animation. Maybe I should try some. Some time. When I’m not already in the middel of a million other things.

The advert:

The making of: