What do people do after they’ve found something that they can “live with”? Most will settle down. And what will happen after people settle down? They will stop looking around. While this might be good when speaking about a spouse or family, it’s not always good for everything else.

In terms of media players for Mac, most Mac users are satisfied with the existence of QuickTime and VLC for multimedia player. They stop looking around and might miss some nice alternatives, something like NicePlayer.

This is an open source multimedia player built from the ground up. It supports scripts, and those who have tried the app say that NicePlayer requires less system resource than QuickTime and VLC while incorporating the goodness of the two.

Let’s Play Nice

If you want to try this alternative media player for Mac, you can start by downloading the latest version, a 3.4 MB installer – relatively small compared to the 19 MB VLC or 17 MB QuickTime installers. At the time of writing, the latest version is 0.96.2.

The first time you try to play movie using NicePlayer, you’ll notice that there’s nothing but the movie there.

The playback controls will appear when you hover your mouse over the lower part of the screen. Similar to QuickTime, or the other way around? Looking at the original release date, I think Niceplayer’s user interface was adopted by QuickTime.

The title bar will also appear upon mouse hover. There’s something more than the title in the title bar. On the most right corner you’ll find the playlist button. Clicking on it will open the playlist pane. You can add movies by dragging and dropping them to the pane.

There are two buttons there. The left one is to arrange the play order: continuously or shuffled, while the right one is the loop button. You can set each item to be played once, or the list to be repeated over and over, or only one item that will be repeated over and over.

The menu “Presentation” allows you to choose the window size, including “Full Screen (Command + F)”.

There are rather unusual menus: Present All, Stop All Simultaneously, and Play All Simultaneously. Curiously, I tried them but nothing unusual happened. The movies were played normally.

As mentioned earlier, NicePlayer supports the use of scripts. There’s the “Scripts” menu to access all the available pre-installed scripts, including one that caught my attention: “Just For Fun“.

This menu contains two items: “Send To Background” – to put the movie behind every other open windows and “Set Current Window Opacity” – to set the transparency level of the movie.

If you choose the latter, you can decide on the opacity. My personal opinion is, against colorful background, anything below 70 percent is barely watchable. Below is an example of transparency level set at 50%.

If you are the kind of person who eats scripts for breakfast and want to create and use your own in this app, you can put the script in NicePlayer’s scripts folder. You can access the folder by going to the “Scripts – Open Scripts Folder” menu.

For those who wants to dig deeper into NicePlayer ability, you can go to the Preferences menu. There are lots of settings that you can adjust to fit your personal preferences.

Don’t Settle

Many people are unaware of the existence of other great alternative apps just because they stop looking. NicePlayer shows us that not well known doesn’t mean not good.

So if you are looking for a small and light media player for Mac, you can try NicePlayer. And if you know other great alternatives, you can share using the comment below.

Don’t forget to check out our other articles about media players for Mac, such as: Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With QuickTime X, How To Play WMV Files on your Mac, and Playing Video Files With Some Twist Using Movist.