NicePlayer is well on its way to the best media player for mac — ever. I finished implementing a plugin this past week using Xine-lib that plays back a lot more media than QuickTime supports. It does have some minor issues (mostly having to do with setting the playhead point in certain cases) that are Xine bugs, but we can do cool stuff like play back vob and HD mpeg2 files (at full res! requires a G5). This is mostly thanks to XinePlayer being open source — I mostly hacked around the existing Xine view code, refactoring it to adhere to our plugin API. Xine gains all of the great UI things we have in NicePlayer, and NicePlayer gains great playback speed — a win-win.
All of the problems with the resize indicator appearing in funny places have been resolved — the resize indicator now appears on mouseover where the movie resize should be while in full screen mode. I’ve also implemented notification support, so we get cool text notification overlays like DVD Player. There’s also support for non-proportional scaling (actually it pretty much comes for free), and plugin loading order and preferences have been fixed (not that anyone noticed it was broken). We’re probably going to miss our projected release date of 4/17 by a week or two, as we’re trying to get some pretty advanced playlist UI in. But we’re definitely getting closer to a 1.0 release, with probably one or two more interim releases between now and then.
Robert,
Perhaps you should follow the fowllowing development with libavcodec
http://www.defyne.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=3
A working hardware idct port is working. MPEG-2 HD on a mac mini will very soone be possible!