QuickTime Player vs VLC media player

QuickTime Player is Apple’s free player for video and audio files on macOS. It supports MOV, H.264, HEVC, MPEG-4 audio, and AAC, along with network playback, subtitles, hardware acceleration, and 4K playback. Controls include play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, and speed settings from 2x through 60x, with smaller steps between 1.1x and 2x. Files can play through AirPlay or in a picture-in-picture window. QuickTime Player trims, rearranges, rotates, and splits movies, records the whole Mac screen or a selected area, and captures connected iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch screens. Camera recording can use built-in or external hardware. Movie exports are.mov using H.264 or HEVC; audio-only exports use MPEG4 audio, and MP4 video export is not available. Export resolutions include 4K, 1080p, 720p, 480p, and Audio Only, subject to the source. It is included with macOS at free.

VLC media player is a free media player for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. It plays multimedia files, DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs and streams, with sources including files, discs, webcams and connected devices. Supported formats include MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, XviD, WMV, MKV, MP4, MOV, AVI, WebM, MP3, AAC and FLAC. It supports subtitles, network playback, hardware acceleration and 4K playback, and most codecs work without a separate codec pack. VLC also supports skins, extensions and skin creation through VLC Skin Editor. Additional downloads are listed for Apple TV, Windows variants, several GNU/Linux distributions and systems including Chrome OS, FreeBSD and Solaris. VideoLAN is a non-profit project, and its source code can be obtained directly. The free plan states that VLC has no spyware, ads or user tracking; no other free-tier limits are listed.