Ultimate MOV Viewer App for Your Mac: Troubleshooting and Fixes for Non-Playable Video Files

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How to Play .MOV on Mac with Best MOV Player

Posted by Kaylee Wood | Last update: June 29, 2020

What’s the best MOV file player for macOS? How to play MOV on macOS Big Sur/Catalina/Mojave when the built-in player - Quicktime - won’t play MOV on Mac? To quickly and easily solve the MOV playback problem, you might need more of a professional MOV player on Mac than a trouble-shoot guide for an on-bar universal media player. And you’ll get your answer here.

You are also suggested to convert MOV to MP4 to play MOV files on Mac and Windows 11/10 >>

Why MOV File Won’t Play on Mac Computers?

Synptoms:
* MOV files imported from a DV/camera are not playing on Mac.
* A number of MOV media from different resources are reported as error playing on Mac.
* MOV file plays on Mac with only audio but no image.

Reasons: Wondering why Mac does not play mov files properly, when MOV is the very native format for macOS? The problem might highly lie in the MOV file itself. And there are many possible causes, be it incompatible video/audio codecs, corrupted files, overdeep bitrate or oversized resolution that is challenging your mac computer overall specs. In these cases, converting mov to other formats will be of none help. Try some other stable free mov player software to check if this MOV file is truely playable, otherwise, you might need to change a Mac computer to try playing the file.

Solutions: A simple installment of 5KPlayer - a trustworthy FUHD 4K/8K video player - on Mac, enables you to rule out possible causes of high-res/bitrate, incomplete MOV file and incompatible codec issues that might result to MOV not playing on Mac. This HD media player can smoothly handle up to 8bit FUHD videos and incomplete files of almost all codecs with the most rational and efficient CPU/GPU usage, thanks to its hardware acceleration feature.

After checking through 5KPlayer, if the file is still unplayable, you will come to the left two possible reasons - MOV file totally corrupted, or computer specs too low. Try playing it on other platforms and computers with higher specs.

How to Play MOV Files on macOS (Big Sur and before)?

Download 5KPlayer for Mac , install and run it. You can enable hardware decoding in Settings in advance.

Tap “video” button to browse local media collection:
If you have made this MOV player associated with your MOV files, you can just double click the file to play. Otherwise, you can input MOV files with one of the ways below:
1. Drag & drop a MOV file to the main panel;
2. Click “Video” to add MOV video for playback;
3. Right click on target MOV file, and navigate to “Open with -> 5KPlayer” option.

5KPlayer is a stable and robust MOV player on macOS Big Sur for high-res video/audio playback. Hi-fi lovers can also enjoy Dolby and 5.1 surround sound using this second to none media player. Light-weight, quick response, and elegant interface add up to be the best local media player softwre choice for your high-end Mac computer.

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