It's a player of the ffmpeg lineage; a GUI frontend for mpv. If you use mpv or some frontend (e.g., SMPlayer, Celluloid, or Haruna) on other platforms, IINA is a natural choice on macOS.

It's free software, it's keyboard friendly, it supports more of less every format, and it blends into the OS's native desktop environment. I don't have an eye for design, but it seems good to me. If there's a better choice for local multimedia playback on macOS, I don't know what that is.

(It seems the only other real contender on the backend is VLC, which is likewise excellent software.)

>It seems the only other real contender on the backend is VLC

Does VLC already support HDR content on MacOS? I switched to IINA because of that omission.

I don't know. I have a medical light sensitivity problem that makes most HDR content physically painful for me unless I manipulate picture settings to reduce peak brightness, backlight, and/or contrast in various ways. Between my light sensitivity and my progressive colorblindness, I don't get as much out of HDR as most people do, so I just turn it off where possible.

Maybe some day when I have more external displays with OLED or something else that can do millions-to-one contrast ratios, I'll play around with HDR and see if I can find a way to reliably make it comfortable, but for now I don't own any-- it's just the built-in displays of my mobile devices, and I spend as much time as possible on much larger screens because I also have visual acuity problems.

IINA has been around for quite a while, it's a front end for mpv. Pretty much Just Werks, it's my standard video playback client.

Ah, I'll try it out thanks. I tried out https://mpv.io/ but wasn't a big fan.

mpv is a nice piece of tech, a solid foundation for a player. IINA agapts it to feel native on macOS, and it does amazing job at that.

Not that new, I've been using IINA for years! It's pretty good.

Another vote for Infuse. In my experience Infuse 8 handles HDR and color management correctly (1:1 with Safari or QuickTime), while IINA does not (too dark).

Infuse is good, but it does not feel so well-polished for the desktop, for example, some windows for pop-up could have been a real window, but were a pop-up that blocks the main player.

Agreed. I still use it anyway because I like icloud syncing