Movist Pro is intended for media playback. As many other players, it is powered by FFmpeg, which allows it to support a wide array of video formats. It has an attractive minimalistic interface, with controls that do not stand in your way to prevent you from fully enjoying your movies. However, unlike other popular apps of its type, Movist Pro does not come with such detailed documentation. Neither does it have such a huge developer community.
One of the first things you would like to look at may be its playback capabilities. Thus, in addition to common controls, Movist Pro allows changing playback speed: it even slows down to frame by frame. By the way, this becomes quite handy when you are taking snapshots of your favorite frames. Likewise, you set a specific segment to play from the entire video. Moreover, it conveniently shows frame thumbnails as you hover the mouse pointer over the seek-slider, which facilitates finding the desired scene.
Luckily, the player lets you configure the screen in every conceivable way. For instance, you can toggle to full-screen mode and adjust the aspect ratio to your preferences. This way, you can shrink or stretch the movie to fit the screen.
One of my favorite features is the way Movist Pro can handle subtitles. In this respect, I think it is way ahead of any other player. First, it supports both playing embedded subtitle tracks and adding them from external files. Second, the appearance of the subtitles is fully customizable, including position, margins and fonts. Third, you can adjust any synchronization issue on the fly. Last but not least, the player can use text-to-speech technology to actually read subtitles aloud.
The product is available in two versions: Standard and Pro. In this regard, the Pro version, being reviewed here, allows playing videos directly from the Internet. It supports various widely used protocols, such as SMB, SFTP, FTP and WebDAV (including HTTPS). Similarly, it supports picture-in-picture playback.
Regrettably, the tool failed to play some types of media files which I supposed it would support. Moreover, it does not seem to allow importing a DVD video folder, a problem you can solve by directly opening the VOB files instead.
All in all, Movist Pro has the main advantage of supporting some media formats that MacOS built-in player cannot. Similarly, it provides many conveniences in terms of playback and subtitling. Luckily, the product can be tried at no cost.
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