MacLC 1.1.1

What's new

• Self-contained app. MacLC now carries every third-party library it needs (143 libraries from 56 Homebrew formulae: FFmpeg, libass, FreeType, libmatroska, libplacebo, libtorrent-rasterbar…). Until 1.1 they had to be installed with Homebrew, otherwise AAC audio, MKV, text and ASS subtitles and torrents did not work. Nothing else to install now.
• Licences of the bundled libraries are in MacLC.app/Contents/Resources/Licenses/.
• HTTPS trackers and web seeds keep working for torrents on Macs without Homebrew (the bundled OpenSSL now uses the certificates macOS ships).
• Minimum system set to macOS 26, which the bundled libraries require: older systems get a clear message instead of a crash.

Install and first launch

1. Open the disk image and drag MacLC to Applications.
2. Open MacLC once. macOS says it could not verify MacLC is free of malware: click Done.
3. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security, scroll to Security and click Open Anyway next to "MacLC was blocked…", then confirm with your password or Touch ID. Only needed once.

Why this step? macOS opens downloaded apps without asking only when they are signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, which requires a paid Apple Developer Program membership (99 USD a year). MacLC is a free, open-source project: it is signed ad hoc, which proves the files were not altered since the build but does not identify the author to Apple. macOS therefore asks you to confirm once. It does not mean the app is damaged or unsafe; the source is public and the SHA-256 of the disk image is below. The disk image contains the same explanation in English and French, and the README has the details (Terminal alternative included).

If macOS ever says MacLC "is damaged", the download is incomplete: download it again and compare the SHA-256.

Requirements

macOS 26 or later, Apple Silicon. Optional: yt-dlp for File › Open Web Video (brew install yt-dlp), SVP 4 Mac for the SVP interpolation engine.

SHA-256 (maclc-1.1.1.dmg): f379a35d1335334f1da3e0e52255f699c3384d788f35a056aba8ce9d0f3f8628

MacLC 1.1

Second beta of MacLC. It is still in development.

New

• BitTorrent streaming. Open a .torrent file or a magnet link and playback starts while it downloads. Torrents open from the Open panel, Browse, the Finder ("Open With") and "Open a Link". Subtitles that come with a video are picked up, and the episodes of a torrent play one after another.

Removed

• Podcasts and radio, along with the Streams section of the sidebar.

Fixed

• Browse crashed when opening a network service (Bonjour, SAP…) that had not found anything yet.
• Crashes when quitting while the controls fade out, on the end-of-playback screen after a file was renamed or deleted, at launch with a toolbar customised without the sidebar button, and in the media information window.
• Progress dialogs froze playback and could stop the player from quitting.
• Playback hung, and the player could not quit, when an HTTP/2 server kept the connection open after a redirect (archive.org and many CDNs).
• Subtitles in an encoding chosen in Settings (ISO-8859-1, for instance) failed to decode.
• Frame interpolation smeared fast motion instead of cross-fading when the motion search ran at reduced resolution.
• A slow thumbnail download could land on the preview of the next web address pasted.
• Audio and video outputs leaked on every playback, Now Playing commands got the wrong status and "play" did not resume paused playback, plus other fixes from code audits.

MacLC

First release of MacLC beta. Keep in mind that it is still in development.