NewUpscaling with nine methods, and Compare Before and After

Your videos have never looked this good.

The free video player for Mac that plays everything, and makes it shine — with real HDR, SDR to HDR, nine GPU upscalers, silky-smooth motion, Voice Boost and a library in the style of the Apple TV app. Free, with no ads and no tracking.

Download for Mac See what’s new

Free · Version 1.6 · macOS 26 Tahoe or later · Apple Silicon

MacLC’s library: Sintel ready to resume at the top, then Continue Watching and Recently Added shelves with HDR badges, and a song playing in the Now Playing bar.

What’s new

More than a player. Still just as simple.

Fourteen reasons to make MacLC the app that opens your videos.

Nine ways to upscale

Small videos enlarged on the GPU to fill a big screen, from MetalFX, FSR and NIS to small neural networks.

Learn more →

Compare Before and After

Split the picture down the middle: without SDR to HDR, upscaling and interpolation on the left, with them on the right.

Learn more →

Discovery in Watch

Narrow Home to the streaming services you use, browse genre tiles and discover editorial collections with The Edit.

Learn more →

Choose a Version

Plain facts for every stream (resolution, HDR, sound, peers) with filters and tips that explain the jargon.

Learn more →

History, favorites and resume

Favorites and History in the sidebar under Watch, Continue Watching on Home, and resume that remembers where you stopped.

Learn more →

YouTube in the sidebar

Home, Subscriptions, History, Watch Later, Liked Videos and playlists run on yt-dlp, with optional private sign-in.

Learn more →

Torrents you can follow

Starts with verified seconds, adapts to swarm speed, with an animated progress screen and buffer marker.

Learn more →

Stremio-compatible add-ons

Install add-ons for catalogs, metadata and streams. Cinemeta built in, with community add-ons a click away.

Learn more →

Nine sound modes and EQ

Voice Boost lifts dialogue without raising effects; night mode and a 10-band equalizer shape every track.

Learn more →

Play on TV

Send what is playing to an Apple TV or AirPlay receiver, or to a Chromecast, and control it from your Mac or remote.

BetaLearn more →

A library for everything you watch

Add a folder and MacLC finds the artwork, groups your shows and albums, and remembers where you stopped.

Learn more →

Everyday videos, lit up

On a Mac screen that supports HDR, lights, skies and reflections glow — faces and shadows stay close to how they were filmed.

Learn more →

HDR without the guesswork

Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10 or iPhone HDR: MacLC picks the best version for your screen and tells you why.

Learn more →

Silky-smooth motion

Films shot at 24 frames a second can glide at up to 120 on a ProMotion screen. One click to try.

Learn more →

01 SDR to HDR

Your videos, in a new light.

A recent MacBook Pro or a Pro Display XDR can shine several times brighter than an ordinary video ever asks it to. MacLC finds the lights, reflections and skies in every scene and lets them glow — while faces, shadows and colours stay close to how they were filmed.

A frame of Sintel at sunset, as an ordinary video shows it: the sun and sky stop at plain white. — Simulated for this screen. On a Mac that shows HDR, the real highlights are brighter still.

Simulated for this screen. On a Mac that shows HDR, the real highlights are brighter still.

Only the highlights change

What should shine — a lamp, the sun, a reflection — gets brighter, while faces and shadows stay close to how they were filmed. At the Balanced level, everything darker than a white shirt is left as it was.

Smart about your Mac

Auto picks the best of five quality levels your Mac can keep up right now: the full trained model when it’s plugged in, a lighter one on battery.

See the difference

Hold M while a video plays to see the original, and let go to see MacLC. You choose how bright highlights may get.

Auto

Picks the best level this Mac can keep up right now.

Fast

One curve for the whole picture. Lightest on the battery.

Balanced

Adapts to each scene. Keeps whites natural and gradients smooth.

High

A trained model finds lights and reflections and lifts only those.

Maximum

The trained model at full detail, best around small lights.

Technical detailsFor the technically curious

Drive: in linear light, each pixel’s drive is the larger of its luminance and 85 % of its brightest channel; the whole pixel is scaled by one factor, so hue and saturation do not move.
Levels: Fast lifts the drive above half of SDR white along a fixed quadratic, with value and slope continuous at the knee and SDR white landing on the chosen peak. Balanced lifts only what lies above diffuse white, by less when large areas are bright, and adds scene statistics, a guided base layer, debanding and protection for burnt-in subtitles and logos. High and Maximum add a bilateral grid of gains predicted by a small neural network from a 256×256 thumbnail, with each channel kept within 0.2 (log) of the luminance gain, run on the GPU with MPSGraph: 0.45 ms (High) and 0.53 ms (Maximum) per frame on an M3 Max.
Model: trained by Hazen Studio on Poly Haven CC0 photographs, shipped in the app (sdr2hdr-high-v1, sdr2hdr-max-v1).
Auto chooses from power source, thermal state, GPU class and pixel rate, and steps down rather than dropping frames.
Output: 64-bit half-float linear light, BT.2020 primaries, 1.0 = SDR white; the peak is the lower of your setting and the display’s current EDR headroom. PQ and HLG sources are left untouched.
Where: a Metal pass on macOS’s native display path (AVSampleBufferDisplayLayer), and in MacLC’s own Metal renderer.

How SDR to HDR works, step by step →

02 HDR

HDR, without the homework.

Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10, or HDR videos from your iPhone: MacLC recognises what you’re playing, picks the best way to show it on your screen, and tells you in one sentence what it did.

Dolby VisionHDR10+HDR10HLG

A card over Sintel lists the formats of the film — Dolby Vision (selected), HDR10+ and HDR10 — and says “Playing in Dolby Vision: best for this display, adjusts every scene to its 1,600-nit peak.”

It tells you what’s playing

A small card names the formats a film carries and the one MacLC chose, then gets out of the way. One click changes it.

Three picture styles

Accurate keeps the film as it was graded. Balanced keeps detail on dimmer screens. Bright lifts the whole picture.

Your iPhone videos, as filmed

HDR videos from an iPhone play as bright as HDR films — or calmer, if you prefer.

Subtitles that never dazzle

Subtitles stay at a comfortable brightness, even over the brightest scenes.

Right on every screen

Move the window to another display and the picture adapts to it straight away.

Kind to your battery

When two formats would look the same on your screen, MacLC picks the one that uses less power, and says so.

Technical detailsFor the technically curious

Formats: Dolby Vision profiles 5, 7 (base layer and RPU; the enhancement layer is ignored), 8.1 and 8.4; HDR10+ (SMPTE ST 2094-40 dynamic metadata, kept until the stream replaces it); HDR10 with ST 2086 mastering and CTA-861.3 MaxCLL/MaxFALL; HLG (ARIB STD-B67).
Choice: when the whole master fits under the display’s peak, Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and HDR10 render the same image, so MacLC recommends HDR10 through macOS’s own pipeline (lower power). When tone mapping is needed it prefers Dolby Vision, then HDR10+, then HDR10. Switching format restarts the track and seeks precisely, so it takes about a second rather than a GOP.
Picture modes: Accurate reproduces every level up to 90 % of the display’s peak and folds the rest into a soft PQ-domain shoulder; Balanced is the ITU-R BT.2390 EETF; Bright lifts by up to 1.6× before the BT.2390 roll-off. When the master fits, the mapping is the identity.
Reference white: PQ is anchored at 100 cd/m² at SDR white, the convention macOS uses for PQ surfaces. HLG is rendered for the BT.2100 1,000-nit reference display (default) or fitted to the display’s current headroom.
Engines: Native (AVSampleBufferDisplayLayer with EDR) by default. Dolby Vision RPUs and HDR10+ go through MacLC’s own Metal renderer (Dolby Vision decoder ported from libplacebo, HDR10+ scene peaks, tone curves, gamut mapping, scaling filters, 360° video and .cube LUTs), with OpenGL kept as a fallback.
Fixes to the inherited VLC 4.0-dev HDR path on macOS: headroom re-measured on every screen and profile change; subtitles pinned to SDR white; 12- and 16-bit sources kept above 8 bits; sub-4K HDR tagged correctly; a real HDR-to-SDR path.

The HDR pipeline in detail →

03 Library

A library as beautiful as your films.

Point MacLC at your Movies and Music folders. It gathers everything into a Home screen that picks up where you left off, with artwork, shows grouped by season and albums with their covers. Nothing leaves your Mac.

Continue watching

Home opens on the film you’re most likely to finish, then what you started and what you just added.

Everything in its place

Videos, Shows, Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, Favorites and Playlists, each with its own search and sorting.

Up Next

See what plays next and reorder it by dragging. Chapters appear too, when a film has them.

Now Playing, always there

Go back to your library while a video plays: a floating bar keeps a live picture and the controls at hand.

HDR at a glance

Dolby Vision, HDR10, HLG and 4K badges tell you which files will shine before you open them.

Resume, but never at the credits

MacLC offers to continue where you stopped — and not when there’s only the end left.

Technical detailsFor the technically curious

Built on VideoLAN’s libmedialibrary and TagLib, linked into the app: indexing, thumbnails, genres, track and disc numbers, years and embedded artwork need nothing installed.
Episodes named like Show Name S01E02 are grouped into shows and seasons. HDR badges come from the colour metadata read when a file is indexed.
A native AppKit interface: source-list sidebar, Up Next inspector, Now Playing capsule and toolbar on Liquid Glass (macOS 26), with every command also in the menu bar.
Resume is offered for media of three minutes or more, never within the first or last minute (or 5 %), and never at or past the end.

04 Watch

Find something to watch. Then press Play.

A new Watch section in the sidebar brings Apple TV-style browsing to the add-ons you install: a carousel of featured titles, shelves, title pages and a stream picker.

MacLC’s Watch section: an Apple TV-style Home screen with a featured carousel and shelves of posters of Blender Foundation open movies.

Discovery in Watch

Narrow Home to the streaming services you use with public catalogs from a community add-on. Browse genre tiles and The Edit: editorial collections chosen by MacLC and renewed every two weeks. Shelves scroll with an elastic feel and no scroll bars.

Choose a Version

Each stream is decoded into plain facts: resolution, HDR, Dolby Vision, sound (5.1, Atmos), language, size and peers, with filters. Short animated tips explain the jargon.

History, favorites & resume

Favorites and History in the sidebar under Watch, and Continue Watching on Home. Playback resumes where you stopped, even after quitting. Mark as Watched puts a badge on the card. Stored locally only.

YouTube in the sidebar

Home, Subscriptions, History, Watch Later, Liked Videos, playlists, channels and search, powered by yt-dlp. Optional private sign-in via Google’s web view or browser session.

Movies & TV Shows

Shelves organised by kind and genre, with “See All” grids to explore complete catalogs.

Rich title pages

Backdrops, title logos, year, rating, running time, cast and directors. Shows include season pickers and episode cards with stills.

Stremio add-ons

MacLC speaks the Stremio add-on protocol. Cinemeta comes built in for posters, descriptions, cast and search.

No content bundled

MacLC ships no films, shows or streams. Add-ons are run by third parties; use them only for content you have the right to watch.

MacLC Settings > Add-ons showing Installed, Official and Community lists with one-click Install buttons.

Add-ons, installed in one click.

Open Settings › Add-ons to explore Official and Community add-ons. Click Install, configure settings when offered, or click “Install from Address…” to paste an add-on address or stremio:// link.

Once an add-on provides streams, use File › Search Add-ons… to search a title, pick an episode and choose Play or Add to Queue.

Technical detailsFor the technically curious

Stremio add-on protocol: native support for manifest, catalog (with search, genre and skip pagination), meta, stream and addon_catalog endpoints.
Stream resolution: magnet links stream through MacLC’s BitTorrent module (libtorrent 2.1); web video and YouTube through yt-dlp; direct URLs through libvlccore.
Editorial collections: The Edit matches titles against catalog add-ons (Cinemeta by default), renewed every two weeks.
Watch library: atomic JSON file at ~/Library/Application Support/org.maclc.MacLC/Watch/library.json. Watched marked at 92 %; under 15 s treated as a mis-click.
Native AppKit: artwork extends beneath the toolbar with NSBackgroundExtensionView on macOS 26 (Liquid Glass). Shelves have no scroll bars and scroll with elastic physics.

05 Sharper and smoother

Sharper pictures. Motion as smooth as your screen.

A 720p episode on a 5K display deserves better than a blur. MacLC enlarges small videos on the GPU, with nine methods to choose from, each explained in plain words in its panel.

Films are made of 24 pictures a second; a MacBook Pro screen can show 120. MacLC can create the pictures in between, so a slow pan glides instead of stepping. Turn it on for sport, nature or animation, leave it off for the classic film look.

Nine upscalers

Auto, Apple Neural 4x, Anime and Anime4K for drawn animation, FSRCNNX for fine detail, Sharp (AMD FSR 1) and NIS for crisp edges, Efficient (MetalFX) for battery life, and Classic (EWA Lanczos) to stay true to the source. Apple’s neural passes, Anime, Anime4K and FSRCNNX work on 8-bit SDR video; on HDR and 10-bit video, and with SDR to HDR on, MacLC uses the other methods.

Compare Before and After

Split the picture down the middle, on the video you are watching: on the left without SDR to HDR, upscaling and interpolation, on the right with them.

Smooth motion in real time

Automatic picks a method your Mac can keep up with, and steps down gently rather than dropping pictures. Optical flow and RIFE, an AI trained to draw the frames in between, can be chosen by hand. Already use SmoothVideo Project? MacLC works with it too.

The Motion Interpolation popover over Sintel running through a bamboo forest: Interpolate Frames is on, Method is Automatic, Frame Rate is Match the Display, and it reads “Playing 24 fps as 120 fps.” The playback bar shows a 120 badge.

Technical detailsFor the technically curious

Upscaling: runs in MacLC’s Metal video output when the window is at least 1.2 times larger than the video. Auto uses Apple’s super resolution on small videos, then MetalFX; Apple Neural 4x is a one-time download from Apple and steps back to 2× when the Mac cannot keep up; FSRCNNX is downloaded only after you accept its LGPL-3.0 licence. Measured on an M3 Max: MetalFX spatial 0.4–0.84 ms per frame, FSR 1 from 720p to 1440p about 0.5 ms, NIS from 720p to 4K 1.19 ms, ArtCNN from 540p to 1080p about 2.1 ms. Neural passes stand down on battery, in Low Power Mode, when the Mac is hot, or when a frame would take more than 60 % of its time.
Interpolation engines: Apple’s optical flow (VTFrameRateConversion, Balanced and Quality); VTLowLatencyFrameInterpolation (up to 720p); block motion estimation on the media engine (VTMotionEstimationSession with true-motion multi-pass search at 960×540) followed by overlapped block motion compensation with an occlusion test in Metal; a cross-fade blend; RIFE v4.25 on Core ML (MIT licence, 960×576, about 12–15 ms per 1080p pass on an M3 Max); SmoothVideo Project through VapourSynth when installed.
Automatic picks a real-time engine that fits the frame budget (41.7 ms at 24 fps): low latency, Balanced optical flow at 2×, motion compensation or blend. It never picks optical flow Quality, RIFE or SVP, which you choose by hand. After half a second of sustained overshoot it steps down the ladder and finally stops interpolating.
Targets: match the display, 60 fps, 120 fps or twice the source. Measured on an M3 Max at 1080p with four extra frames: motion compensation 7–11 ms, blend 2 ms, optical flow 58 ms.

06 Sound & casting

Clearer voices. Sound tailored to you.

Nine sound modes in the style of Apple’s sound settings, a 10-band equalizer, a boost for voices, and playback on an Apple TV or a Chromecast.

Nine sound modes

Voice Boost, Night, Cinema, Music, Bass Boost, Spoken Word, Headphones, Small Speakers and Custom, each with an Intensity slider.

Voice Boost

Makes dialogue louder and clearer without raising music and effects. Measured: +7.4 dB of dialogue advantage on a 5.1 mix, +4.8 dB in the voice band on stereo.

10-band equalizer

Fine-tune bands from 32 Hz to 16 kHz via Audio › Equalizer… (⌥⌘E) or the Sound button. A limiter keeps loud moments from clipping.

Night mode

Evens out loud and quiet moments so you can keep the volume low without missing what characters say.

Play on TV Beta

Send what is playing to an Apple TV, another AirPlay receiver or a Chromecast with the Play On button. Use MacLC’s controls or your TV’s remote.

MacLC’s Sound panel: Sound on, Voice Boost selected, the Intensity slider and the 10-band equalizer open.

Technical detailsFor the technically curious

Signal chain: 10-band equalizer on ISO centre frequencies (32 Hz to 16 kHz), optional compressor, maclc_dialogue filter, and a limiter at -1.5 dB.
maclc_dialogue: 5.1 rebalance towards the centre channel; stereo centre dialogue extraction by Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) with Apple vDSP (1024 points, 16 ms latency).
Play on TV (beta): a new airplay stream output: MacLC serves the video as HLS (fragmented MP4, the audio as an EXT-X-MEDIA rendition) on your network, and AVPlayer sends it to the receiver over AirPlay. Chromecast uses VLC’s Chromecast output. Upstream fixes: the Chromecast demuxer no longer cuts endings, and stream outputs forward the clock (set_pcr) so HLS cuts segments.

07 Plays everything

If it plays anywhere, it plays here.

Almost any video, song or stream — MKV, MP4, AVI, WebM, AV1, HEVC, FLAC, DTS, subtitles in SRT and ASS — with nothing else to install to play files. And two more ways in.

MKV
MP4
MOV
AVI
WebM
MPEG-TS
HEVC
AV1
VP9
ProRes
MPEG-2
FLAC
MP3
AAC
ALAC
Opus
WAV
SRT
ASS subtitles
HTTP streams
Torrents
Web links

The Open Web Video panel with a YouTube link: it shows the video’s thumbnail, title and length, with Add to Queue and Play buttons.

Paste a link, or browse YouTube

Browse YouTube directly from the sidebar with Home, Subscriptions, History, Watch Later and playlists, or copy a video link from any site and press ⌘ U. MacLC plays it in the same window with every control you know.

Uses yt-dlp, a free helper installed once with one command. Signing in to YouTube is optional: on Google’s own page inside MacLC, or with a browser where you are already signed in. MacLC keeps only the session cookies yt-dlp needs, in a private file on your Mac.

The same panel with a magnet link for the open movie Sintel, recognised as a BitTorrent link.

Torrents you can follow

Open a .torrent file or paste a magnet link. An animated loading screen explains each step as peers are found and the start gate buffers verified seconds. The buffer adapts to the swarm’s speed, and a marker on the playback bar shows what is downloaded ahead with speed and peers.

Only stream what you have the right to watch, like Sintel above, an open movie.

Technical detailsFor the technically curious

Engine: built on VLC 4’s open-source playback engine (libvlccore) with its demuxers, decoders and protocols, FFmpeg and dav1d. Hardware decoding through VideoToolbox (H.264, HEVC, ProRes; AV1 on M3 and newer), 10-bit and 16-bit paths kept.
Web video & YouTube: File ▸ Open Web Video (⌘U) and the sidebar YouTube section run yt-dlp off the main thread with --cookies <file> (file mode 0600) or --cookies-from-browser. Options sit before -- so addresses cannot be read as flags. Prefers a stream that carries sound, picks hardware codecs at equal size, and asks YouTube’s servers for 1 MiB ranges. The last ten pasted links are kept locally.
BitTorrent start gate: waits for 20 s of film until the swarm’s speed is known, then 10 to 90 s depending on how fast the swarm downloads relative to the film; plays anyway after two minutes. The adaptive buffer keeps a deadline window of two minutes (at least 48 MiB) ahead of the player. Player lead (PTS delay) follows the start buffer, capped at 10 s. Default trackers added. Interface reads a JSON snapshot twice a second with no libtorrent round trip. The DHT routing table is preserved across launches so peers connect in seconds. Magnet metadata is cached; the files of a torrent become a playlist, so subtitles attach and episodes chain. MacLC does not claim the magnet: scheme, so your torrent app keeps its links.
Everything is in the app (143 libraries); nothing else to install to play files.

08 Settings

Settings that speak your language.

Every option says what you’ll see or hear — not how it works inside. Search finds a setting by what it does, and nothing is there just for show.

MacLC says“Highlights keep detail but the picture is dimmer overall.”

Instead of~~applies a BT.2390 EETF~~

The HDR & Colour settings: a live panel shows the connected display and what is playing, then plain-language choices for what happens when an HDR video opens.

Eight clear sections

General, Playback, Video, HDR & Colour, Audio, Subtitles, Interface and Shortcuts — in one window, like System Settings.

Search that understands

Type what you want to change, not what it’s called: search looks through names, descriptions and keywords.

What’s happening right now

The HDR section shows your screen, how bright it can go and what the video is doing, live.

Nothing taken away

Every expert option is still there, behind a disclosure, for the day you need it.

Technical detailsFor the technically curious

One window, a category sidebar and a search field that filters by label, description and per-pane keywords; each row is a label, a control and one sentence about what you will see or hear.
Every control is checked against an option that exists in this build; a missing option removes its row. All 240 configuration reads go through guarded wrappers, which ended an assert() abort in the Interface pane.
A startup self-check builds all eight panes: summary: 8 panes, 8 ok, 0 failed. The playback engine’s full advanced tree is untouched and still reachable.

How the interface was rebuilt →

09 Made for the Mac

Feels like it came with your Mac.

Volume

Quiet confirmations

Change the volume, the speed or the subtitles and a small glass capsule confirms it — never text written over the picture.

Windows that fit the film

A widescreen film gets a widescreen window: no black bars, even when you tile windows side by side.

Your Mac, your way

Follows your accent colour, Light and Dark, Reduce Motion, Increase Contrast, VoiceOver and full keyboard control.

Liquid Glass

On macOS Tahoe, the playback controls, sidebar and Now Playing bar float on glass, the way Apple’s own apps do.

Nothing else to install

Codecs, subtitles, the library and the upscalers come inside the app. Drag it to Applications, and it’s ready for your files, folders and links.

An icon made for the Dock

A graphite squircle drawn on Apple’s icon grid, with one warm light at its centre — because that’s what MacLC is about.

Technical detailsFor the technically curious

AppKit throughout: NSGlassEffectView on macOS 26 with a HUD-material fallback (also under Reduce Transparency or Increase Contrast), SF Symbols, a real source-list sidebar and monospaced-digit time labels.
MacLCDesign defines every colour, type style, spacing, radius, material and animation as system semantics, which is why accessibility settings apply without special cases.
Self-contained: 143 libraries inside the app, with own bundle identifier org.maclc.MacLC. Translations keep working.
Video windows take the video’s native size or its aspect ratio inside a tiled or zoomed frame; menus use Apple’s wording (Settings…, Keep on Top, Take Snapshot).

Design and accessibility in detail →

10 Compare

The player nobody had built.

QuickTime feels at home on a Mac but opens few formats. Infuse has a fine library and asks for a subscription for Pro features. IINA is excellent, free and open source too, without SDR to HDR or built-in upscalers and frame interpolation. MacLC brings them together.

MacLC compared with other video players for the Mac
Feature	MacLC	IINA	Infuse	QuickTime Player
Plays almost any video file			Some audio needs Pro	Mostly MP4 and MOV
Makes ordinary video glow on HDR screens (SDR to HDR)
Upscaling methods built in	Nine	Shaders you install	One AI mode
Library for your own videos	And music	Playlists and history	Its speciality
Free			Pro is paid	With macOS
Open source	GPL	GPL

Based on each player’s published features as of 2026-11-03. Something wrong? Tell us. See the full comparison →

From the blog

Video on the Mac, explained.

Plain-language guides to HDR, formats, players, streaming and sound, with diagrams you can play with.

All articles →

Players & apps11 min read

The best video players for Mac in 2026

Compare the best video players for Mac in 2026. From MacLC and IINA to VLC and Infuse, find the right player for HDR, MKV files, and battery life.

October 16, 2026

Formats & codecs10 min read

How to play MKV files on a Mac (no converting)

Learn how to play MKV files on Mac without converting. See why QuickTime fails, how to open MKVs instantly in MacLC, and how to set a default player.

October 16, 2026

HDR & picture11 min read

What is HDR? High dynamic range video, explained

HDR delivers brighter highlights, deeper contrast, and richer color than standard video. Learn what HDR means, how it differs from 4K, and how it works.

October 16, 2026

HDR & picture8 min read

SDR to HDR: can you turn ordinary video into HDR?

Can you convert SDR video to HDR? Learn how inverse tone mapping works, why crude conversions look fake, and how MacLC expands SDR highlights in real time.

October 16, 2026

Sound8 min read

Why is movie dialogue so quiet? And how to fix it on a Mac

Why movie voices are hard to hear while explosions are deafening. Learn why 5.1 downmixing buries dialogue, and how to fix it with Voice Boost and EQ.

October 16, 2026

Mac how-to9 min read

“Apple could not verify” an app? How to open it safely on a Mac

See what 'Apple could not verify that this app is free of malware' means on macOS Sequoia & Tahoe, why Open Anyway is needed, and how to open apps safely.

October 16, 2026

Free. Private. Open.

Free, for real

No subscription, no ads, no account, no feature held back. Donations are welcome, never required.

Private by design

No tracking and no telemetry. Your library, your history and your settings never leave your Mac.

Open source

Every line is public on GitHub under the GPL. Anyone can read it, check it and build it.

Open foundations

MacLC is built on part of VLC 4’s open-source playback engine, libVLC, with credit and thanks to VideoLAN.

MacLC is in public beta

The engineering is measured; now it needs eyes. If you have an HDR display, a big library or an unusual file, try MacLC and tell us what you see. A good bug report is worth more than most donations.

Plays everything. Makes it shine.

Download MacLC What’s new in 1.6

Free
Version 1.6
57.8 MB
macOS 26 Tahoe or later
Apple Silicon (M1 or newer)