I noticed that when playing AVI's, VLC tends to drop a lot of frames, temporarily freeze up my system, and heats up my Macbook Air fast. Apple Quicktime seems to handle the AVI files I have much better on my Macbook Air. Does VLC do the same to your Macbook Air?
but quicktime is way too elitist, you need a pro version to use the different features, so it's vlc for me,
i've been having issues with VLC 1.0 playback on my mbp too. a lot of stuttering, check VLC's forums. seems to be a common issue. i'm considering returning to mplayer...
I'm actually testing out Mplayer on my Mac. The VLC freezes have gotten to the point of annoying me. Mplayer's actually really nice, although I'm wondering if it's as versatile as VLC.
AVI is almost the same as Quicktime's .mov. it is uncompressed video format at VLC can handle small and compressed video. why there are drop frames during playback in VLC? uncompressed digital videos like .mov and .avi are much dependent on rams, graphics and processor. so if your mac book air heats up fast, you should not be watching avi and .mov video that are large files. what you can do is to convert those avi video to m4v, that is playable in mac book air and iPods/iPhones.