Fig Player - play mp4 mkv mp3 for Mac

Fig Player is a Mac media player built for straightforward playback of video and audio files, from MP4 and MKV to MP3. It handles local media without fuss, while a handful of extras — wireless casting, OCR text capture, and multiple simultaneous windows — give it a shape of its own. Version 1.3.37 is a quiet release: no new features, just the same tool refined under the hood.

Subtitles and acceleration: the playback core

It supports the usual subtitle suspects — ASS, SSA, SRT, and IDX+SUB — alongside hardware acceleration to keep heavier files smooth. Picture-in-picture mode floats a small player above other windows, and you can open several videos at once, each in its own window, without one blocking another.

Sending video off-screen: wireless display

DLNA, Chromecast, and Roku devices appear as targets when you want to push playback off the Mac screen. The connection is direct; no extra configuration screens to click through.

Grabbing text from frames: OCR and posters

On macOS 12 and later, Fig Player can recognise text in paused frames — useful for grabbing a line from a presentation or a subtitle that isn't in a text track. A screenshot can also be turned into a scene poster with a couple of clicks, giving a library thumbnail a more deliberate look.

Audio device detection: a few things that can trip you up

Multiple audio output devices appear in the menu only after they are connected and recognised by macOS; plugging in a USB DAC or switching to a Bluetooth headset while Fig Player is open sometimes requires a restart of the application before the new device shows up.

Wireless casting to a Chromecast or Roku device occasionally fails on networks where client isolation is enabled — a setting some routers default to on guest networks. The fix is simply to ensure the Mac and the target device sit on the same primary network segment. For DLNA, a third-party firewall rule can silently block discovery; temporarily disabling the firewall for a test run usually confirms whether that is the culprit.

Picture-in-picture mode keeps the player floating above other windows, but macOS Spaces remembers its placement independently. If the PiP window seems to vanish after switching desktops, it has likely anchored itself to a different Space. The straightforward remedy: switch back or summon the main player window and toggle PiP off and on again.

Questions people often ask before installing

Does it handle 4K files without stuttering? Hardware acceleration is built in, and on a Mac with a recent Intel chip, playback of high-bitrate 4K MKV files stays smooth. The player leans on the GPU for decoding, so the experience depends more on the machine's graphics capability than on the software itself. On older integrated graphics, dropping the playback quality to half resolution in the menu lightens the load without affecting audio.

Will it respect my subtitle styling, or flatten everything to plain text? ASS and SSA subtitles keep their formatting — fonts, colours, positioning, and animations render as intended. SRT files, naturally, remain plain. The OCR feature, available on macOS 12 and later, can extract text from hard-coded subtitles in a paused frame, which has proven handy for language learners grabbing vocabulary from a video still.

Can I play a music playlist while working in another app? Yes. Opening an audio file — MP3, FLAC, or Opus — in a separate window and sending it to the background keeps playback going, much like a lightweight audio player. The picture-in-picture mode, however, is video-only; audio continues whether the main window is hidden or not.

In short: a local media player that keeps its features tight and its interface out of the way.

• macOS 11 or later
• Intel 64-bit architecture