Compare Two Videos Side by Side on a Mac (Watch, Don't Edit)

To compare two videos side by side on a Mac without editing them, open both in QuickTime Player and press ⌘Return to play or pause every window at once, or use a tiled player such as Plush Media Player, which puts two to eight local files in one window (up to three free, eight with Plush Pro), syncs them to a reference take with Pro, and slows them down together.

The short answer

Search for "compare two videos side by side mac" and nearly every result explains how to build a split-screen clip in iMovie. That's an editing answer to a watching question. If you just want to see two takes next to each other, pause them on the same beat and run them again at half speed, you don't need a timeline or an export.

You have three realistic paths on a Mac:

• Built in and free: QuickTime Player windows, with ⌘Return as a group play/pause. No install, but you arrange windows by hand and both play audio.
• Free but fiddly: VLC with a second instance, IINA, or the Homebrew tool video-compare driven from Terminal.
• A tiled player: Plush Media Player, free on the Mac App Store (macOS 14 or later) for up to three tiles, with a one-time $2.99 Plush Pro upgrade for up to eight. Two or more tiles in one window and one speed for all are free; the lead tile the others follow and saved layouts are Plush Pro.

We built Plush partly because we kept doing this with QuickTime windows and losing the arrangement every time one got nudged. The free options come first, then the Plush routine.

Who needs to watch two videos at once

• Dancers and choreographers comparing today's run against last week's, or a cover against the original.
• Coaches and athletes lining up two performances: a lift before and after a form fix, two golf swings from the same angle.
• Editors reviewing version 3 of a cut against version 4.
• Language learners shadowing a native speaker with their own recording alongside.
• Families putting a 1998 camcorder transfer next to the same living room filmed last Thanksgiving.

The demand shows up in the App Store, where a shelf of small apps exists for exactly this in dance and sport: SyncMovie, the FYP Dance Cover Practice Tool, Dance Helper and Coach Video Analysis all sell side-by-side playback of two clips. It also shows up in what's gone missing. "Video Compare," a Mac utility editors used for A/B review, is no longer available, and threads asking for a replacement get answered with iMovie tutorials.

Built-in ways to play two videos on a Mac, and their limits

QuickTime Player

Select two or more files in Finder, right-click, choose Open With > QuickTime Player, and each opens in its own window. iDownloadBlog's QuickTime guide describes the group control: "hold the Command key and press the return / enter key to play or pause all the videos at once" (iDownloadBlog, May 2023). That shortcut is why QuickTime remains the best free answer.

The limits sit around the shortcut. You size each window yourself, and macOS Split View tiles exactly two windows (Apple Support: Split View), so three takes means three windows to babysit. Both videos play audio. Scrub one window and the other stays put. There is no shared speed control, and the arrangement is gone when you quit.

VLC

On Windows, VLC has a preference for multiple instances. On a Mac it doesn't. MakeUseOf's October 16, 2023 guide puts it plainly: "If you own a Mac, you can't play multiple instances of VLC Media Player by tweaking the app's settings" (MakeUseOf). The workaround is launching a second copy from Terminal with open -n, which the VideoLAN wiki documents. Then you're back in the QuickTime situation with fewer group controls. Our QuickTime and VLC guide walks through the Terminal steps.

IINA

IINA is the nicest free Mac player, but multi-select doesn't do what you'd hope. Issue 5574 on the IINA project, filed June 30, 2025, describes the behavior: "IINA will open a single new window with a playlist and add all the opened files to a playlist" (IINA issue 5574). You get one window and a queue. A second window is possible by hand, with no sync between them.

Quick Look

Quick Look is for photos, not takes. Select images in Finder, press Space, then use the full-screen and Play buttons for a slideshow (Apple Support: Quick Look), or press ⌥Space to go straight to full screen. Each image holds for about 5 seconds with no setting for dwell, transition or order. Two selected videos become a slideshow of two videos, not a side-by-side.

Homebrew video-compare and mpv scripts

If you live in Terminal, brew install video-compare gets you what Homebrew describes as a "Split screen video comparison tool using FFmpeg and SDL2" (Homebrew formula). Its GitHub page lists synchronized playback, frame stepping with the A and D keys, a time shift to align clips that start at different moments, and a subtraction mode. It's the most precise free tool here, and it's built for engineers checking encodes: two files per launch, no GUI, no saved layouts. AppleScript and mpv scripts that fire two players at once are in the same camp, precise and not what a choreographer wants to type before class.

How to compare two videos side by side with Plush

Plush opens with empty tiles. Step down to two with the stepper in the sidebar (⌘\) and the grid becomes two tiles side by side. Four takes need Plush Pro.

1. Load the takes. Drag a video from Finder onto any tile, or click the empty tile and choose Local Files > Single File. Plush plays mp4, mov, m4v and avi, plus mkv and webm, though those two may fail to open depending on what AVFoundation can decode. Audio (mp3, m4a, aac, wav, aiff, flac, caf) and images (jpg, png, heic, gif, tiff, webp, bmp) load the same way. A single file loops.
2. Pick the reference. With Plush Pro, right-click the tile you trust and choose Sync Tiles to This One. Every other video tile now follows its position and play/pause state. Plush checks twice a second and re-seeks a follower only when it drifts more than 0.5 seconds, so playback stays smooth. The sidebar shows "Syncing to Tile N" with a Stop Syncing button.
3. Line them up. Scrub the reference to the moment you care about and the others jump with it. Shorter clips stay in phase within their own loop.
4. Slow it down. The speed menu in the bottom control bar offers 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x and 2x, applied to every tile at once. Half speed is where footwork stops hiding.
5. Decide what you hear. In the sidebar's Sound section, Focus plays audio only from the tile you hover, or the tile you double-click to lock. Chaos (Pro) plays every tile at full volume, useful for checking whether two takes hit the same count. M mutes everything.
6. Adjust the view. The Zoom button in each tile's pill cycles Fit, Zoom and Fill. Fit shows the whole frame with letterboxing, the honest setting for comparing framing. Drag the seam between tiles to give the reference more room, double-click it to reset, ⌘Z to undo.
7. Save the setup. With Plush Pro, Sidebar > Sessions > Save Current Session stores the tile count, files, sizes, zoom and volume. Load it next week and the same takes are back in the same layout.

Keyboard control while you compare

With the pointer over the window and no text field active, the whole comparison runs from the keyboard:

• Space or K: play or pause all tiles.
• J and L, or ← and →: skip every tile back or forward 10 seconds.
• ⌥← and ⌥→: jump to the start or end.
• 0 through 9: jump to 0% through 90% of the clip.
• ↑ and ↓: change the hovered tile's volume by 10%.
• ⇧S: copy the hovered video's current frame to the clipboard as a PNG at source resolution. Paste it into Messages to point at a foot.
• ⌘⇧G: export a looping GIF of the 3 seconds around the current moment, 15 fps, up to 800x600. There's no menu item, only the shortcut.
• ⌘/: open the shortcuts panel.

Judging form without color

Under Appearance in the sidebar, Picture Mode has a B&W preset that drops saturation to zero in every video tile. It sounds like a gimmick until you compare a rehearsal under stage lights with one shot in a studio. With color gone, your eye stops arguing about the lighting and goes back to lines and timing. It's app-wide and resets when you quit.

Play a slideshow or jukebox from a folder on a Mac

The same tiles handle the other thing the Mac makes oddly hard: point at a folder and let it play. Click an empty tile, choose Local Files > Folder, and pick one. Plush scans it and its subfolders, up to 5,000 files, skipping hidden files.

• A folder of songs becomes a jukebox with artwork, title and artist from the tags and an "Up next" line.
• A folder of photos becomes a slideshow. Each image holds for 3, 7, 15, 30 or 60 seconds (default 7), set from the timer button in the pill. Transitions are Crossfade (1.0 s, the default) or Slide (a 0.6 s push). A gentle Ken Burns drift is on by default and turns off under Reduce Motion.
• A folder of videos plays them in turn, using mov, mp4, m4v and avi only.
• A mixed folder plays photos, videos and songs one after another.

Choosing a folder for a tile is a Plush Pro feature, photo settings included; folders play in order or with Shuffle (every file once before any repeats), toggled from the pill. A Previous control walks back through the last 20 items when a photo slides away too soon.

This fills a gap Apple left. The Photos app builds slideshows only from items in your library or an album (Apple Support: Create slideshows in Photos), so a folder of scans on an external drive has to be imported first. And macOS Sonoma dropped the option to point the Photos screen saver at a folder of your own. A TidBITS Talk thread from October 15, 2023 summed it up: "The only folders available are those of Apple's own choosing" (TidBITS Talk). A Plush tile is a folder slideshow that sits beside your other tiles, or fills the window with ⌃⌘F.

What Plush does not do

• Sync covers local video and web tiles, not Apple Music. A music tile can't lead or follow, and live web streams only match play and pause.
• Frame copy and GIF export work on local video only. Not web tiles, images or audio, and Picture Mode isn't baked into the capture.
• Sessions don't save playback positions or speed. A restored session starts each take from the beginning.
• There is no single-frame step. The finest control is 0.5x plus the scrubber. For frame stepping and subtraction views, video-compare is the better tool.
• Folders come in through the Folder button, not by dragging a folder onto a tile. Dragging works for single files.

If your comparison needs a deliverable, iMovie is still the answer. If it needs to be watched, paused and re-run this afternoon, that's what this is for. The multi-video player page has the full tile and layout details, and this post covers the same workflow when the reference lives on YouTube.

Frequently asked questions

How do I play two videos side by side on a Mac?

Open both files in QuickTime Player, arrange the two windows next to each other, and press Command-Return to play or pause both at once. For a layout that stays put and playback that stays in step, use a tiled player such as Plush Media Player, which shows two files in one window and syncs them to whichever tile you choose as the lead.

Can QuickTime play two videos at once?

Yes. Each file opens in its own window, and Command-Return plays or pauses every open QuickTime window together. QuickTime doesn't keep the windows in sync if you scrub one, has no shared speed control, and plays audio from every window, so you manage the volume sliders by hand.

How do I play two videos in sync on a Mac?

In Plush Pro, load each video into a tile, right-click the reference tile and choose Sync Tiles to This One. The other video tiles follow its position and play/pause state, re-seeking whenever they drift more than 0.5 seconds. The free alternative is the Homebrew tool video-compare, which syncs exactly two files from Terminal.

Can I compare two dance videos side by side without editing?

Yes. You only need iMovie if you want a file to share. Put the two takes in two Plush tiles, sync them to the cleaner take (Plush Pro), set the speed to 0.5x for all tiles, and use Focus audio to hear one track at a time. Shift-S copies a frame to the clipboard when you want to point at a position, and Picture Mode B&W strips the color so lighting differences stop distracting from form.

How do I play a slideshow from a folder on a Mac?

Select the images in Finder and press Option-Space for a full-screen Quick Look slideshow with a fixed dwell of about 5 seconds. For control over timing, choose Local Files > Folder in a Plush tile. It reads up to 5,000 files including subfolders, holds each image for 3 to 60 seconds, and offers Crossfade or Slide transitions, in order or shuffled. Folder playback is part of Plush Pro.

Plush Media Player is free on the Mac App Store, and Plush Pro is a one-time $2.99 with no subscription, no account and no analytics. Drop two takes into two tiles, sync them, and watch instead of editing.