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VLC is one of those programs that has really proved itself a stalwart of the FLOSS community. I feel like VLC is in a rare category of software that is great be
by peatmoss 9y ago
VLC is one of those programs that has really proved itself a stalwart of the FLOSS community. I feel like VLC is in a rare category of software that is great because:
1. It's existed for long enough that we know it won't just go away and break our hearts. (I used VLC to play videos on BeOS back in college in the late 90s.)
2. No matter how many iterations it goes through, it's still intelligible to would-be time travelers from the past. I.e. didn't get caught up in the "must change the UX around for change's sake" epidemic that still seems rampant.
3. It's always had acceptable performance, perhaps owing to being born in a time of no goddamned Electron apps.
4. It's dependable across platforms, even platforms that I'm unfamiliar with or don't like. Need to play a video on Windows? I don't even know what crapware to download, because I download VLC, because I know VLC runs on Windows and will greet me as a familiar friend in this strange and foreign land.
My hat is off to you, VLC!
- etix 9y agoThanks for your support!
- qubex 9y agoI also first used VLC on BeOS!
- djtriptych 9y ago#4 really is amazing. vlc is probably the ONLY application that I took with me when switching from Windows to Mac/Linux 10+ years ago. It's as essential to my multimedia computing as vim is to my text editing.
- sacheendra 9y agoIf you are still on Mac, you should check out IINA(https://github.com/lhc70000/iina https://github.com/lhc70000/iina). I switched to it when I needed to watch 4k videos on my Macbook and it out-performs VLC. I think VLC's cross-platform compatibility hurts it here as IINA uses some Mac specific APIs.
- maxxxxx 9y agoAgreed. IINA is really good. Best Mac player I have seen so far.
- aorth 9y agoWow, thanks for the tip. I've been using mpv for years but IINA is great!
- naikrovek 9y agoRead the VLC 3.0 release notes. Performance is no longer a problem on 4k & 8k videos.
- sacheendra 9y agoTrue. Should have read the full changelog. Thank you for pointing it out. I'll give it a try. The change is that VLC now supports H.265 hardware decoding on mac. Great that VLC iterates so quickly!
- Moter8 9y agoMy gripe with VLC on Mac is that the fullscreen mode is not a real Mac full-screen. It just maximizes. There is no way to put it besides another chrome tab for example (quicktime and any other program lets you do this)
- jorvi 9y agoVLC > Preferences > 'Use native fullscreen mode' I believe this was originally done because Lion would black out all other monitors when fullscreening something.
- dzhiurgis 9y ago> VLC now supports H.265 hardware decoding on mac. Doesn't seem to work on last year ones with only dedicated GPU-hardware acceleration.
- TheKarateKid 9y agoI agree with everything although with #2, VLC really could use some UI/UX improvements on both desktop and iOS. Hard to complain though when it's been stable and efficient for all these years - I'd rather have a few odd/annoying UI issues than a bloated piece of garbage!
- barbs 9y agoWhat UI/UX improvements would you like to see? I agree with the grandparent post - it's simple, consistent and dependable :). Also, customizable!
- jtolmar 9y agoIt's missing keyboard shortcuts for some operations (slowdown and speedup) and missing some common shortcuts that other video apps have mostly converged on (unmodified left/right for short hops, up/down for volume). Many of the auxiliary menus are inconsistently partitioned. For example, if you're looking for a color setting in Tools->Effects & Filters, it's unclear whether it'll be under Color or Essentials. These are minor things, but that's what good UX is all about. Tragically, new style guides and frameworks often pitch themselves by explaining solid UX principles then claiming the way to achieve these is a total rewrite using their system.
- avhon1 9y agoThe square brackets are shortcuts for slowing down and speeding up.
- zouhair 9y agoAnd the guy turned down some millions of Euros to keep it Free.[0] [0]: https://np.reddit.com/r/france/comments/736ghk/ama_je_suis_le_pr%C3%A9sident_de_videolan_et_le/dnnyrop/?st=jdgbxr8l&sh=760aea2c https://np.reddit.com/r/france/comments/736ghk/ama_je_suis_l...
- vanderZwan 9y agoDr Scott Atran on economic incentives and sacred values: > Much more is know about economic decision making than moral decision making. Very little is known about sacred values. [In political negotiations] the standard view is to leave the hard questions of recognition and who you are for last, and you try to build things slowly through economic small steps, and person-to-person discussions. [I find that] when sacred values are in conflict, that is a formula for another hundred years of war. > Now what do I mean by sacred values? Well, they are values that are very strongly tied to the emotions, to your sense of who you are within your community, and you are usually not even aware of them. It is a little bit like food: people usually are not aware of food until they are starving, [but then it becomes the one value people have] > The same [is true for] sacred values: sacred values are the frame within which all social and economic transactions are possible, and again you usually are not even aware of them, until another society or group challenges them. Then they become dominant. > In our [secular Western] society we do not have standard principles of sacred values any more, except for our children and perhaps our nation, everything is supposedly fungible. Of course, if I asked you if you would accept a million dollars to sell off your child, you would say I am crazy. If I insisted on it you would think I am a sociopath. But that is exactly the way people feel when one offers them a material incentive to exchange their sacred values. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ijmBd69878&t=6m3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ijmBd69878&t=6m3s
- Schoolmeister 9y agoWhile I definitely agree with you that VLC is a gem I'd like to add that on Windows there's a - AFAIK - more feature-rich open source project called MPC-HC. My main reason for using it over VLC is that it's comically easy to download (just press "D") and sync subtitles (pause in the beginning of a sentence -> CTRL+6 -> select sentence -> F5). Last time I checked this was a lot harder in VLC. It required a trial-and-error method to try and get the correct delay.
- smhenderson 9y agoI love MPC-HC and still use it on a Win 7 box plugged into my TV but sadly it is no longer actively developed[1]. Because I strictly use it for local videos and don't run anything remote through it I don't worry too much about the lack of updates. But I imagine a day will come when it will no longer work on some new version of Windows. [1] https://mpc-hc.org/2017/07/16/1.7.13-released-and-farewell/ https://mpc-hc.org/2017/07/16/1.7.13-released-and-farewell/
- XzetaU8 9y agoMPC-HC v1.7.14 unofficial build https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=175209 https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=175209 - https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/ https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/
- jbk 9y agoOne click for download will be done in next major release. As for the sync subtitles, it's already possible in VLC.
- noxecanexx 9y agoTheir easy multi-platform support makes VLC a no-brainer for even non-tech people.(through recommendations of course)
- richardlblair 9y ago> being born in a time of no goddamned Electron apps. You and I would be great friends.
- andrepd 9y ago>No matter how many iterations it goes through, it's still intelligible to would-be time travelers from the past. I.e. didn't get caught up in the "must change the UX around for change's sake" epidemic that still seems rampant. Well amen to that. If it works, why change it?
- graycat 9y agoMaybe FLOSS abbreviates Free/Libre Open Source Software
- peatmoss 9y agoThat’s how I intended it.
- iClaudiusX 9y agoI remember the nightmare of downloading random codec packages trying to get video to work in the late 90s, early 2000s before I found VLC. More than ever it's a shining example of high quality software driven by a desire to simply make things work. It stands in stark contrast at a time when the tech industry seems hyper focused on business models that lock users into crippled platforms and extremely invasive tracking.
- S4M 9y ago> I used VLC to play videos on BeOS back in college in the late 90s VLC was first released in 2001, as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player
- peatmoss 9y agoWow, was it really that late? perhaps it was. Maybe my memory is shot. I definitely remember using VLC on BeOS at one point, but it must have been a couple years later than I thought. Thanks for keeping me honest :-)
- jbk 9y agoYou could have used VLC in 1999 or 2000 on BeOS, before it was open source. Because, indeed, VLC was out on BeOS before Linux and Windows.
- noloblo 9y agoNo Apple TV or airplay support seems difficult to watch from vlc on tv how do you stream or cast to appletv from vlc