4 ms·
Did VLC ever lose it's reputation of being the worst video player of all time?
by Kaiyou 7y ago
Did VLC ever lose it's reputation of being the worst video player of all time?
- gsich 7y agoNo. Right now it's on the verge of being the worst audio player too. Takes forever to seek in a 2h+ audiofile.
- jbk 7y agoMp4 files? What format? What OS?
- gsich 7y agomp3, m4a, doesn't really matter. Win32 Edit: Ubuntu and VLC 3.0.4 has the same problem.
- gsich 7y agoI made a short video: https://streamable.com/96v6n https://streamable.com/96v6n this is the audiofile: https://meta.metaebene.me/media/mm/fs235-sechzehn-bar-blondes-haar.m4a https://meta.metaebene.me/media/mm/fs235-sechzehn-bar-blonde...
- teekert 7y agoUhm did it ever have it?
- Kaiyou 7y agoYes, VLC being the worst was a meme back in 2007. To the point where people got involved in the project, just to fix it from being so bad.
- Krasnol 7y agoWhere was that a meme? I'm using VLC since the codec pack times and it always did what it was supposed to do. Never had any relevant issues with that. I only knew it as THE go to program if you didn't want to bother with codecs anymore. I've never heard about this "meme" before.
- panzerklein 7y ago4chan
- lmm 7y agoIt was notorious for crash bugs and poor implementations of "advanced" format features. A major fansub group got fed up of complaints to the point where they put out an episode that deliberately triggered bugs in VLC's ASS rendering to make their subtitles unreadable on VLC (I think this was gg with code geass episode... 16? 17?). That particular problem was solved when VLC abandoned their subtitle rendering code and switched to using mplayer's libass, but for a long time there were similar concerns about support for other formats (e.g. rendering 10-bit video correctly).
- Krasnol 7y agoSo it was actually a specific group that had a specific problem with it and it wasn't a wide spread and general opinion. Well...
- 7y ago
- vardump 7y agoIt certainly is the worst audio player, clipping like no tomorrow. No plugins, audio level at 100% or below. I know it must clip if levels are above 100%, but in this case it must be just a decoder bug.
- jbk 7y agoCan you share the files where you see that? VLC 4.0 will get gapless audio and a different audio management, that will improve the quality.
- vardump 7y agoI'll try to search for the clipping files. It's been some time, and I don't remember exactly what it was. They did play perfectly in other players. I do remember the offending song had a deep sine wave bass. The issue sounded like non-saturated clipping, integer overflow. It drove me crazy, because at first I suspected my bluetooth headphones, etc. I tried to reset VLC completely, reinstall, tried to reduce levels below 100%. But nothing helped. Edit: Couldn't find the files for now. I'll make sure to send them to you once I find them.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIt never had it. It had, and probably still has, the reputation of being the best video player on Windows - it was bullshit-free, and the only one that worked OOTB with whatever you threw at it, without making you install these things called "codecs".
- Kaiyou 7y agoVLC being the worst thing ever was a meme back in 2007. Everyone saying that he used it got flamed into oblivion.
- oblio 7y agoThe Internet is a big place, we were probably hanging out in different circles cause I never heard that.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIndeed. In my circles around that time we were all switching to VLC.
- Crinus 7y agoI use VLC from at least 2006 (perhaps earlier, i remember the old icon) and i never remember hearing that "meme". Perhaps it was in some closed circle you were or something, but i remember VLC always having a top-notch reputation with mplayer being the only that could contest it in terms of codec support.
- saagarjha 7y agoVLC is great: it's cross platform and handles basically anything you can throw at it, and works well in a pinch. And I say this as someone who works on another video player.
- manigandham 7y agoIt was never the worst, and is among the best. It rose to prominence back in the days of codec packs, media player classic, and the numerous configuration headaches. VLC always just worked with pretty much any file, even a youtube url. It was also one of the first to handle container formats like mkv/matroska. These days I would say MPV is a better player for simplicity and performance but I still keep VLC as the workhorse.
- wongarsu 7y agoI want to like MPV, but whenever I try it VLC seems to handle playback problems like corrupted sections in files or performance problems more smoothly.
- szuze 7y agoHeh, I remember talking to Hocevar (one of the original authors) about how bad VLC had become and he told me that he knew and that he wasn't involved anymore.