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I don’t really understand the praise for VLC. I might be wrong here but isn’t it basically a GUI around FFMPEG? While VLC is great at playing anything you throw

I don’t really understand the praise for VLC. I might be wrong here but isn’t it basically a GUI around FFMPEG? While VLC is great at playing anything you throw at it, that’s pretty much all due to the hard work of FFMPEG devs. The parts that VLC adds - the GUI - is really not that well done in my opinion. However it is absolutely critical that we have some sort of open source, cross platform, multimedia player, and for that I applaud it.

_Gyan_ 6y ago
Yes, much of the demuxing and decoding relies on libav, but there are other demuxers and decoders in VLC as well. The library for handling DVD/BD playback is also distinct. Managing playback (flow, state, buffering..etc) itself is not a facility of libav so that is managed by the app.
jbk 6y ago
> but isn’t it basically a GUI around FFMPEG No, it isn't. VLC is doing a lot more than just wrapping libavcodec. Look at the source code of VLC. To give you an idea, VLC is around 800 kLoC, the UI taking 60 kLoC, and the core 100 kLoC. There are tons of modules that are not based on FFmpeg. Also, some VLC devs are also FFMpeg devs.