7 ms·

The team that powers VLC (2019)

140 points by feross 5y ago

kdjfjf7d7 5y ago
I always wonder why people go gaga googoo over VLC, when there's Media Player Classic with K-lite which does a lot of the same things better. I remember watching 1080p blurry rips in MPC without any problems in 2008 while VLC would spend 1 year doing some sort of buffering upon opening then struggling to play the video correctly.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Can you tell me why MPC + K-Lite is better? I've been gone from the Internet for 8 years. Before I left I used VLC for everything. When I just got a laptop I was convinced to install PotPlayer as "being better". Having been gone for such a long time I assumed there was a tectonic shift in the media player space. Perhaps I was wrong?
  - Cyph0n 5y ago
    VLC is an excellent media player. It is actively developed and runs on many platforms.
  - datenarsch 5y ago
    MPC-HC is just as good as VLC and maybe a little less cluttered. It's Windows only of course, but if that isn't a limiting factor, then it's a very good alternative to VLC in my opinion.
    - tasty_freeze 5y ago
      From the home page: "MPC-HC is not under development since 2017. Please switch to something else."
      - kdjfjf7d7 5y ago
        The version packaged with K-lite is frequently updated to this day, last release today.
      - datenarsch 5y ago
        It's still actively being developed, the author just created a new project page for it for some reason. You can find it at https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    I never like vlc approach. It did everything but there was always 7 fingercuts in the process. Or it was slower, less ergonomic. MPC, MPV were more my daily drivers.
- jjulius 5y ago
  You're arguing that MPC is better than VLC because of an issue you encountered 13 - almost 14 - years ago?
  - kdjfjf7d7 5y ago
    No, I'm pointing out that a better player already existed since the inception of VLC.
    - Eelongate 5y ago
      MPC is better? Maybe if you run windows. But if you don't then MPC isn't only not better, it's completely irrelevant. VLC on the other hand supports pretty much everything under the sun, so you can safely recommend it without playing the "what kind of computer do you have?" game.
    - fnordfnordfnord 5y ago
      Lots of better players existed at the inception of VLC. Most existing players that worked at all were probably better. That's how most projects start off.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  VLC works on other operating systems for a start.
- zppln 5y ago
  Well, I've personally always wondered why people advocate MPC. During like 15+ years of use I can't recall having a single issue with VLC. And that's from consuming basically everything from the VCD era and onwards. In my experience VLC has been as close to flawless software as one can get.
  - kdjfjf7d7 5y ago
    I dont think VLC is bad by any means or that anyone shouldn't use it, I just don't understand the comments I often see on HN acting like it's some unprecedented software that's unlike anything else.
    - twostorytower 5y ago
      It plays any media file you throw at it out of the box and doesn't require any codec packs installed. On top of that, it has a ton of other features including network support. Simple as that.
      - usr1106 5y ago
        > It plays any media file I also believed this until I got a family support case a couple of weeks ago. I learned that if the bitrate is too high for the PC to handle vlc badly fails. (This was a fanless Intel PC, so the CPU is very much low end despite not being particularly old.) Of course I would not expect vlc to do any miracles here, but at least I would expect an error message explaining the problem. ffmpeg gives me warnings all the time if buffers are too small etc. In vlc I'd expect it a bit less cryptic... Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know. Just decoding I-frames would be the most naive approach, but probably also a not lead to very much usable results. Actually the family member found one solution themselves: Play it at reduced speed. VLC could have figured out that automatically. (And of course give a clear message to the user why it does that.)
        astrange 5y ago
        > Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know. It isn't really. It's possible if the video has B-frames but it's hard to predict how much dropping will cause how much recovery, and if you drop almost anything else the possible error is unbounded.
- the_af 5y ago
  In my case, because VLC opens and plays flawlessly any video file you throw at it and that other players struggle with. That and it's FOSS and available in every OS I ever used. What else is there to think about?
- asdf_snar 5y ago
  It might come down to difference of experiences. As soon as software bites you once, I think most people feel differently towards it. I think the reason VLC gets (and in my opinion, deserves) a lot of praise is that a large part of the user base has never felt bitten. Personally, I have never once had trouble getting VLC to run a media file, and I can't say that for any other media player. Granted, I don't know any other media players, and I don't know if it's hard to make a good one -- but that's kind of the point. I want a limited range of features from a media player: ability to make sound really loud, adjust timing of subtitles, speed up / slow down. All of those "just work" for VLC and have very basic navigation (that's good). VLC has allowed me to be comfortably oblivious to all the codec crap I remember dealing with over a decade ago.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Used to do the same with klite codec pack and a patch to play HD videos on windows. It wasn't "better" though, it was just what tutorials suggested you installed to play more videos. VLC just works now, its on every platform, and I used it to run any video that MPC couldn't play. Then I just used it to play everything, and I can do that on every platform I use, they all have VLC.
btheshoe 5y ago
VLC is by far the best media player in existence, and I'm extremely thankful for the team behind it. Gives me hope that this whole Foss thing is actually very good for the world.
- aktuel 5y ago
  I very much prefer mpv.
  - Eelongate 5y ago
    I also greatly prefer mpv, but I wouldn't recommend it to most people for the same reason I wouldn't recommend emacs to most people. To get the most out of it, you need to be able and inclined towards extending it. But if you are, it really kicks ass.
    - random_cynic 5y ago
      Like how? What can it do that vlc can't?
      - Eelongate 5y ago
        It has the JSON-IPC interface, which is much better than vlc's telnet interface (which is barely documented at all.) The pseudo-gui is written as a lua script and can be swapped out with your own to suit your personal whims. It comes with builtin support for youtube-dl/yt-dlp (which work on a wider range of sites than vlc's equivalent feature), which can be modified to allow changing the format/quality on the fly. Relating to that, scripts can add new protocol support for things like torrent files, magnet links, etc. With the right scripts and configuration, you can turn it into a capable image viewer suitable for reading comic books (cbz files). I have a gallery view (for the playlist) and a contact sheet view (for the current file) that both have thumbnails. For the life of me I can't figure out how to get this in VLC (surely there must be a way, right? But the documentation is crap and I can't find it anywhere in the menus or preferences window. All I can find is the playlist view that doesn't have thumbnails.) But the big differences which enable everything else is better documentation, particularly for the scripting and IPC interfaces. If you can find the documentation for VLC's Lua interface please let me know, because as far as I can tell that documentation is nonexistent. It's certainly not in the manpage, nor the worthless F1 window, nor can I find it on the VLC wiki). It's difficult to figure out what VLC's Lua interface is even capable of, but if you go by the addons listed on VLC's website the sole advantage of VLC's Lua scripting seems to be the ability to create basic GUIs.
wjakob 5y ago
There is also IINA that somehow seems more snappy/better-integrated on macOS.
- tehnub 5y ago
  IINA is basically a front-end for mpv. I use it. It's got nice features like force-touch support, but in my experience it's a memory hog—way worse than base mpv somehow.
grokx 5y ago
A funny story (among many other) related to the traffic cone chosen as the VLC icon. When some student was spotted consuming most of the bandwidth by downloading 'Linux distros' on P2P networks, such traffic cone would be placed in front of his room door, to designate the culprit. It might be one of the reason of the VLC icon choice. Told by my brother in law, who was president of the VIA[0] student association of the Ecole Centrale de Paris. [0]: https://viarezo.fr/en/a_propos https://viarezo.fr/en/a_propos
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- blululu 5y ago
  The story I heard is that the association has a collection of traffic cones that were stolen under the influence of alcohol [0]. [0]: http://nanocrew.net/2005/06/23/vlc-cone/ http://nanocrew.net/2005/06/23/vlc-cone/
- Octplane 5y ago
  I had never heard this story but this could definitely have happened at some point. My personal memory that this happened because the people there were collecting cones at a high rate to play in the corridor of the floor (the 2H) of the student residence most of the VideoLAN / Via people were occupying at that time. This trend was certainly started by someone who became Debian Project Leader at some point and who was also enjoying eating regularly at a fast food restaurant in town. On their way back, these young and stupid boys were stealing the cones from a nearby gas station and bringing them back. This lead to various uses such as the creation of an unofficial acrobatic cone launch federation (« la federation internationale de cone ball » I tried to find a picture of a now prominent Google SRE in action but my google-fu escaped me) and various costumes[1]. The cone used as an icon was also illustrating the fact that most of the code was heavily in progress at that time and so definitely not usable. We were young! 1: http://sam.zoy.org/photos/20001011%20-%202H/016%20-%20la%20derni%c3%a8re%20transformation%20de%20Coneman.jpeg http://sam.zoy.org/photos/20001011%20-%202H/016%20-%20la%20d...
miohtama 5y ago
> “There are some [silly] features in VLC—some filters that everyone finds weird and asks [us], ‘Why do you have that?’ The answer is someone sent a good patch, so there was no reason to refuse it,” says Kempf.
- er4hn 5y ago
  Fun for VLC, a series of sharp edges for openssl
  - twic 5y ago
    > While anyone can submit new ideas, whether they’re accepted or not largely depends on the quality of the code, rather than the utility of the feature. “We have a very difficult process,” Kempf admits. “People don’t understand why we do that. But the reason is we need good code, because I’m the one that’s going to maintain it. If I don’t understand it now, this is going to be a problem.” That's the difference to OpenSSL!
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  A "not so silly" option is that you can just cast any video to a Chromecast. Which is quite handy for videos that don't belong in eg. Plex.
johnvaluk 5y ago
After several false starts, I finally figured out how to configure the DLNA server in my router to serve files from USB-attached storage to the smart TVs on my LAN. Then I installed the VLC app on my iPhone and it discovered the DLNA server immediately as a UPnP File Server in the Network tab. It works pretty well, except it doesn't show the cover art for music files. The MacOS app also discovers the server, but the interface is completely different. Overall, I'm impressed, though I did have to do some online searching to figure out how to do some basic things like random play (you have to start playing a song to access the shuffle icon).
- boiler_up800 5y ago
  Any particular links that were helpful for this?
  - johnvaluk 5y ago
    Honestly, no. The whole process felt like a scavenger hunt. In theory, it should be simple: 1) Connect a drive containing media to a USB port. 2) Enable DLNA server. 3) Select the server in a DLNA client and play the media. It sounds like something that should be a standard feature in any smart TV or networked media device. It's surprising how many bugs and bad interfaces I encountered along the way. Once I got it working, I liked the built-in DLNA media server in my particular ASUS router enough that I retired my Jellyfin server.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: The team that powers VLC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620300 - Nov 2019 (49 comments)
8bitsrule 5y ago
TIL: before you click on 'View>Minimal interface', be sure to note the shortcut you need to restore it. Because minimal means minimal.
- csmcg 5y ago
  You can right-click anywhere in the VLC window to bring up the context menu, which has a 'View' tab which let's you toggle it back.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
VLC hasn't fixed the many-years-old bug where seeking causes pitch to randomly shift (https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/14287 https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/14287, previously https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/10056 https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/10056). And IIRC when VLC plays network streams (eg. Youtube) and they get disconnected, VLC often aborts playback instead of reconnecting (don't know if this bug is tracked or not, or fixed, since I use mpv for Youtube now).
tehnub 5y ago
Anyone know if it’s possible to run shaders in VLC like you can with mpv? e.g. https://github.com/igv/FSRCNN-TensorFlow/releases https://github.com/igv/FSRCNN-TensorFlow/releases

140 points by feross 5y ago

I always wonder why people go gaga googoo over VLC, when there's Media Player Classic with K-lite which does a lot of the same things better. I remember watching 1080p blurry rips in MPC without any problems in 2008 while VLC would spend 1 year doing some sort of buffering upon opening then struggling to play the video correctly.

kingcharles 5y ago
Can you tell me why MPC + K-Lite is better? I've been gone from the Internet for 8 years. Before I left I used VLC for everything. When I just got a laptop I was convinced to install PotPlayer as "being better". Having been gone for such a long time I assumed there was a tectonic shift in the media player space. Perhaps I was wrong?
- Cyph0n 5y ago
  VLC is an excellent media player. It is actively developed and runs on many platforms.
- datenarsch 5y ago
  MPC-HC is just as good as VLC and maybe a little less cluttered. It's Windows only of course, but if that isn't a limiting factor, then it's a very good alternative to VLC in my opinion.
  - tasty_freeze 5y ago
    From the home page: "MPC-HC is not under development since 2017. Please switch to something else."
    - kdjfjf7d7 5y ago
      The version packaged with K-lite is frequently updated to this day, last release today.
    - datenarsch 5y ago
      It's still actively being developed, the author just created a new project page for it for some reason. You can find it at https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I never like vlc approach. It did everything but there was always 7 fingercuts in the process. Or it was slower, less ergonomic. MPC, MPV were more my daily drivers.
jjulius 5y ago
You're arguing that MPC is better than VLC because of an issue you encountered 13 - almost 14 - years ago?
- kdjfjf7d7 5y ago
  No, I'm pointing out that a better player already existed since the inception of VLC.
  - Eelongate 5y ago
    MPC is better? Maybe if you run windows. But if you don't then MPC isn't only not better, it's completely irrelevant. VLC on the other hand supports pretty much everything under the sun, so you can safely recommend it without playing the "what kind of computer do you have?" game.
  - fnordfnordfnord 5y ago
    Lots of better players existed at the inception of VLC. Most existing players that worked at all were probably better. That's how most projects start off.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
VLC works on other operating systems for a start.
zppln 5y ago
Well, I've personally always wondered why people advocate MPC. During like 15+ years of use I can't recall having a single issue with VLC. And that's from consuming basically everything from the VCD era and onwards. In my experience VLC has been as close to flawless software as one can get.
- kdjfjf7d7 5y ago
  I dont think VLC is bad by any means or that anyone shouldn't use it, I just don't understand the comments I often see on HN acting like it's some unprecedented software that's unlike anything else.
  - twostorytower 5y ago
    It plays any media file you throw at it out of the box and doesn't require any codec packs installed. On top of that, it has a ton of other features including network support. Simple as that.
    - usr1106 5y ago
      > It plays any media file I also believed this until I got a family support case a couple of weeks ago. I learned that if the bitrate is too high for the PC to handle vlc badly fails. (This was a fanless Intel PC, so the CPU is very much low end despite not being particularly old.) Of course I would not expect vlc to do any miracles here, but at least I would expect an error message explaining the problem. ffmpeg gives me warnings all the time if buffers are too small etc. In vlc I'd expect it a bit less cryptic... Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know. Just decoding I-frames would be the most naive approach, but probably also a not lead to very much usable results. Actually the family member found one solution themselves: Play it at reduced speed. VLC could have figured out that automatically. (And of course give a clear message to the user why it does that.)
      - astrange 5y ago
        > Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know. It isn't really. It's possible if the video has B-frames but it's hard to predict how much dropping will cause how much recovery, and if you drop almost anything else the possible error is unbounded.
the_af 5y ago
In my case, because VLC opens and plays flawlessly any video file you throw at it and that other players struggle with. That and it's FOSS and available in every OS I ever used. What else is there to think about?
asdf_snar 5y ago
It might come down to difference of experiences. As soon as software bites you once, I think most people feel differently towards it. I think the reason VLC gets (and in my opinion, deserves) a lot of praise is that a large part of the user base has never felt bitten. Personally, I have never once had trouble getting VLC to run a media file, and I can't say that for any other media player. Granted, I don't know any other media players, and I don't know if it's hard to make a good one -- but that's kind of the point. I want a limited range of features from a media player: ability to make sound really loud, adjust timing of subtitles, speed up / slow down. All of those "just work" for VLC and have very basic navigation (that's good). VLC has allowed me to be comfortably oblivious to all the codec crap I remember dealing with over a decade ago.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
Used to do the same with klite codec pack and a patch to play HD videos on windows. It wasn't "better" though, it was just what tutorials suggested you installed to play more videos. VLC just works now, its on every platform, and I used it to run any video that MPC couldn't play. Then I just used it to play everything, and I can do that on every platform I use, they all have VLC.

btheshoe 5y ago

VLC is by far the best media player in existence, and I'm extremely thankful for the team behind it. Gives me hope that this whole Foss thing is actually very good for the world.

aktuel 5y ago
I very much prefer mpv.
- Eelongate 5y ago
  I also greatly prefer mpv, but I wouldn't recommend it to most people for the same reason I wouldn't recommend emacs to most people. To get the most out of it, you need to be able and inclined towards extending it. But if you are, it really kicks ass.
  - random_cynic 5y ago
    Like how? What can it do that vlc can't?
    - Eelongate 5y ago
      It has the JSON-IPC interface, which is much better than vlc's telnet interface (which is barely documented at all.) The pseudo-gui is written as a lua script and can be swapped out with your own to suit your personal whims. It comes with builtin support for youtube-dl/yt-dlp (which work on a wider range of sites than vlc's equivalent feature), which can be modified to allow changing the format/quality on the fly. Relating to that, scripts can add new protocol support for things like torrent files, magnet links, etc. With the right scripts and configuration, you can turn it into a capable image viewer suitable for reading comic books (cbz files). I have a gallery view (for the playlist) and a contact sheet view (for the current file) that both have thumbnails. For the life of me I can't figure out how to get this in VLC (surely there must be a way, right? But the documentation is crap and I can't find it anywhere in the menus or preferences window. All I can find is the playlist view that doesn't have thumbnails.) But the big differences which enable everything else is better documentation, particularly for the scripting and IPC interfaces. If you can find the documentation for VLC's Lua interface please let me know, because as far as I can tell that documentation is nonexistent. It's certainly not in the manpage, nor the worthless F1 window, nor can I find it on the VLC wiki). It's difficult to figure out what VLC's Lua interface is even capable of, but if you go by the addons listed on VLC's website the sole advantage of VLC's Lua scripting seems to be the ability to create basic GUIs.

wjakob 5y ago

There is also IINA that somehow seems more snappy/better-integrated on macOS.

tehnub 5y ago
IINA is basically a front-end for mpv. I use it. It's got nice features like force-touch support, but in my experience it's a memory hog—way worse than base mpv somehow.

grokx 5y ago

A funny story (among many other) related to the traffic cone chosen as the VLC icon. When some student was spotted consuming most of the bandwidth by downloading 'Linux distros' on P2P networks, such traffic cone would be placed in front of his room door, to designate the culprit. It might be one of the reason of the VLC icon choice. Told by my brother in law, who was president of the VIA[0] student association of the Ecole Centrale de Paris. [0]: https://viarezo.fr/en/a_propos https://viarezo.fr/en/a_propos

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blululu 5y ago
The story I heard is that the association has a collection of traffic cones that were stolen under the influence of alcohol [0]. [0]: http://nanocrew.net/2005/06/23/vlc-cone/ http://nanocrew.net/2005/06/23/vlc-cone/
Octplane 5y ago
I had never heard this story but this could definitely have happened at some point. My personal memory that this happened because the people there were collecting cones at a high rate to play in the corridor of the floor (the 2H) of the student residence most of the VideoLAN / Via people were occupying at that time. This trend was certainly started by someone who became Debian Project Leader at some point and who was also enjoying eating regularly at a fast food restaurant in town. On their way back, these young and stupid boys were stealing the cones from a nearby gas station and bringing them back. This lead to various uses such as the creation of an unofficial acrobatic cone launch federation (« la federation internationale de cone ball » I tried to find a picture of a now prominent Google SRE in action but my google-fu escaped me) and various costumes[1]. The cone used as an icon was also illustrating the fact that most of the code was heavily in progress at that time and so definitely not usable. We were young! 1: http://sam.zoy.org/photos/20001011%20-%202H/016%20-%20la%20derni%c3%a8re%20transformation%20de%20Coneman.jpeg http://sam.zoy.org/photos/20001011%20-%202H/016%20-%20la%20d...

miohtama 5y ago

> “There are some [silly] features in VLC—some filters that everyone finds weird and asks [us], ‘Why do you have that?’ The answer is someone sent a good patch, so there was no reason to refuse it,” says Kempf.

er4hn 5y ago
Fun for VLC, a series of sharp edges for openssl
- twic 5y ago
  > While anyone can submit new ideas, whether they’re accepted or not largely depends on the quality of the code, rather than the utility of the feature. “We have a very difficult process,” Kempf admits. “People don’t understand why we do that. But the reason is we need good code, because I’m the one that’s going to maintain it. If I don’t understand it now, this is going to be a problem.” That's the difference to OpenSSL!
NicoJuicy 5y ago
A "not so silly" option is that you can just cast any video to a Chromecast. Which is quite handy for videos that don't belong in eg. Plex.

johnvaluk 5y ago

After several false starts, I finally figured out how to configure the DLNA server in my router to serve files from USB-attached storage to the smart TVs on my LAN. Then I installed the VLC app on my iPhone and it discovered the DLNA server immediately as a UPnP File Server in the Network tab. It works pretty well, except it doesn't show the cover art for music files. The MacOS app also discovers the server, but the interface is completely different. Overall, I'm impressed, though I did have to do some online searching to figure out how to do some basic things like random play (you have to start playing a song to access the shuffle icon).

boiler_up800 5y ago
Any particular links that were helpful for this?
- johnvaluk 5y ago
  Honestly, no. The whole process felt like a scavenger hunt. In theory, it should be simple: 1) Connect a drive containing media to a USB port. 2) Enable DLNA server. 3) Select the server in a DLNA client and play the media. It sounds like something that should be a standard feature in any smart TV or networked media device. It's surprising how many bugs and bad interfaces I encountered along the way. Once I got it working, I liked the built-in DLNA media server in my particular ASUS router enough that I retired my Jellyfin server.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: The team that powers VLC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620300 - Nov 2019 (49 comments)

8bitsrule 5y ago

TIL: before you click on 'View>Minimal interface', be sure to note the shortcut you need to restore it. Because minimal means minimal.

csmcg 5y ago
You can right-click anywhere in the VLC window to bring up the context menu, which has a 'View' tab which let's you toggle it back.

nyanpasu64 5y ago

VLC hasn't fixed the many-years-old bug where seeking causes pitch to randomly shift (https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/14287 https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/14287, previously https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/10056 https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/10056). And IIRC when VLC plays network streams (eg. Youtube) and they get disconnected, VLC often aborts playback instead of reconnecting (don't know if this bug is tracked or not, or fixed, since I use mpv for Youtube now).

tehnub 5y ago

Anyone know if it’s possible to run shaders in VLC like you can with mpv? e.g. https://github.com/igv/FSRCNN-TensorFlow/releases https://github.com/igv/FSRCNN-TensorFlow/releases