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VLC has been downloaded over a billion times
- fierarul 14y agoI cherish the VLC.app for iPad that was pulled from the AppStore! It's just great to copy a movie in the app folder and know it will play in VLC without any conversion, etc. It's actually the reason we stopped taking the laptop while away for the weekend. I just put a movie on the iPad for VLC and we are good to go. Edit: But the new VLC on OSX is horrible. Had to revert to the older version, mostly due to the way on-screen-display changed.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- taligent 14y agoYou mean that giant pill shaped toolbar ? If so I hate it too. Raised a bug report for it being too large and one of the developers told me to buy a Retina Mac and that my 17inch MacBook Pro has too small a resolution.
- AmericanOP 14y agoIn the public forums the devs have been very defensive about the UI redesign. I don't criticize easily, but it really does seem to stem from arrogance.
- feepk 14y agoThis will be fixed in VLC 2.0.2 :)
- reitzensteinm 14y agoThe new VLC really has regressed. It crashes for me now (I don't remember the last time it did before the latest update). Also, the audio delay for volume changes is multiple seconds instead of instant, and for some reason, the "repeat this video" is always on whenever I start it up. Plus, the interface is ugly. Even with all that though, VLC has regressed from being an amazingly solid piece of software to being merely above average.
- Zirro 14y agoUnless you have a different bug, "the audio delay for volume changes is multiple seconds instead of instant" was fixed in version 2.0.1 along with several other issues.
- Dejital 14y agoThe audio delay issue persists for me in version 2.0.1 like the parent commenter. Among other issues is an increase in random crashing. The new interface isn't particularly inviting, either. Reading through the other comments here has caused me to revert to the older version with which I was never unhappy with.
- getsat 14y agoI also see it "rebuilding font cache" on every fresh start. Is anyone else seeing that? Very annoying.
- mparlane 14y agoYea, I get that on any 720p + movie. Basically any mkv that may have subtitle support.
- crxpandion 14y agoIf you download the latest build this problem was fixed for me. http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/macosx-intel/?C=M;O=D http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/macosx-intel/?C=M;O=D
- withad 14y agoI've lost count of the number of times I've gone to click play on the new OSX version of VLC and accidentally clicked forward or backward, completely losing my place in the video I was watching as it skips to another. Horrible UI.
- Terretta 14y agoNot to mention VLC 2.0 it breaking the helper libs needed for DVD backup. The fix should have been automatic: http://www.macworld.com/article/1165549/fix_handbrake_dvd_ripping_if_youve_installed_vlc_2_0.html http://www.macworld.com/article/1165549/fix_handbrake_dvd_ri...
- feepk 14y agoSorry, but we aren't responsible for 3rd apps who try to use VLC's functionality in a completely unsupported way. Stuff within an application bundle is considered private and can change anytime. Anyway, we informed the Handbrake devs about a month prior to VLC's 2.0 release, which is why they came up with a fix in their latest version shortly after.
- itg 14y agoTry MPlayerX for OSX, I prefer it over the new VLC.
- cellularmitosis 14y agoI tried MPlayer OSX once, and found that it turned my mac's volume up to max everytime I played a video. Sorry guys, endangering my audio equipment is terminally bad QA in my book. No thanks.
- oldschooltaper 14y agoIf OSX is anything like other OS's, you have to turn down the volume through OSX, not mplayer. mplayer's volume control is a way to "fine tune" the system volume. It sounds like your system volume is set high to begin with. Lower it. Then launch mplayer. I would tell you how but I don't use OSX. Surely someone else can tell you, or you could learn yourself. It's worth learning how to use mplayer, if you are serious about audio.
- cellularmitosis 14y agoActually, it turn(ed) the system volume all the way up. But mplayer (command line) itself is awesome. It's the only thing I use on Linux.
- xyzzyb 14y agoTry hosting your video files on a Plex media server paired with the Plex iOS app. No need to copy files to the iPad, Plex streaming works great even over 3G. You can register your server with myPlex then sign on Plex clients to make getting to your video collection super easy. Custom video categories are fantastic for keeping track of programming screencasts. I just setup my Plex with Peepcode, Destroy All Software, and Railscasts categories and am very pleased with the setup. If I start watching a video on the Roku box on my TV, I can pick up where I left off on the iPad or my iPhone whether I'm at home or not.
- derefr 14y agoThat doesn't really solve for the parent's use-case of > It's actually the reason we stopped taking the laptop while away for the weekend. I just put a movie on the iPad for VLC and we are good to go. though. You'd need to bring something to run Plex on.
- xyzzyb 14y agoPlex runs on a computer at home. You then stream that computer's media over the Internet on the iPad/iPhone using the Plex app. To make things super-easy you can register your home Plex server on myPlex and sign into it using myPlex on the iPad/iPhone. Bam! No need to bring a computer OR move files to the device. You can even stream over 3G with pretty decent quality.
- adaml_623 14y agoI think the previous poster understood the technical details and was implying that internet access is not always there. Also a lot of people have limited mobile quotas so wouldn't want to use their 3G connection for streaming something.
- base698 14y agoThat works so well on an airplane without wifi, or a tent in a valley in the wilderness :)
- efnx 14y agoVLC is open source right? It would be nice if they put up the source for the iPad app so at least developers could make a build for themselves.
- zachanker 14y agoSeems that they do http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html unless it's a different iOS version of VLC than the one on the app store that was removed.
- efnx 14y agoPerfect! Thank you for finding that! I skimmed their site but obviously not deep enough.
- res0nat0r 14y agoI'm debating buying an iPad and not being able to play all media formats is a big one. Can I drag mkv 720p files to my iPad and will VLC play them if I can get it installed via above? Also hows the battery life if trying to play a 720p or 1080p file?
- drzaiusapelord 14y agoFWIW my Android Transformer plays everything using MX player. There's a seperate install for the codecs, but its easy and painless. All in the android play store. No sideloading needed.
- SiVal 14y agoHow would this help? (And I'm actually asking, not disputing.) I don't have an iPad. Does Apple allow you to load your own app (as in an app you write or at least compile for yourself) onto your own iPad, or do you have to load everything through the store, which requires getting Apple's approval? If you can't directly load your own app (which is my, perhaps mistaken, impression), how would having the source help? If you can, then that sounds like a potential solution.
- ralfd 14y agoThere are only two programs I reversed a version update: - Skype back to 2.8 - VLC back to 1.1.12
- vasco 14y agoNo Linux stats. That's too bad! I would really love to see how they would compare to mac and windows download counts.
- andyking 14y agoI guess most people get it from their distribution's repository, so there are no centralised stats kept for downloads.
- kinleyd 14y agoVLC has been my go to media player on Linux for years now and I still love it.
- liotier 14y agoAbout 25% of Debian users who submit to the Debian Popularity Contest have VLC installed on their computer : http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=vlc&show_installed=on&show_old=on&want_percent=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1 http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=vlc&show_... - that includes servers, so the actual proportion of Debian desktop users with VLC is much higher.
- gaving 14y agoI used to love VLC, pity they ruined the OSX version. MPlayerX all the way now and I don't look back.
- gulbrandr 14y agoWhy is MPlayerX better than VLC on OSX? (Sell it to me)
- orta 14y agoPersonally I've found the keyboard commands to be easier to remember in MPlayerX ( I watch a lot of streams so its dealing with networks ) than for VLC.
- CrLf 14y agoI wish they had left the OSX interface alone... The old one was mostly a player, now it's supposed to be a media center... The new UI really is horrible. Well, now it's on the same league as the Windows version, whose UI has always been pretty bad.
- Tyr42 14y agoAm I the only one who liked the new OSX version?
- praptak 14y agoIf you value all the the time you saved by skipping "unskippable" DVD crap in VLC, please consider donating to this amazing project.
- lmm 14y agoDoesn't it just use mplayer's libraries for playing DVDs? Seems like they would be a better target for donation (particularly since most efforts to support new formats e.g. bluray seem to happen there)
- keeperofdakeys 14y agoNo, it uses FFMPEG (among other libraries), which mplayer also use. The thing is, the libraries don't fit together like jigsaw puzzles, you have to do a lot of work to glue them together. VLC also tries to make a stable library for others to use, in the form of libvlc.
- option_greek 14y agoBoth mplayer and vlc along with many other open source media players use codecs from ffmpeg project.
- obtino 14y agoBoth VLC and MPlayer use ffmpeg as one of the many decoding modules. The ffmpeg module (libavcodec) decodes many of the codecs out there.
- vibragiel 14y agoAnd this is what ffmpeg have to say about donations: Want to donate to FFmpeg? Well, theres no way to do that currently. Luckily we dont need any money. But there are many not for profit organizations with noble goals that do. Select one of your choice that you trust and agree with their goals and instead of donating to FFmpeg, send your donation to them. http://ffmpeg.org/ http://ffmpeg.org/ So yeah, donating to VLC directly seems like a good choice.
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- diminish 14y agoI am using VLC on linux from time to time, together with others. it is good to know it plays almost everything with a simple UI. Congratulations to the team. for 1 billion downloads. you rock.
- rachelbythebay 14y agoAt least one of the Santa Clara county DAs uses it to play back 911 calls in court. That orange cone on his laptop was unmistakable. Conclusion: VLC is everywhere.
- program 14y agoI know that it's a fallacious statistic but here is the VLC all time OS market share (rounded): Windows: 89.38% OS X: 10.27% Other: 0.35%
- shawabawa 14y agoNote that it said on the site it purposefully didn't include linux downloads as it's mostly delivered through package managers.
- hackermom 14y agoI wonder how many percentiles of the Windows number comes from Windows' re-re-re-re-install-ish nature. "Dang, my FPS is low, I gotta "format Windows" again."
- freehunter 14y agoI've always held install/download statistics to be just a rough, rough estimate. Personally, I know I can spin up a Windows VM within the span of a lunch break and run a script to automatically install all my default applications (even if I don't plan on using them). When I'm finished with whatever task I'm doing, I delete the VM. With VLC and Firefox et al, I know reinstalls contribute to a lot of "downloads" numbers. I take the number at face value: it's popular enough to have been downloaded 1 billion times, regardless of how many people are using it right now.
- RobAtticus 14y agoI haven't had to reinstall Windows since upgrading to 7, and didn't really reinstall that often with XP either. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think this has been a big issue in quite a while.
- zanny 14y agoI still have a 6 year old Vista partition from when it first launched somewhere (which has since been updated with SP2 ofc). I have written off ever trying to make that drive look pretty again without breaking everything, but it does still boot and I think all the applications start. Baby steps M$!
- SeanDav 14y agoVLC used to be a nice simple program that just did what it said on the tin. Now much more bloated with really slow start up. I use GOM player mainly (Windows)
- pmr_ 14y agoYou mean the media-player player that is violating the GPL? http://roundup.libav.org/issue112 http://roundup.libav.org/issue112
- hackermom 14y agoIf you want something smaller, faster and tons more efficient for OS X, I highly recommend MPlayerX instead. It's everything VLC is, and more, with none of VLC's bloat.
- st3fan 14y agoOr just install Perian. Which installs most popular codecs system wide. That means things will work fine in any app that uses the OS X APIs to render video. Including QuickView .. really nice to be able to just hit space bar in the Finder to see a quick preview of a movie.
- hackermom 14y agoI used to be a Perian user, but its complications and shortcomings made me ditch it in favor of MPlayer OS X Extended, which eventually led me to the better MPlayerX. I am in favor of Perian's solution of being a nifty QT plugin, though.
- grecy 14y agoThe developers just announced the next version of Perian will be the final version. http://perian.org/?eol http://perian.org/?eol
- danso 14y agoThis is an incredible number...I didn't believe it at first but it makes sense given the cumulative version downloads. But except for other techies (fellow students in comsci/comp. eng), I ran into very few people who ever used VLC. They just put up with WMP/VLC/iTunes. Now with Netflix/Amazon/iTunes, I've found myself rarely ever needing another video player. Not that these commercial entities are "better" than what VLC offers, they're just easy enough and provide enough content that I no longer feel the "need" to go to VLC...but that's also because I'm older and have less time to watch things overall.
- keeperofdakeys 14y agoThe trouble with these statistics is there are some rather variable gaps of time between the releases, which makes it hard to gauge growth without doing more research.
- afterburner 14y agoI've always been impressed at what VLC accomplished under the hood, but the usability and configurability of Media Player Classic always pulls me back.
- cema 14y agoVLC is a great product. Has consistently been among the top media players for the big platforms for quite a while. (Despite occasional slips like the recent changes on OS X, still one of the best.) I have, as others mentioned too, noticed a certain reluctance among the non-techies to download and install VLC. Even so (or maybe especially so), I promote it whenever I can.
- NathanKP 14y agoEvery time I see the VLC website I have to laugh, because I coded it a few years ago back when I was still doing general consulting. It has changed a little bit but it is still nice to be able to look into the code and still see some of my old stuff in there. And yes.... I know some of the markup is terrible. :P
- PiracyApologist 14y agoNice humblebrag there.
- mparlane 14y agoWere you paid? Or part of a "help a free project" endeavor ?
- NathanKP 14y agoYes I was paid. It wasn't much, but it was a good learning experience.
- ElliotH 14y agoThere's a lesson in how to make a product in VLC's success. It has a horribly unfriendly interface, and is certainly not pretty, but it doesn't matter - Whatever media file you point it at, you can feel confident that VLC will play it, without hassle.
- why-el 14y agoThe interface might not be the prettiest, but I don't think it's "horribly unfriendly". Can you contrast it with another player? I have been using vlc for a long time now and although I just switched to Mac OS, I can't say that I find other players on the platform particularly appealing. But again I think it depends on what you do it. In my case its usually either in minimized mode or playing a movie on full screen mode, making my contact with its UI very limited.
- krupan 14y agomplayer, for example, is just as capably at playing just about any media format, but is definitely far more user-unfriendly than vlc
- sasha-dv 14y agoI disagree. Regarding user-friendliness they are about the same to me. Can you point out something that I maybe missed that makes mplayer "definitely far more user-friendly than vlc"? (not rude, just curious) edit: missed a word
- mbell 14y agoLet's start with the fact that mplayer is a command line only interaction program, if you want to discuss real usability, which GUI for mplayer are you using?
- Edootjuh 14y agoWhile it does require some terminal skills, as far as playing or streaming any media file and skipping left and right a bit (the largest part of my contact with a media player) or shuffling through a music library goes, I find it far easier to work with. I feel that people too often confuse a user-friendly interface with an intuitive or noob-friendly one. But I guess seeing as most programs' user base's large majority are non-technical people that's fair.
- laconian 14y agoVLC's success is truly a testament to how awful the first-party media player solutions are. People know that sparkly, zoomy UIs on DRM-ridden underpinnings are just lipstick on a pig. VLC isn't pretty but it works.
- Erunno 14y agoI'll just add another data point. After the release of VLC 2.0 I was slightly dissatisfied with the new interface on OS X and used the opportunity to try out a couple of alternative players. In the end I stuck with MPlayerX because of short startup time and the minimalistic interface. But it was only a short love affair. The keyboard controls are pretty much non-existent, it can't open DVD menus, it only shows half the available duration of some of my music DVD rips (dual-layer?!?) and I have some occasional weird timing issues with regard to subtitles (image and subtitles suddenly not in sync). In the end I returned to VLC and all of my issues disappeared. So kudos to the VLC team for producing such a great product (despite some questionable interface decisions). I'll take a player which "just works" over the pretty and shiny competitors every day.
- glanch 14y agoSince there are a lot of VLC fans here, can anyone tell me why I can't seem to watch a video with VLC while having the playlist open at the same time? These functions seem to be mutually exclusive on my win7 pc. Quite frustrating.
- Gravityloss 14y agoYou don't need to hunt any plugins or codecs. You install a monolithic package and everything just works. If something doesn't you probably only need to upgrade. Saves a lot of time.
- Knoopi 14y agoThese guys killed the MediaPlayer market for the bad. It is one of the apps making knock my head on the table. It is so terribly poor in UX. While the appearance is IMHO seems to be heavily "inspired" from existing players (e.g. Quicktimes controls overlay) without any charming twist, it is implemented ridiculously poor. Boys, a cursor that hides when you try to click the playhead!? Ridiculous. The playhead is so idiotically tiny that this crap product turns into a Aim & Click game. Yea, it's free but this is for no good as it kills any efforts to make something better. This is such a pity.
- tuxguy 14y agoVLC is awesome, but SMPlayer is awesome *2 :)
- corkercsuite 14y agoI've downloaded it at least 10 times over the years ...