3 ms·

You speak as if VLC is the pinnacle of video player technology. I know it is an open source darling, but it's been a buggy, overengineered mess since forever, w

by sph 2y ago

You speak as if VLC is the pinnacle of video player technology. I know it is an open source darling, but it's been a buggy, overengineered mess since forever, which is why many use alternatives as mpv, IINA when I used macOS, SMplayer, etc. On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised. It is the only player to stutter for me on Windows, to get lost in its settings page, to have a terrible playlist implementation that's forced upon you, doesn't handle corrupted media as well as others, etc. mpv on the other hand does one thing and does it very well. I'll skip ranting about VLC for Android TV this time

RulerOf 2y ago
> On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised. It's praised because it "plays everything." It developed this reputation in an era when even average people were installing numerous DirectShow "codec packs" (often of dubious pedigree) in an often futile effort to "play that thing I just downloaded" from the P2P file sharing network du jour. For a number of reasons, installing a bunch of these codec packs would often leave video playback broken globally[1]. Since VLC is cross-platform, it does not use DirectShow, and would "fix" a system that had been "broken" by other software. [1]: most of these issues could be fixed with the GraphEdit utility, which offered a simple but powerful UI for configuring and testing every codec in the system. GraphEdit should have been included with Windows, and be something you could invoke from within Control Panel.
- Refusing23 2y ago
  VLC even plays incomplete files which i've found useful every now and again.
- account42 2y ago
  Literally every FFMPEG-based player will play whatever you throw at it. While it may be an advantage over basic bith OS-provided players it hasn't been a unique selling point for VLC for a long long time.
badsectoracula 2y ago
> On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised. For me the alternatives back when i first wanted a video player that could play various file formats were Media Player Classic (which worked only on Windows and relied on external codecs that sometimes didn't fully work), mplayer (which had annoying arcane commandline switches and weird shortcut keys), Totem (which used gstreamer which 90% of the time either didn't had the codecs i wanted or they were very buggy). More recently the only alternative seems to be mpv (which seems to be a mplayer fork that persists with the arcane switches and apparent hate of anything resembling a discoverable GUI). VLC on the other hand is available on anything that has a display (or at least anything that has a display and i'd want to play videos on it - that is currently Linux and Android and sometimes Windows) and has a GUI that while might be a bit on the overloadedly bloated side, at least it shows everything you may (and often you may not) want to configure, with actual menus, categories, tooltips, etc. And when it comes to the most common aspect, playback of videos, it shows a simple and to the point UI with the play, seek, volume, etc buttons that you'd need 99% of the time (that admittedly most other players do too, except they don't do the 99% rest of the GUI that VLC does). So, basically VLC is my preferred video player largely because 20 years ago i didn't had to read a tutorial on how to select the subtitle language (or something along these lines) and was able to play pretty much any video i threw at it without any extra fuss.
metroholografix 2y ago
I always saw VLC as subpar. A typical case of software that's just trying to copy what the pioneers do. As we all know, mediocrity it not antithetical to popularity, and VLC has become very popular indeed. However, it never pushed the envelope in terms of codecs, features and performance and as a result was never at the forefront of opensource video playing: mplayer got the ball rolling with rapid breakthroughs including hardware acceleration (e.g. /dev/mga_vid) before standards such as xvideo even existed and that spirit of technical excellence has been passed on to Mpv which remains at the pinnacle.
- diggan 2y ago
  > I always saw VLC as subpar. A typical case of software that's just trying to copy what the pioneers do. What pioneer is/was VLC trying to copy? Media Player Classic? Windows Media Player? Before VLC, the ecosystem of video players was a mess, and if you came across a format you didn't already had installed codecs for, chances were you couldn't play that file. But VLC always could play it, no matter what file, as long as it said it was a video file. > However, it never pushed the envelope in terms of codecs VLC literally took over the world because you could install VLC and VLC only, and stop having to care about codecs at all, at the time at least. Maybe today it's different, because the ideas of VLC already spread, but at the time, things were different. I personally use mpv most of the times today, but when I got started with computers and didn't understand as much as I do now, installing codecs to be able to view some video I just downloaded was a pretty confusing task. CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) for MPC helped a lot, but to even get to that point took some time.
  - nubinetwork 2y ago
    Wasn't CCCP bundled with malware or something back in the day?
    - diggan 2y ago
      Not that I'm aware of, nor can I find any sources talking about it. Maybe you're confusing it with DivX that did something like that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6409888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6409888)? Both were popular during the same timeframe, so not impossible you're confusing the two.
lupusreal 2y ago
> I never understood why VLC was so widely praised. Because it's the one you can reasonably suggest to all your utterly nontechnical friends and relatives to get them to stop downloading random sketchy exe's from the internet to install codecs. mpv, and mplayer before it, has always been better for me and I find VLC to be pretty shoddy. But when it comes to people like my mom, I don't hesitate to sing praise for VLC. In that context, VLC is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I don't muddy the waters by even mentioning mpv.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > Because it's the one you can reasonably suggest to all your utterly nontechnical friends and relatives I concurr.- PS. On a related tangent the amount of unpaid "support" tech knowledgeable individuals are doing for (particularly) FAANG is enormous.-
  - diggan 2y ago
    > PS. On a related tangent the amount of unpaid "support" tech knowledgeable individuals are doing for (particularly) FAANG is enormous.- Which is exactly the same for every profession. If you have a plumber friend and have issues with plumbing, who you call first, a random contractor or your friend? Replace "plumber/plumbing" with any profession and the answer is usually the same, you call your friend first, at least to get some more understanding before reaching out to a contractor.
    - Bluestein 2y ago
      Sure. I understand, and agree.- I was just wondering about what the sum total of the (otherwise) "billable" hours might amount to, were they to be accounted for as a cost of business for FAANG.-
    - account42 2y ago
      The difference is that if your plumber friend helps you out with your toilet, Big Plumbing Inc does not get your business. If however your tech friends help you with Windows/Android/Apple issues, MS/Google/etc. still get paid and save up on support costs. These two situations aren't even remotely comparable.
immibis 2y ago
I see VLC as the swiss army knife that can play anything you throw at it, no matter how weird. I see mpv as a more streamlined, less abstract implementation that supports many fewer options, but can contain special-case code paths for hardware acceleration, for example. Hardware-accelerated playback on my Raspberry Pi 3 works out of the box with mpv but requires some special trick or doesn't work at all in vlc. I assume mpv's design allows it to contain a special-case code path when you happen to be playing something compatible with a Raspberry Pi's GPU on a Raspberry Pi.
- account42 2y ago
  What files can your VLC play that MPV can't? Both get almost all of their codec support from FFMPEG.
maeln 2y ago
VLC is *amazing* at its design purpose: being a rock solid video player. The GUI, the UX, and other things can be criticized, but I dare you to find another video player that will play just about *anything*, and without having to install external codec separately with weird licence. You can throw at it a broken mp4 file, a https url with basic auth, a weirdly encoded video, a DVD full of scratches, etc, chances are VLC will manage to play it (at least what is playable). There is just no other video player in the world that achieve that. A lot of other video player might beat it at other features, but just straight video playing, VLC is just the best.
- eviks 2y ago
  > without having to install external codec separately with weird licence. What's up with this artificial limitation? I'd take frame back function over not having to install some codec pack once any time And 99.99% of the time you don't play "everything, with scratches", so UX issues are much more consequential than that
  - hiptobecubic 2y ago
    It's not artificial at all. It's a real limitation that was so outrageously annoying for the reasons mentioned above that VLC was able to "win" by tackling this one issue alone. The success of vlc is all the proof you need. As you say, why else would it be so popular?
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > What's up with this artificial limitation? I'd take frame back function over not having to install some codec pack once any time Then VLC is not for you - and there's nothing wrong with it or you - you just happen to have differing priorities. Back when the Internet was more p2p, the ability to play uncommon media formats and containers was crucial. Even today, VLC offers a lot of value to anyone who has to playback media whose encoding they have no control over. VLC has other useful features as well (like streaming while playing back, allowing for multicomputer watch parties on the same network)
- account42 2y ago
nubinetwork 2y ago
AFAIK, VLC was the one of the first players that was able to read all sorts of formats... back in the day, you were lucky if you could play mp2 and mp4, let alone mkv/avi/etc... Sadly VLC devs have let their software deteriorate to the point where VAAPI hw decoding doesn't even work anymore, they think it's ffmpeg's fault... except ffmpeg supports it just fine, VLC is just too lazy to update their ffmpeg calls to use the api correctly.
pxc 2y ago
> many use alternatives as mpv, IINA when I used macOS, SMplayer, etc. Those are all basically the same alternative in terms of backend. They're all based on ffmpeg and of mplayer lineage. I don't think there are many (any??k others comparable to VLC in terms of covering so many formats that are independent of FFMPEG. Maybe GStreamer?

by sph 2y ago

RulerOf 2y ago

> On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised. It's praised because it "plays everything." It developed this reputation in an era when even average people were installing numerous DirectShow "codec packs" (often of dubious pedigree) in an often futile effort to "play that thing I just downloaded" from the P2P file sharing network du jour. For a number of reasons, installing a bunch of these codec packs would often leave video playback broken globally[1]. Since VLC is cross-platform, it does not use DirectShow, and would "fix" a system that had been "broken" by other software. [1]: most of these issues could be fixed with the GraphEdit utility, which offered a simple but powerful UI for configuring and testing every codec in the system. GraphEdit should have been included with Windows, and be something you could invoke from within Control Panel.

Refusing23 2y ago
VLC even plays incomplete files which i've found useful every now and again.
account42 2y ago
Literally every FFMPEG-based player will play whatever you throw at it. While it may be an advantage over basic bith OS-provided players it hasn't been a unique selling point for VLC for a long long time.

badsectoracula 2y ago

> On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised. For me the alternatives back when i first wanted a video player that could play various file formats were Media Player Classic (which worked only on Windows and relied on external codecs that sometimes didn't fully work), mplayer (which had annoying arcane commandline switches and weird shortcut keys), Totem (which used gstreamer which 90% of the time either didn't had the codecs i wanted or they were very buggy). More recently the only alternative seems to be mpv (which seems to be a mplayer fork that persists with the arcane switches and apparent hate of anything resembling a discoverable GUI). VLC on the other hand is available on anything that has a display (or at least anything that has a display and i'd want to play videos on it - that is currently Linux and Android and sometimes Windows) and has a GUI that while might be a bit on the overloadedly bloated side, at least it shows everything you may (and often you may not) want to configure, with actual menus, categories, tooltips, etc. And when it comes to the most common aspect, playback of videos, it shows a simple and to the point UI with the play, seek, volume, etc buttons that you'd need 99% of the time (that admittedly most other players do too, except they don't do the 99% rest of the GUI that VLC does). So, basically VLC is my preferred video player largely because 20 years ago i didn't had to read a tutorial on how to select the subtitle language (or something along these lines) and was able to play pretty much any video i threw at it without any extra fuss.

metroholografix 2y ago

I always saw VLC as subpar. A typical case of software that's just trying to copy what the pioneers do. As we all know, mediocrity it not antithetical to popularity, and VLC has become very popular indeed. However, it never pushed the envelope in terms of codecs, features and performance and as a result was never at the forefront of opensource video playing: mplayer got the ball rolling with rapid breakthroughs including hardware acceleration (e.g. /dev/mga_vid) before standards such as xvideo even existed and that spirit of technical excellence has been passed on to Mpv which remains at the pinnacle.

diggan 2y ago
> I always saw VLC as subpar. A typical case of software that's just trying to copy what the pioneers do. What pioneer is/was VLC trying to copy? Media Player Classic? Windows Media Player? Before VLC, the ecosystem of video players was a mess, and if you came across a format you didn't already had installed codecs for, chances were you couldn't play that file. But VLC always could play it, no matter what file, as long as it said it was a video file. > However, it never pushed the envelope in terms of codecs VLC literally took over the world because you could install VLC and VLC only, and stop having to care about codecs at all, at the time at least. Maybe today it's different, because the ideas of VLC already spread, but at the time, things were different. I personally use mpv most of the times today, but when I got started with computers and didn't understand as much as I do now, installing codecs to be able to view some video I just downloaded was a pretty confusing task. CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) for MPC helped a lot, but to even get to that point took some time.
- nubinetwork 2y ago
  Wasn't CCCP bundled with malware or something back in the day?
  - diggan 2y ago
    Not that I'm aware of, nor can I find any sources talking about it. Maybe you're confusing it with DivX that did something like that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6409888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6409888)? Both were popular during the same timeframe, so not impossible you're confusing the two.

lupusreal 2y ago

> I never understood why VLC was so widely praised. Because it's the one you can reasonably suggest to all your utterly nontechnical friends and relatives to get them to stop downloading random sketchy exe's from the internet to install codecs. mpv, and mplayer before it, has always been better for me and I find VLC to be pretty shoddy. But when it comes to people like my mom, I don't hesitate to sing praise for VLC. In that context, VLC is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I don't muddy the waters by even mentioning mpv.

Bluestein 2y ago
> Because it's the one you can reasonably suggest to all your utterly nontechnical friends and relatives I concurr.- PS. On a related tangent the amount of unpaid "support" tech knowledgeable individuals are doing for (particularly) FAANG is enormous.-
- diggan 2y ago
  > PS. On a related tangent the amount of unpaid "support" tech knowledgeable individuals are doing for (particularly) FAANG is enormous.- Which is exactly the same for every profession. If you have a plumber friend and have issues with plumbing, who you call first, a random contractor or your friend? Replace "plumber/plumbing" with any profession and the answer is usually the same, you call your friend first, at least to get some more understanding before reaching out to a contractor.
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    Sure. I understand, and agree.- I was just wondering about what the sum total of the (otherwise) "billable" hours might amount to, were they to be accounted for as a cost of business for FAANG.-
  - account42 2y ago
    The difference is that if your plumber friend helps you out with your toilet, Big Plumbing Inc does not get your business. If however your tech friends help you with Windows/Android/Apple issues, MS/Google/etc. still get paid and save up on support costs. These two situations aren't even remotely comparable.

immibis 2y ago

I see VLC as the swiss army knife that can play anything you throw at it, no matter how weird. I see mpv as a more streamlined, less abstract implementation that supports many fewer options, but can contain special-case code paths for hardware acceleration, for example. Hardware-accelerated playback on my Raspberry Pi 3 works out of the box with mpv but requires some special trick or doesn't work at all in vlc. I assume mpv's design allows it to contain a special-case code path when you happen to be playing something compatible with a Raspberry Pi's GPU on a Raspberry Pi.

account42 2y ago
What files can your VLC play that MPV can't? Both get almost all of their codec support from FFMPEG.

maeln 2y ago

VLC is *amazing* at its design purpose: being a rock solid video player. The GUI, the UX, and other things can be criticized, but I dare you to find another video player that will play just about *anything*, and without having to install external codec separately with weird licence. You can throw at it a broken mp4 file, a https url with basic auth, a weirdly encoded video, a DVD full of scratches, etc, chances are VLC will manage to play it (at least what is playable). There is just no other video player in the world that achieve that. A lot of other video player might beat it at other features, but just straight video playing, VLC is just the best.

eviks 2y ago
> without having to install external codec separately with weird licence. What's up with this artificial limitation? I'd take frame back function over not having to install some codec pack once any time And 99.99% of the time you don't play "everything, with scratches", so UX issues are much more consequential than that
- hiptobecubic 2y ago
  It's not artificial at all. It's a real limitation that was so outrageously annoying for the reasons mentioned above that VLC was able to "win" by tackling this one issue alone. The success of vlc is all the proof you need. As you say, why else would it be so popular?
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > What's up with this artificial limitation? I'd take frame back function over not having to install some codec pack once any time Then VLC is not for you - and there's nothing wrong with it or you - you just happen to have differing priorities. Back when the Internet was more p2p, the ability to play uncommon media formats and containers was crucial. Even today, VLC offers a lot of value to anyone who has to playback media whose encoding they have no control over. VLC has other useful features as well (like streaming while playing back, allowing for multicomputer watch parties on the same network)
account42 2y ago

nubinetwork 2y ago

AFAIK, VLC was the one of the first players that was able to read all sorts of formats... back in the day, you were lucky if you could play mp2 and mp4, let alone mkv/avi/etc... Sadly VLC devs have let their software deteriorate to the point where VAAPI hw decoding doesn't even work anymore, they think it's ffmpeg's fault... except ffmpeg supports it just fine, VLC is just too lazy to update their ffmpeg calls to use the api correctly.

pxc 2y ago

> many use alternatives as mpv, IINA when I used macOS, SMplayer, etc. Those are all basically the same alternative in terms of backend. They're all based on ffmpeg and of mplayer lineage. I don't think there are many (any??k others comparable to VLC in terms of covering so many formats that are independent of FFMPEG. Maybe GStreamer?