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> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients. The v

> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients. The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. If you were tech support for friends and family during that era, it was common to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install software to watch some video they found. The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play common files or you can install VLC and play anything is infinitely better than the past experience with local video.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago
I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later. I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.
- j1elo 1y ago
  You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques. There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope. [1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
  - Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago
    Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe. What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
  - CharlesW 1y ago
    > Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes. > There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode… Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.
    - kalleboo 1y ago
      It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime. Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.
      - darkwater 1y ago
        > It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime. I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?
      - morshu9001 1y ago
        QT is so much faster than anything else. I'll only use VLC if the format is weird or if I want some feature like playlists.
- mmh0000 1y ago
  What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux. Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills. And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past. Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file. The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.
  - ConceptJunkie 1y ago
    Modern video tools provide an enormous selection, much of which is free. But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
    - embedding-shape 1y ago
      > But I'll always miss VirtualDub. Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of frames in .png and concatenating them together into a proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)
      - paradox460 1y ago
        ffmpeg?
        embedding-shape 1y ago
        Not sure you missed it, I did say "easy" :) Last time I compared them, VirtualDub was still the fastest.
    - Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago
      But I don't want more tools. I want to be able to view a video on YouTube, shift-scrub to select a short clip, hit copy, then go over to X, write some commentary, and hit paste. I don't want to have to go through yt-dlp, a dedicated video editor, and a file picker. This functionality was taken for granted when video on personal computers were first invented.
- dspillett 1y ago
  > RealPlayer was a dumpster fire And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were through tricks: silent installations with other software, drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware like Comet Cursor.
morshu9001 1y ago
That's if you weren't using a Mac
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  Ah man, Macs of yore could play .rm/.rv files natively?
- leptons 1y ago
  If you weren't using a Mac and wanted to play Quicktime videos? Then you have to install Apple's Quicktime player for Windows which was a piece of garbage.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
j45 1y ago
Real player was one of the first real video players, it wasn't a pain, it was a genuine addon. Flash, also almost came built into every browser. By the time both had gone away, HTML video built in was here. Of course, there were players like jwPlayer what played video fine. Today, most browsers have most codecs.
- recursive 1y ago
  Real Player was an early innovator. Mostly in dark patterns.
  - j45 1y ago
    Wouldn't be surprising, likely happened more when competition showed up.
ConceptJunkie 1y ago
Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though. MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  > MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great. And in-between those we had Media Player Classic together with the Combined Community Codec Pack, and once you had MPC + CCCP installed, you could finally view those glorious aXXo-branded 700MB files found on a random DC++ hub.
  - JBiserkov 1y ago
    I'm still using the Media Player Classic Home Cinema to this day. https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc Never liked VLC, but that's just me.
    - embedding-shape 1y ago
      I did drop MPC in favor of VLC, but with the new UI of VLC, maybe it's time to give MPC a try again. Didn't realize there was forks of it, time to do some rabbit hole diving!
    - xnx 1y ago
      It's insane that clicking on the video in the VLC interface does nothing. In every other app it is play/pause. There's a way to enable it deep in settings (or as a plugin?) but it should be the default.
      - JBiserkov 1y ago
        This.
MangoToupe 1y ago
> For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. How is this any worse than what YouTube does now? Real Player and flash never made you watch ads.
- jonas21 1y ago
  It seems you may be misremembering. From Wikipedia [1]: > Past versions of RealPlayer have been criticized for containing adware and spyware such as Comet Cursor. ... PC World magazine named RealPlayer (1999 Version) as number 2 in its 2006 list "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time", writing that RealPlayer "had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying 'messages' that were really just advertisements, and so on." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPlayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPlayer
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    Ah, I was not a windows user at the time. Regardless, from what I remember it was never as annoying as being screamed at to buy a minivan.
amomchilov 1y ago
You just reminded me of Perian. What a throwback! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perian

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago

I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later. I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.

j1elo 1y ago
You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques. There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope. [1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
- Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago
  Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe. What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  > Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes. > There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode… Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.
  - kalleboo 1y ago
    It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime. Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.
    - darkwater 1y ago
      > It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime. I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?
    - morshu9001 1y ago
      QT is so much faster than anything else. I'll only use VLC if the format is weird or if I want some feature like playlists.
mmh0000 1y ago
What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux. Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills. And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past. Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file. The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.
- ConceptJunkie 1y ago
  Modern video tools provide an enormous selection, much of which is free. But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    > But I'll always miss VirtualDub. Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of frames in .png and concatenating them together into a proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)
    - paradox460 1y ago
      ffmpeg?
      - embedding-shape 1y ago
        Not sure you missed it, I did say "easy" :) Last time I compared them, VirtualDub was still the fastest.
  - Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago
    But I don't want more tools. I want to be able to view a video on YouTube, shift-scrub to select a short clip, hit copy, then go over to X, write some commentary, and hit paste. I don't want to have to go through yt-dlp, a dedicated video editor, and a file picker. This functionality was taken for granted when video on personal computers were first invented.
dspillett 1y ago
> RealPlayer was a dumpster fire And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were through tricks: silent installations with other software, drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware like Comet Cursor.

morshu9001 1y ago

That's if you weren't using a Mac

embedding-shape 1y ago
Ah man, Macs of yore could play .rm/.rv files natively?
leptons 1y ago
If you weren't using a Mac and wanted to play Quicktime videos? Then you have to install Apple's Quicktime player for Windows which was a piece of garbage.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

j45 1y ago

Real player was one of the first real video players, it wasn't a pain, it was a genuine addon. Flash, also almost came built into every browser. By the time both had gone away, HTML video built in was here. Of course, there were players like jwPlayer what played video fine. Today, most browsers have most codecs.

recursive 1y ago
Real Player was an early innovator. Mostly in dark patterns.
- j45 1y ago
  Wouldn't be surprising, likely happened more when competition showed up.

ConceptJunkie 1y ago

Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though. MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.

embedding-shape 1y ago
> MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great. And in-between those we had Media Player Classic together with the Combined Community Codec Pack, and once you had MPC + CCCP installed, you could finally view those glorious aXXo-branded 700MB files found on a random DC++ hub.
- JBiserkov 1y ago
  I'm still using the Media Player Classic Home Cinema to this day. https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc Never liked VLC, but that's just me.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    I did drop MPC in favor of VLC, but with the new UI of VLC, maybe it's time to give MPC a try again. Didn't realize there was forks of it, time to do some rabbit hole diving!
  - xnx 1y ago
    It's insane that clicking on the video in the VLC interface does nothing. In every other app it is play/pause. There's a way to enable it deep in settings (or as a plugin?) but it should be the default.
    - JBiserkov 1y ago
      This.

MangoToupe 1y ago

> For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. How is this any worse than what YouTube does now? Real Player and flash never made you watch ads.

jonas21 1y ago
It seems you may be misremembering. From Wikipedia [1]: > Past versions of RealPlayer have been criticized for containing adware and spyware such as Comet Cursor. ... PC World magazine named RealPlayer (1999 Version) as number 2 in its 2006 list "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time", writing that RealPlayer "had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying 'messages' that were really just advertisements, and so on." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPlayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPlayer
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  Ah, I was not a windows user at the time. Regardless, from what I remember it was never as annoying as being screamed at to buy a minivan.

amomchilov 1y ago

You just reminded me of Perian. What a throwback! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perian