This matches with my observation, VLC tends to be more tolerant of slightly broken files or random issues that you encounter when streaming. Especially for hls

This matches with my observation, VLC tends to be more tolerant of slightly broken files or random issues that you encounter when streaming. Especially for hls streams, vlc often works when ffplay refuses to play it, I believe because vlc uses their own demuxer (instead of relying on libavformat).