5 ms·

>it's been my default video app since I can remember. Curious as to what you think about MPlayer, MPC-HC, or mpv, which have mostly taken the crown in nerd cir

by mehrzad 13y ago

>it's been my default video app since I can remember. Curious as to what you think about MPlayer, MPC-HC, or mpv, which have mostly taken the crown in nerd circles as being the de facto video players.

JohnTHaller 13y ago
MPlayer works in the Linux world, but the app itself has no stable releases outside of that so it doesn't have traction beyond Linux. Unless you count things like SMPlayer (Windows-specific front-end and MPlayer backend) and the like. MPC-HC is pretty popular in the Windows world. But neither of them come close to approaching VLC's userbase. We make SMPlayer, MPC-HC and VLC all available in portable form at PortableApps.com alongside each other and VLC's downloads blow the other two away.
- Osmium 13y ago
  There are some MPlayer-powered releases for OS X too, e.g. http://mplayerx.org http://mplayerx.org There are others too, though I'm not sure what the differences are.
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    There are a bunch of them on Windows, too. It's hard to keep track of them all.
- simcop2387 13y ago
  smplayer isn't windows only. It does work on linux fairly well too. That being said, I have grown to like VLC more lately.
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    Quite right, my mistake. The point still stands, though, as Windows (the dominant OS by a huge margin) has no stable releases of the base MPlayer app, so there's no one version people can grab. Whereas VLC runs quite well on Windows, Mac and Linux.
    - simcop2387 13y ago
      Yep, that's the same reason I recommend VLC. It's definitely improved since the days of 2005 or so when I used it to stream dvds over a lan to a machine that didn't have a DVD drive. I wonder if anyone has screenshots of it over the years...
Enquiry 13y ago
The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior. (Especially subbing groups) I use FooBar2K for audio and VLC for video.
- smtddr 13y ago
  So, if you're going to say that about otakus then can you explain why your choices are superior?
  - CrazedGeek 13y ago
    I'll let someone else handle VLC, but fb2k is good because: * Extremely fast startup and snappy interface * Supports a wide variety of formats * Uses existing ID3 tags & Vorbis comments and doesn't try creating its own * Mature plugin interface * Reasonably simple Downsides are that you have to be willing to spend a little extra time organizing your music and it's weak with playlists and device synchronization.
- mileswu 13y ago
  There are many rendering filters and pipelines available for DirectShow (and therefore MPC-HC) that VLC does not have. For example MadVR[1] improves upscaling and display rendering quality dramatically and xy-VSFilter can render subtitles many times faster than libass which is used in VLC. These are just two examples that I came up with off the top of my head, but there are countless more. The advantage of VLC is that it's simple and just works out of the box for 95% of stuff, but MPC/Directshow gives you far more flexibility as you can construct a very custom filter chain (eg. using different decoders and renderers). [1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228 [2] https://code.google.com/p/xy-vsfilter/ https://code.google.com/p/xy-vsfilter/
- ANTSANTS 13y ago
  Kinda surprised that the grandparent (asked an honest question) is getting downvoted while this post (made a baseless claim) isn't. >The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior. VLC is built largely around the cross-platform ffmpeg libraries and does not seem to have the ability to use native Windows DirectShow filters, in the interest of being portable and removing a source of configuration errors. Like it or not, a number of high quality open-source "audio/videophile" (for lack of a better term) media player plugins exist solely as Windows DirectShow filters. The most important that springs to mind is MadVR, a video renderer with support for high-quality GPU-accelerated upscaling filters, and the ability to set separate upscaling filters for the chroma and luma channels. That's more than enough for me, but there's also ReClock (similar to the RetroArch emulator, perfectly syncs the video to the display and slightly shifts the pitch of the audio to compensate), various vendor-specific hardware-accelerated video decoders, xy-VSFilter, the LAV filter suite (which support, amongst other things, bitstreaming, the ability to pass compressed audio streams through to a digital receiver), and others I'm probably forgetting. These plugins can be used in any media playing software for Windows that supports DirectShow filters, such as the official Windows Media Player. MPC just happens to be a really lightweight, stable, and customizable DirectShow-based media player. VLC is good software and probably the best solution for people who just want to watch some videos without configuring anything. I haven't looked at a stock MPC install in a while, but it's possible that stock VLC works better than that. However, for those that actually want to put some effort into tweaking their AV-setup, and want to make use of Windows-specific software, MPC is a great media player, one of the few programs (including Foobar) that I sorely miss on Linux. The people that look down on VLC users are silly, but it's not like the only reason to use MPC is elitism.
Camillo 13y ago
I don't want to go off-topic, but since VLC developers are reading this thread, here's where MPlayer (I use MPlayerX) is still better than VLC: - MPlayer starts much faster. - MPlayer loads videos much faster. - MPlayer has very convenient shortcuts for skipping forward or backward by 10 seconds (just press the right or left arrow), which are a godsend when you're watching something in a foreign language and you need to hear a sentence again. VLC's shortcuts (command-option-arrow) are far less convenient, harder to remember, and VLC reacts to them much more slowly, which makes it incredibly inconvenient. There has been some improvement over the last few years: seeking hardly used to work at all in VLC, while now it works, albeit slowly. However, it's not enough to beat MPlayer. There may be other reasons to prefer MPlayer, but they become more subjective. The ones I mentioned above are areas where VLC is objectively inferior. It would be great if it could be further improved.
- FooBarWidget 13y ago
  I used to be an avid mplayer user too, starting since circa 2003 on Linux. However nowadays, on my Mac, I found more and more video files that mplayer crashes on. That made me switch to VLC. I still miss mplayer's super-fast seeking and loading times though. And once in a while VLC freezes during startup for no good reason.
- hrktb 13y ago
  I've been using both for weird format files and codecs (anything more or less standard is streamed to the tv directly) and felt that VLC tends to try as much as possible to read everything, while MPlayerX is more tolerant towards garbage in the stream and won't bother recovering mildly invalid data. Part of the lag in VLC when starting a stream might come from a more heavy handed init process. This can be a curse or a blessing, I'm happy both approaches are available.
- autodidakto 13y ago
  Shortcuts are the reason I haven't switched off VLC: a to change aspect ratio on poorly encoding. c to change crop. e to advance one frame. s to change subtitle stream, l for audio stream.
medell 13y ago
Movist for Mac, MPC-HC for Windows. VLC has gotten heavy and some defaults have me thinking the user is not in mind. Holding CTRL / ALT with arrow keys to skip? This is awkward with one hand. The arrows default to "Navigate" for DVD menus. DVD's! Rebuilding font cache? Yes, yes these are all customizable...

by mehrzad 13y ago

JohnTHaller 13y ago

MPlayer works in the Linux world, but the app itself has no stable releases outside of that so it doesn't have traction beyond Linux. Unless you count things like SMPlayer (Windows-specific front-end and MPlayer backend) and the like. MPC-HC is pretty popular in the Windows world. But neither of them come close to approaching VLC's userbase. We make SMPlayer, MPC-HC and VLC all available in portable form at PortableApps.com alongside each other and VLC's downloads blow the other two away.

Osmium 13y ago
There are some MPlayer-powered releases for OS X too, e.g. http://mplayerx.org http://mplayerx.org There are others too, though I'm not sure what the differences are.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  There are a bunch of them on Windows, too. It's hard to keep track of them all.
simcop2387 13y ago
smplayer isn't windows only. It does work on linux fairly well too. That being said, I have grown to like VLC more lately.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  Quite right, my mistake. The point still stands, though, as Windows (the dominant OS by a huge margin) has no stable releases of the base MPlayer app, so there's no one version people can grab. Whereas VLC runs quite well on Windows, Mac and Linux.
  - simcop2387 13y ago
    Yep, that's the same reason I recommend VLC. It's definitely improved since the days of 2005 or so when I used it to stream dvds over a lan to a machine that didn't have a DVD drive. I wonder if anyone has screenshots of it over the years...

Enquiry 13y ago

The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior. (Especially subbing groups) I use FooBar2K for audio and VLC for video.

smtddr 13y ago
So, if you're going to say that about otakus then can you explain why your choices are superior?
- CrazedGeek 13y ago
  I'll let someone else handle VLC, but fb2k is good because: * Extremely fast startup and snappy interface * Supports a wide variety of formats * Uses existing ID3 tags & Vorbis comments and doesn't try creating its own * Mature plugin interface * Reasonably simple Downsides are that you have to be willing to spend a little extra time organizing your music and it's weak with playlists and device synchronization.
mileswu 13y ago
There are many rendering filters and pipelines available for DirectShow (and therefore MPC-HC) that VLC does not have. For example MadVR[1] improves upscaling and display rendering quality dramatically and xy-VSFilter can render subtitles many times faster than libass which is used in VLC. These are just two examples that I came up with off the top of my head, but there are countless more. The advantage of VLC is that it's simple and just works out of the box for 95% of stuff, but MPC/Directshow gives you far more flexibility as you can construct a very custom filter chain (eg. using different decoders and renderers). [1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228 [2] https://code.google.com/p/xy-vsfilter/ https://code.google.com/p/xy-vsfilter/
ANTSANTS 13y ago
Kinda surprised that the grandparent (asked an honest question) is getting downvoted while this post (made a baseless claim) isn't. >The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior. VLC is built largely around the cross-platform ffmpeg libraries and does not seem to have the ability to use native Windows DirectShow filters, in the interest of being portable and removing a source of configuration errors. Like it or not, a number of high quality open-source "audio/videophile" (for lack of a better term) media player plugins exist solely as Windows DirectShow filters. The most important that springs to mind is MadVR, a video renderer with support for high-quality GPU-accelerated upscaling filters, and the ability to set separate upscaling filters for the chroma and luma channels. That's more than enough for me, but there's also ReClock (similar to the RetroArch emulator, perfectly syncs the video to the display and slightly shifts the pitch of the audio to compensate), various vendor-specific hardware-accelerated video decoders, xy-VSFilter, the LAV filter suite (which support, amongst other things, bitstreaming, the ability to pass compressed audio streams through to a digital receiver), and others I'm probably forgetting. These plugins can be used in any media playing software for Windows that supports DirectShow filters, such as the official Windows Media Player. MPC just happens to be a really lightweight, stable, and customizable DirectShow-based media player. VLC is good software and probably the best solution for people who just want to watch some videos without configuring anything. I haven't looked at a stock MPC install in a while, but it's possible that stock VLC works better than that. However, for those that actually want to put some effort into tweaking their AV-setup, and want to make use of Windows-specific software, MPC is a great media player, one of the few programs (including Foobar) that I sorely miss on Linux. The people that look down on VLC users are silly, but it's not like the only reason to use MPC is elitism.

Camillo 13y ago

I don't want to go off-topic, but since VLC developers are reading this thread, here's where MPlayer (I use MPlayerX) is still better than VLC: - MPlayer starts much faster. - MPlayer loads videos much faster. - MPlayer has very convenient shortcuts for skipping forward or backward by 10 seconds (just press the right or left arrow), which are a godsend when you're watching something in a foreign language and you need to hear a sentence again. VLC's shortcuts (command-option-arrow) are far less convenient, harder to remember, and VLC reacts to them much more slowly, which makes it incredibly inconvenient. There has been some improvement over the last few years: seeking hardly used to work at all in VLC, while now it works, albeit slowly. However, it's not enough to beat MPlayer. There may be other reasons to prefer MPlayer, but they become more subjective. The ones I mentioned above are areas where VLC is objectively inferior. It would be great if it could be further improved.

FooBarWidget 13y ago
I used to be an avid mplayer user too, starting since circa 2003 on Linux. However nowadays, on my Mac, I found more and more video files that mplayer crashes on. That made me switch to VLC. I still miss mplayer's super-fast seeking and loading times though. And once in a while VLC freezes during startup for no good reason.
hrktb 13y ago
I've been using both for weird format files and codecs (anything more or less standard is streamed to the tv directly) and felt that VLC tends to try as much as possible to read everything, while MPlayerX is more tolerant towards garbage in the stream and won't bother recovering mildly invalid data. Part of the lag in VLC when starting a stream might come from a more heavy handed init process. This can be a curse or a blessing, I'm happy both approaches are available.
autodidakto 13y ago
Shortcuts are the reason I haven't switched off VLC: a to change aspect ratio on poorly encoding. c to change crop. e to advance one frame. s to change subtitle stream, l for audio stream.

medell 13y ago

Movist for Mac, MPC-HC for Windows. VLC has gotten heavy and some defaults have me thinking the user is not in mind. Holding CTRL / ALT with arrow keys to skip? This is awkward with one hand. The arrows default to "Navigate" for DVD menus. DVD's! Rebuilding font cache? Yes, yes these are all customizable...