4 ms·
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 start
by 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 agoI 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 agoI'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 agoShortcuts 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.