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I have been a VLC user on Windows for years. I've actually stuck with VLC 1.1.5 for 2 reasons: 1. It plays any local video I throw at it. Other people tell me

I have been a VLC user on Windows for years. I've actually stuck with VLC 1.1.5 for 2 reasons: 1. It plays any local video I throw at it. Other people tell me "It doesn't play some of my videos" but I haven't seen this actually occur. Or when I do, it's because they're using a newer version of VLC which has removed support or changed processing. VLC has terrible license problems and awful feature creep. I had some .mkv files which didn't play correctly, so I downgraded from 1.1.10 to 1.1.5, and they play just fine. That's right, the 3-year old player plays the newest .mkv files much better than the 2-year old player or the newest player. And unlike mplayer, mplayer2, wmp, and most other players out there, you don't have to goto some random website and download some random codec pack, and install it with who knows what malware.</FUD> All the codecs are included with the program. Reading this github doesn't tell me why I should use mpv instead of vlc 1.1.5. Actually, it tells me I'll have to go find these random codec packs again, opening myself to possible CSRF attacks and other malware from poorly-secured or malicious codec providers. I'm already trusting the media player install package to not be evil, and I'd rather only have to trust 1 install package instead of it and several codec install packages. 2. I actually downgraded from VLC 2.0 to 1.1.10 because of VLC's terrible responsiveness. I don't know what changed, but it has made VLC 2.0 too annoying to use. The delay is a second or 2, which is a second or 2 longer than it used to be, and a second or 2 longer than it needs to be. When I go from a quiet video to a loud video, and I roll the mousewheel to lower the volume, that volume change needs to happen immediately, not after a 1-2 second delay. I like that responsiveness is one of the bullet points. I would have downloaded it and tried it out, but I don't know how to make this on Windows.

SimHacker 13y ago
VLC may play lot of videos, but it has the most systematically terrible user interface of any program I have ever seen. Just absolutely horrible, on a level that could not possibly just the results of ignorance and carelessness, but it actually seems to optimized to actively fuck the user on purpose.
- ciupicri 13y ago
  What's so horrible about it? It looks like most media players. The playlist could use some love, but if you're only playing a single (long) video at a time it doesn't matter to much.
  - stephengillie 13y ago
    The playlist actually has a lot of options which are randomly buried in the settings. You can change settings so double-clicking a video file just adds it to the end of the playlist. Or you can make every new video open in its own new player. Like I said, feature creep is one of VLC's biggest problems.
    - SimHacker 13y ago
      Some but not all of the changes I make to the configuration (like key bindings in particular) don't take effect until I restart VLC. What the fuck??? http://forums.logitech.com/t5/G-Series-Gaming-Keyboards/G19-media-keys-not-working-with-VLC/td-p/602628 http://forums.logitech.com/t5/G-Series-Gaming-Keyboards/G19-... "In VLC, as of 1.1.11, you have to go to interface, preferences, hotkeys, and doubleclick the GLOBAL hotkey you need to set. Press the media key on the keyboard, and it'll return but will act like nothing changed. Click "Apply" and it should show you the media key identification of the key you pressed. Once you have setup all your keys, save, and completely exit and restart VLC." For me, on both Mac and Windows, VLC key bindings fail to take effect until I restart it (any key bindings, not just global media hotkeys), and many options simply don't get saved at all. I have to hand edit the configuration text file. Ridiculous. http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=91154 http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=91154 "Saving can fail. And sometimes it can even output corrupted file." http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=13340 http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=13340 "As for saving, make sure you click 'Save' on the options dialog. OK applies them without saving, while Save applies and saves them." Yes I am pressing the "Save" button. There is no "OK" button, and if there was both an OK and a Save button, that would still be a terrible user interface design. Basic simple things like that just don't work. Maybe my preferences file keeps getting corrupted, but that should NOT happen, ever. At least it should give me an error message instead of just silently losing. Shameful. Then there's the way it decides to resize the playlist window really big for no reason at all. Why can't the playlist window just stay the same size? It crashes all the time, and then when I restart it, it ALWAYS asks if I want to report the last crash to the development team. No I don't, and I also don't want it to ask me that every fucking time. I just want it to shut the fuck up and play a video. Of course there is no option I can find to turn off that annoying modal pop-up dialog. A not-terribly-designed user interface would have a checkbox on the annoying modal dialog that says "Never ask me this ever again", and I wouldn't have to go through an unsuccessful wild goose chase through the millions of advanced options searching for a way to turn that dialog off. The simple preference user interface has checkbox options to disable video and audio. What's the point of that? In fact, those are the first options in the video and audio sections! Who would ever want to disable video or audio in a video player? You already have a volume and mute control, and you can disable video and audio tracks from the menus. So why is that the first option in the simple preferences user interface? Was there a huge demand from novice users for that option? Terrible user interface design. There are many other things about the UI design that are extremely annoying, a lot having to do with the out of control feature creep and totally uncoordinated committee design. All those advanced options, yet there is no way to set it to always show advanced options every time. Isn't it ironic that it has millions of options, but no option to always show the millions of options by default? Or maybe it's just failing to save the "advanced mode" option. So lame. It gives me the distinct impression that nobody on the development team gives a shit.
oijaf888 13y ago
Are all the codecs that VLC ships with freely redistributable? I was under the impression that many required licensing agreements even to distribute for free which impedes open source projects without a corporate backing from doing so.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  AFAIK, they're not, which is one of the reasons that newer versions of VLC have problems playing videos which play fine on older versions -- because the license-requiring codecs have been removed, and only sometimes replaced by free codecs or workarounds.
w1ntermute 13y ago
> And unlike mplayer, mplayer2, wmp, and most other players out there, you don't have to goto some random website and download some random codec pack, and install it with who knows what malware.</FUD> All the codecs are included with the program. You're absolutely right to tag that as FUD, because I have never had to download "random codecs" from "random codec packs" in order to get videos to play in MPlayer on Linux (I don't know how it is on Windows).
- pkj 13y ago
  >never had to download "random codecs" from "random codec packs" Second that. I have had videos which couldn't be played on VLC (codecs or missing frames) play nicely with mplayer. Easily the best versatile player, especially if you are conversant with the command line options ( or take a quick look at man page).
  - userulluipeste 13y ago
    At least some time ago, for Windows there was a (main) installer that included the player and the most used codecs, and there also was available an additional package with the uncommon codecs. This is what I've got after a quick search: http://data.netfast.org/downloadse.html http://data.netfast.org/downloadse.html
- stephengillie 13y ago
  mplayer and mplayer2 use the Windows codec libraries. Playing a video usually means having to learn about codec packs like ffdshow from Google searches and random internet forums, and then finding the legitimate website for the codec pack (not a linkspam site or a rehosting company like cnet who bundle Ask toolbar into the installer), then locating and downloading the codec pack on the (sometimes intentionally) badly designed website, and giving it blanket permission to alter files on your hdd. I don't want this to become a fanboy flamewar, but the above process is time consuming, technically difficult & also requires a broad and complex network of social trusts. Whereas VLC "just works", well at least the older versions. --- I don't know where my responses would lead a media player developer. I don't like licensed codecs, but I understand that encoding groups will use the codecs which work best; illegally if necessary since encoding tv & movies for free downloading are all still legal and moral grey-areas. And I know people want to be paid for their art which others have demand for. And free media player developers don't want to pay to license codecs when they gain no benefit over just supporting whatever codec libraries the OS has installed.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bloopletech 13y ago
Does VLC 1.1.5 support HI10P (10-bit H.264 video)? That would be one reason to upgrade, as many anime releases now use HI10P (http://wiki.bakabt.me/index.php/Hi10P http://wiki.bakabt.me/index.php/Hi10P).

SimHacker 13y ago

VLC may play lot of videos, but it has the most systematically terrible user interface of any program I have ever seen. Just absolutely horrible, on a level that could not possibly just the results of ignorance and carelessness, but it actually seems to optimized to actively fuck the user on purpose.

ciupicri 13y ago
What's so horrible about it? It looks like most media players. The playlist could use some love, but if you're only playing a single (long) video at a time it doesn't matter to much.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  The playlist actually has a lot of options which are randomly buried in the settings. You can change settings so double-clicking a video file just adds it to the end of the playlist. Or you can make every new video open in its own new player. Like I said, feature creep is one of VLC's biggest problems.
  - SimHacker 13y ago
    Some but not all of the changes I make to the configuration (like key bindings in particular) don't take effect until I restart VLC. What the fuck??? http://forums.logitech.com/t5/G-Series-Gaming-Keyboards/G19-media-keys-not-working-with-VLC/td-p/602628 http://forums.logitech.com/t5/G-Series-Gaming-Keyboards/G19-... "In VLC, as of 1.1.11, you have to go to interface, preferences, hotkeys, and doubleclick the GLOBAL hotkey you need to set. Press the media key on the keyboard, and it'll return but will act like nothing changed. Click "Apply" and it should show you the media key identification of the key you pressed. Once you have setup all your keys, save, and completely exit and restart VLC." For me, on both Mac and Windows, VLC key bindings fail to take effect until I restart it (any key bindings, not just global media hotkeys), and many options simply don't get saved at all. I have to hand edit the configuration text file. Ridiculous. http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=91154 http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=91154 "Saving can fail. And sometimes it can even output corrupted file." http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=13340 http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=13340 "As for saving, make sure you click 'Save' on the options dialog. OK applies them without saving, while Save applies and saves them." Yes I am pressing the "Save" button. There is no "OK" button, and if there was both an OK and a Save button, that would still be a terrible user interface design. Basic simple things like that just don't work. Maybe my preferences file keeps getting corrupted, but that should NOT happen, ever. At least it should give me an error message instead of just silently losing. Shameful. Then there's the way it decides to resize the playlist window really big for no reason at all. Why can't the playlist window just stay the same size? It crashes all the time, and then when I restart it, it ALWAYS asks if I want to report the last crash to the development team. No I don't, and I also don't want it to ask me that every fucking time. I just want it to shut the fuck up and play a video. Of course there is no option I can find to turn off that annoying modal pop-up dialog. A not-terribly-designed user interface would have a checkbox on the annoying modal dialog that says "Never ask me this ever again", and I wouldn't have to go through an unsuccessful wild goose chase through the millions of advanced options searching for a way to turn that dialog off. The simple preference user interface has checkbox options to disable video and audio. What's the point of that? In fact, those are the first options in the video and audio sections! Who would ever want to disable video or audio in a video player? You already have a volume and mute control, and you can disable video and audio tracks from the menus. So why is that the first option in the simple preferences user interface? Was there a huge demand from novice users for that option? Terrible user interface design. There are many other things about the UI design that are extremely annoying, a lot having to do with the out of control feature creep and totally uncoordinated committee design. All those advanced options, yet there is no way to set it to always show advanced options every time. Isn't it ironic that it has millions of options, but no option to always show the millions of options by default? Or maybe it's just failing to save the "advanced mode" option. So lame. It gives me the distinct impression that nobody on the development team gives a shit.

oijaf888 13y ago

Are all the codecs that VLC ships with freely redistributable? I was under the impression that many required licensing agreements even to distribute for free which impedes open source projects without a corporate backing from doing so.

stephengillie 13y ago
AFAIK, they're not, which is one of the reasons that newer versions of VLC have problems playing videos which play fine on older versions -- because the license-requiring codecs have been removed, and only sometimes replaced by free codecs or workarounds.

w1ntermute 13y ago

> And unlike mplayer, mplayer2, wmp, and most other players out there, you don't have to goto some random website and download some random codec pack, and install it with who knows what malware.</FUD> All the codecs are included with the program. You're absolutely right to tag that as FUD, because I have never had to download "random codecs" from "random codec packs" in order to get videos to play in MPlayer on Linux (I don't know how it is on Windows).

pkj 13y ago
>never had to download "random codecs" from "random codec packs" Second that. I have had videos which couldn't be played on VLC (codecs or missing frames) play nicely with mplayer. Easily the best versatile player, especially if you are conversant with the command line options ( or take a quick look at man page).
- userulluipeste 13y ago
  At least some time ago, for Windows there was a (main) installer that included the player and the most used codecs, and there also was available an additional package with the uncommon codecs. This is what I've got after a quick search: http://data.netfast.org/downloadse.html http://data.netfast.org/downloadse.html
stephengillie 13y ago
mplayer and mplayer2 use the Windows codec libraries. Playing a video usually means having to learn about codec packs like ffdshow from Google searches and random internet forums, and then finding the legitimate website for the codec pack (not a linkspam site or a rehosting company like cnet who bundle Ask toolbar into the installer), then locating and downloading the codec pack on the (sometimes intentionally) badly designed website, and giving it blanket permission to alter files on your hdd. I don't want this to become a fanboy flamewar, but the above process is time consuming, technically difficult & also requires a broad and complex network of social trusts. Whereas VLC "just works", well at least the older versions. --- I don't know where my responses would lead a media player developer. I don't like licensed codecs, but I understand that encoding groups will use the codecs which work best; illegally if necessary since encoding tv & movies for free downloading are all still legal and moral grey-areas. And I know people want to be paid for their art which others have demand for. And free media player developers don't want to pay to license codecs when they gain no benefit over just supporting whatever codec libraries the OS has installed.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bloopletech 13y ago

Does VLC 1.1.5 support HI10P (10-bit H.264 video)? That would be one reason to upgrade, as many anime releases now use HI10P (http://wiki.bakabt.me/index.php/Hi10P http://wiki.bakabt.me/index.php/Hi10P).