I moved away from VLC because of the somewhat boring UI. Then I used potplayer, then I discovered MPV - which is awesome because it’s so performant you can easily customize it.
But I think VLC helped pioneer the library that allows decoding and playing videos without the mess that were video codec drivers on desktop.
If I try to play 3 random videos in VLC, they all three will play perfectly. If I try those same three on anything else, at least one of them will be buggy in some way.
Yes you can argue there could be encoding problems in the video file of that buggy one, but somehow VLC just always works. Shit’s unbelievably good, so I won’t be switching.
I remember the first time I encountered the Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) media type which ultimately lead me to downloading VLC as it was the only player that could handle it at the time
Sadly i recently learned VLC doesn’t just always work.
About a year ago i had an issue with playing FLAC files on VLC, where there would be short periods of no audio. I had recently made some upgrades to my audio hardware, so i was looking at my new hardware/cables/config… but in the end i realized it always happened at the same point in the same files, so a software issue was more likely:
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/27696
Nice quote from this issue: VLC is broken since months Use their nightly version, it has a nice new interface too, and no bugs. I don’t get how they can keep a huge breaking bug like this in vlc from MONTHS.
And neither can i… until a year ago VLC was for me the pinnacle of “it just works”. Now after them leaving a bug causing audio playback issues into their stable version for months, they broke my trust in them… they’re probably still the best option out there, but now i’ll just say probably, not for sure, and there is room for improvement…
And if it were some obscure format, sure, but FLAC? …
but in the end i realized it always happened at the same point in the same files, so a software issue was more likely
Isn’t the logical conclusion here there’s an issue with the FLAC files instead of the player?
Well… I’d point you to this very nice blog post to help rationalize why it can take a long time.
Not a 4K movie.
edit: the only reason I switched from VLC to potplayer was because VLC couldn’t play my 2160p videos
Hmm I’ve definitely played many 4k videos in VLC. Don’t remember having any issues.
How many porn videos do you need to watch simultaneously?
spoiler
(for me it’s 4 but I might have to go up to 9)
MPC-HC and MPV both rock, but VLC will always stay on all my machines because any time I have a problem with a video file, VLC opens that shit no issue.
As of right now VLC also doesn’t properly support Wayland, but MPV does. It’s a great piece of software!
Agree on the sentiment about VLC though, having an open source project demonstrate what is possible and stand the test of time definitely paves the way for future work and improvements.
I still have PTSD from those codec-install-infested-times… God bless VLC and it’s Author / Creator!
Still mpv’s gpu-next video output driver is based on VLC’s libplacebo.
VLC is really slow to integrate their own development efforts though, VLC media player 4.0 has been in beta for years…
Dude should try adding some ads to the program to generate some income to spend on more dev time…
Why does the UI matter for a video player? It’s not like you’re looking at it when the video is playing. How odd. I’ve been using VLC for years, I like that it doesn’t change. It just cracks on and plays the video, which is what you want in a video player. Isn’t it?
It’s the Tunnock’s Teacake of apps.
I moved away from VLC because compared to MPC-HC, VLC was super slow. If only MPC-HC could come to Linux, that would be amazing.
MPC comes with those inexplicable keybindings, and it’s a hassle setting them, as far as I remember. Or it lacked some deal breaking customization option for me, some stuff is essential.
I got it mostly set up how I was used to. I’d be curious what you are missing?
