Playing an unsupported file

Image Alt Text: "After downloading a 2.5GB movie

Me: Presses play Movie unsupported file" A person is shown with eyes on her laptop punching the wall beside her, causing it to crack.

If vlc cant open it you have found something truly odd

The file extension is exe, am I doing something wrong?

Have you tried installing it as system admin? Make sure to check all boxes and click next as well.

It’s a scam don’t follow the instructions.

If you can’t find a different release there aren’t any legnimate releases of that title.

Nice of you for being concerned and telling. But it‘s a joke.

Yes. That’s terribly unsafe of you. Use a Mac and only open up video files with a .app file extension, silly!

I honestly can’t remember the last time I couldn’t open a video file.

Happened to me a few months ago. Had a ticket for our District Attorney office, trying to playback a security camera footage from a parking lot or something. It would open, but, the person that was supposed to be seen would show up for a few frames and glitch out.

Turns out the cam system it came from uses some very proprietary codec. So the footage was effectively useless without their special sauce player/codec

Sounds infuriating. I would have assumed most of these use h.264 because of how ubiquitous it is.

I am guessing this is by design so when you really need it, you’ll use their software and need to pay to use it?

I can! Happened all the time 20 years ago. Since then, no.

I’m working in live video and there’s a lot of proprietary codecs out there that vlc doesn’t play by default. Most of those are lossless/very high bitrate lossy formats designed to be encoded and decoded quickly for things like instant replays, so not something the average consumer would get their hands on.

My smart tv refuses to work with .mkv so it happens regularly for me.

All my homies use mpv

I always use VLC so I thought the meme was that it was one of those fake “codec not supported, go to this sketchy website” videos

Yeah, if VLC can’t do it, I’d bet my money nothing can

I’ve only had this problem playing the video on TV directly. Like smart TV. Can I put VLC on there?

I use jellyfin to do transcoding, but very occasionally it exhibits issues still.

Something I don’t see a lot of people do but totally should is get a really long HDMI cable and snake it around the room. You can then hook up a laptop or hell even your desktop directly to the TV. Think my cable is around 20 feet and I got it off Amazon for dirt cheap. Works wonders when I want to watch something on Plex (a lot of smart TV’s have trouble with Plex)

I took a little ASROCK DeskMini and put a 5700G in it to serve as a media and light gaming station. My family uses it more than I do now.

You could easily do this with a pi 5 or pi variant for cheap.

If you’re going to go that far, it probably has to be an “active” HDMI cable.

This! 10meter hdmi cable came in really handy in my last apartment for connecting pc to tv while having the cable completely hidden all thr time. Now I would need like 20m cable and I would have to drill it trough walls. Just laptop and chromecast now. It’s a bit sad that I cant just open any game on my tv without carrying the pc from another room

My gaming PC sits on the other side of the wall of my living room. I’ve got HDMI and USB going right through the wall. Wireless keyboard and mouse on the coffee table. It’s worked great for years, and for couch gaming I generally use a Steam Controller or DS4 in Bluetooth mode.

My living room TV is smart but I don’t use any of those features and keep it disconnected from a network.

If it’s Android tv then yes, there is a VLC version for that.

lol indeed. Love VLC on my AppleTV. Plays stuff the native app from my NAS won’t play.

I recently downloaded some YouTube videos that my dad wanted to play through USB with his Android based projector, as it doesn’t have the PlayStore and the videos didn’t want to play (and I knew they worked fine on my mac) I went quickly to its store just to find out VLC wasn’t there, and I didn’t have time to sideload stuff (I didn’t even know if it was possible), hopefully there was FX File Explorer and that one comes with a video player which was able to save the day.

Beat me to it. I haven’t had an unsupported file error in the decade I’ve been using VLC. Maybe one time I had to download something to support a rare file type

I remember a phase in my childhood where I could only get Realplayer to open some series of anime that I was into at the time that I had downloaded.

VLC doesn’t play 4k files properly though

Potplayer ftw

Uninstall that shit and use VLC

And if you want to play on a TV that doesn’t support the format, convert it with FFMpeg.

I’ve had good experience using mkvtoolnix to mux video into an mkv with subtitles included. Not sure if mkv support is widespread, but as janky as the TV was with other formats, mkv worked great every time.

MPC-HC also a very good choice

Installing MPC-HC during K-Lite Code pack as my primary media player has taken place of VLC for me this last year. I have been using VLC as music player only with some Winamp-like no-viewport UI lately.

Been using both MPC-HC and VLC for years now. Between the two of them there is no file that you cannot play.

Been using k-lite codec pack since the Kazaa days, very good stuff. MPC-HC with madVR looks excellent.

this is the correct answer

VLC could play a polaroid image of the Voyager records.

VLC works most of the time. That said some videos VLC can’t seem to decode correctly - I never get VLC complaining about unsupported file formats, but I do get weird artifacts and glitched rendering when I try to play certain ones.

It’s then that I usually try MPV or MPlayer. One of those will usually play the video correctly.