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VLC Player

VLC is the supreme of all open source projects, you used it in school, college, work and home.

I used it since I was a child and it has never failed on me. It didn't matter what type of file you chucked at it, it would run it.

Do you disagree or agree with VLC being the best media player? What are your thoughts?

91 comments
  • I mostly use mpv nowadays, but I used VLC a lot years ago. Played pretty much everything.

  • We all have Jean-Baptiste Kempf, and many other brilliant volunteer developers to thank for it

  • As a friend of mine said some years ago "VLC will play a slice of cucumber" that pretty much sums it up.

  • I used to use it, but then I switched to MPV, as it works a lot better with hardware acceleration. MPV supports more methods for hardware decoding (e.g. nvdec), and also MPV will keep the frames in VRAM when doing hardware decoding, and do additional processing and presentation using the GPU, while VLC copies everything back to system RAM and processes the frame on the CPU.

    At the time I switched hardware decoding with copy-back would actually result in twice the CPU usage compared to software decoding, but that was a long time ago. Also, I would get tearing in VLC and not in MPV.

  • VLC's file format support is amazing for a project that rolls its own codecs, etc, but it's missing some important features for me on the music front, primarily gapless playback and library management. I generally prefer to use software tailored to my DE. I've yet to find a better video player anywhere though; GNOME Videos and Kaffeine come closest and are a little easier to use, but are still far away from VLC's capabilities.

    • Offtopic, but what do you use for music?

      • Currently Elisa for my digital music library, and for individual files I prefer to use VLC. I've had good experiences with Strawberry Music Player (and its predecessor, Clementine), too, and am thinking of switching back to it. And when I was a GNOME user, I preferred Lollipop.

      • Just wanna jump in here and recommend Quodlibet. It handles tags very well.

  • I feel like it was great 10 years ago but now it's just... kind of bloated and super buggy, and not even that compatible anymore? It's like its only quality was it would play just about anything you throw at it, but even then there's stuff I have to open in MPV because VLC just doesn't play them.

  • There's been a bug with .flac files for quite a while now. They haven't fixed it. Audio just stops very briefly then continues.

    • That's the reason I used the VLC alpha for a long time, it's fixed there.

      Moved away from VLC for music playback since then.

  • Is has no Wayland support, doesnt support the very well packaged Flatpak officially, and it is kinda big.

    I prefer MPV now, using Celluloid and tried Haruna.

  • I tried using it years ago but I didn't like the interface so I ended up switch back to media player classic

91 comments