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?
VLC is one of the greatest achievements of the modern era imho (along with Linux, Wikipedia, etc).
A good dev who didn't sell out, fully FOSS, always up-to-date before-the-date, no nonsense or bloatware, no UI changes every month to get more engagement, etc.
This is how all products of humanity with our level of tech should be like (even non-software).
Plus it puts on a Santa hat around Christmas.
good cross platforms too.
I've used it from win, osx, linux, android.
It just finds the DLNA and CIFS shares from my nas so naturally in the library - better than thunar.
I just wish my "smart" TV had it.
The 4.0 version will make drastic changes to the UI ):
I am quite worried about that direction design.... Feels like a departure of the sleek video player that we all know and love.
Great thing is that since it's open source someone can just fork the project and continue development in a different direction.
It would be easy enough to put a toggle in the settings for a 'classic' mode. I can see him doing that.
Doesn't look bad tbh. Though I don't use VLC too often.
Yeah, I know, and the new streaming formats technically supporting ads ... What can I say - the world is a fuck & we must manage (or not manage, I'm not your boss, Im barely my boss).
We don't deserve our open source heroes, so grateful for the incredible free software ecosystem
Gimp, 7zip, blender, vlc, open office, the kernel, thousands of others, I feel like our lives have been universally improved by these inverted charity projects. The few taking care of the undeserving many.
I've actually moved away from vlc. It's had some weird issues with videos that MPV doesn't have. Plus, MPV has a much simpler interface which I like. I've also learned how to use ffmpeg to convert media so I don't need that functionality from vlc anymore.
It's still a great program though, especially for windows where there's not many better options.
Same here 👋 still i'm a bit sad I had to move on from VLC... It was always one of the first software I would install on my setup... But that was mostly on windows.
On linux/macos, MVP seems to work way better. I'm very thankfull for all these years of service, but everything has an end and like ICQ ended recently, VLC will probably die off in a few years...
Except if they make a come back? Who knows !
I still have some videos that mpv cannot play that VLC can. Also some esoteric audio formats like SPC, only work in VLC.
VLC is the best media player, but the Linux kernel is the “supreme of all open source projects”.
Linux contains (edit) proprietary (/e) binary blobs. Not sure if that disqualifies it for being supreme of "open source projects" but if the question was about "free software projects" I am certain it would.
My only comment is I was surprised my work - which uses Windows and has closed source software exclusively - has VLC installed on all workstations and even as the default media player as well. It's a testament to how ubiquitous and approachable VLC is to be included in such a fashion over just Windows Media Player or some other form.
I mostly use mpv nowadays, but I used VLC a lot years ago. Played pretty much everything.
Let's face it, if you install Linux (or even Windows!) for your mom, you put VLC in there.
Yes, some other tools are better at some things, but VLC is the perfect choice for the "standard" user.
I think the best player is mpv because it supports real-time anime upscaling with plugins
Like AI?
I think it's more like shaders with sharpness that don't look bad
Can you elaborate?
There are software and instructions
VLC has pretty mediocre rendering, it stutters a lot even on a fast PC, or renders with grey artifacts. MPV is open source, renders much clearer and faster and can be used as the backend for any simple or advanced GUI video player.
That said, VLC was great back in the early 2000's, when it and it alone could open basically any media file and file containing media including mkv. Nowadays every video player does that.
VLC for the everyday person, all the way until you get to enthusiast class, then you use MPV.
Shortcuts, lightweight, CLI etc..
There is a CLI for VLC... just sayin'...
mpv on desktop, all the way
vlc on phone, all the way
There is a CLI for VLC... just sayin'...
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.
It very much needs to update its interface.
I've been waiting for a Dark Mode for VLC for over a decade. It's absurd. Yes I know some skins sorta do that, but they all suck because they change everything around and remove buttons and options instead of just making the default UI darker.
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 didn't expect to click on a VLC appreciation thread agreeing that it's awesome only to end up maybe switching to MPV based on the comments, but such is life I guess.
I will remember it just like I will remember winamp, as one of the greats of its time.
I sometimes got performance issues or corrupted frames, so I mostly use mpv. It sometimes fails for some files so I need to switch to VLC to handle them.
My only complaint about VLC is that it consistently drops the first few seconds of audio anytime I start playing a new file...
I was wondering where that issue came from
Ffmpeg guys, ffmpeg first king... And VLC golden second.
gstreamer lads, gstreamer is the god of all media pipelines
the thing can read fucking SNES soundtrack files out of the box. i’m sure it could run a marathon if you asked it to
It flawlessly plays me 1080p videos on my 8 year old smart phone with a 480p screen. It is the most performative app I have.
Also plays Amiga .mod files.
The supreme of all open source projects would be something like Linux, curl, or SQLite.
Video player? Absolutely. However, it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to music. I use Strawberry for music, personally, as I like the added metadata features it offers.
Last time I tried VLC, it didn't have the ability to play music without a gap between tracks and that was a deal breaker for me.
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.
mpv+uosc is my jam these days.
Fully agree. Don't forget to support our open source heros every know and then (if you can ofc).
I had one big problem with VLC, in that it could not figure out which of my monitors I wanted the video to run fullscreen on. That was infuriating to the point I switched to MPV, and I'm very happy with it
MPC-HC + Madvr is a lot nicer, VLC for mixed other videos though.
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.
Only some truly superior software can afford a GUI that's >10 years outdated :)
I tried using it years ago but I didn't like the interface so I ended up switch back to media player classic
I've ran into a few issues with VLC. That being said, I'd probably only ever replace VLC with WinAmp.
Never liked vlc. Only used mpv and mplayer before that. A few times I had some problems with mpv and forumposts have insisted "just use vlc", and it never helped. First time I installed it for such troubleshooting I noticed there was no manual, just a mile long help print. I just uninstalled it right there, that time.
it's a mediocre media player, i don't really use it anymore. blender, Linux, ffmpeg, gcc, llvm, V8, cpython are all far more important just to name a few
I have always had minor issues with VLC with video playback when seeking or playing certain videos that mpv has never, ever, ever had. mpv just works.
VLC is a nice piece of software but it's just never beaten mpv for me.
It's a great player, but I prefer smplayer on the desktop and the default player on android. Somehow the interface is a bit clunky
What 'default' Android player? I use VLC on Android because everything else would lag when seeking to other parts of the video.
The one in the image gallery app that comes preinstalled with the phone. On my current one it's an app by Google, on the one before it was some app by Sony.
VLC ships their own codecs which is great on Windows, but a bit suboptimal on a typical Linux desktop installation since you're probably going to have GStreamer or ffmpeg available too for the rest of the software like video editors, web browsers, etc
VLC just uses ffmpeg...
FFmpeg (libavcodec) is just one of 22 codecs that VLC is shipped with
Click to continue where you left off.
Resizes window.
Moves button off screen.
3 seconds to hit that button or you lose your place.
I prefer mplayer—novel-length man page and all—for video, but there's nothing innately wrong with VLC. I did try it, a very long time ago, but it felt too GUI-oriented for my taste back then.
(I can think of exactly two times mplayer has failled to play a file I presented it with, and in both cases it was my own fault for not compiling in support for that codec. However, the man page is justifiably frightening.)
And to top it all off, release codenames are Discworld references!
I have the iOS app and it cannot play my MP4 files from my phone. I don’t know what to do.
Try switch to software rendering. That, or weep, for if VLC fails you then nothing in this world will ever be right again.
Winamp, I don't need you anymore.