Whats your favorite free open source software that everyone should try?

Sigmatank@midwest.social to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 420 points –

Lemmy seems like the right place to ask this. Personally I've really enjoyed Gurgle, which is a FOSS Wordle clone app.

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mpv has superior playback quality to VLC in my opinion.

I’ve also find mpv about a thousand times faster to start up.

Aren't they both based on ffmpeg? Surely any quality difference is just a configuration issue?

Yes. If I remember correctly VLC was originally configured (maybe still is) to network streams and prioritize no lag. That's why you get weird artifacts in VLC sometimes that's not present in mpv.

I use celluloid, because I absolutely hate the mpv interface. Seriously, how unexplorable and unintuitive can you make it?

It's driven by keyboard shortcuts

Yes, that is deeply connected with being unexplorable.

Celluloid is also keyboard driven. But in celluloid there are clearly marked buttons for the most used functions and I can open the menu to check the keyboard shortcuts. Not so in mpv.

For what it's worth, I think celluloid is a thin wrapper around mpv with the only purpose to provide a better UI. And I'm very thankful for and happy with that.

I really like the idea of Celluloid. However, last time I tried, it somehow felt less performant than pure mpv. Colors a bit washed out and not perfectly smooth playback. Should try it again soon.

Yeah, it does have some hickups when playing a movie from my HDD. I think it doesn't prefetch enough data, because I didn't have any issues after copying the movie to a tmpfs.

I still use it over mpv, because I truly cannot stand mpvs UX. But a valid point.

I used to feel the same way, but the interface is actually super customizable if you are ok with editing config files!

Here is the manual.

There is also a huge variety of third party scripts, like this one shows thumbnail previews when hovering over the seek bar.

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