VLC Player

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).

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.

VLC is the best media player, but the Linux kernel is the “supreme of all open source projects”.

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.

VLC for the everyday person, all the way until you get to enthusiast class, then you use MPV.

Shortcuts, lightweight, CLI etc..

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.

I think the best player is mpv because it supports real-time anime upscaling with plugins

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

It very much needs to update its interface.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

My only complaint about VLC is that it consistently drops the first few seconds of audio anytime I start playing a new file...

Ffmpeg guys, ffmpeg first king... And VLC golden second.

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

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.

Fully agree. Don't forget to support our open source heros every know and then (if you can ofc).

The supreme of all open source projects would be something like Linux, curl, or SQLite.

mpv+uosc is my jam these days.

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

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.

MPC-HC + Madvr is a lot nicer, VLC for mixed other videos though.

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

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.

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 great player, but I prefer smplayer on the desktop and the default player on android. Somehow the interface is a bit clunky

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.

Winamp, I don't need you anymore.

I have the iOS app and it cannot play my MP4 files from my phone. I don’t know what to do.

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.)

Click to continue where you left off.

Resizes window.

Moves button off screen.

3 seconds to hit that button or you lose your place.

And to top it all off, release codenames are Discworld references!

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

It is technically illegal in most places due to copyright