It plays any media file you throw at it out of the box and doesn't require any codec packs installed. On top of that, it has a ton of other features including network support. Simple as that.
I also believed this until I got a family support case a couple of weeks ago.
I learned that if the bitrate is too high for the PC to handle vlc badly fails. (This was a fanless Intel PC, so the CPU is very much low end despite not being particularly old.) Of course I would not expect vlc to do any miracles here, but at least I would expect an error message explaining the problem. ffmpeg gives me warnings all the time if buffers are too small etc. In vlc I'd expect it a bit less cryptic...
Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know. Just decoding I-frames would be the most naive approach, but probably also a not lead to very much usable results.
Actually the family member found one solution themselves: Play it at reduced speed. VLC could have figured out that automatically. (And of course give a clear message to the user why it does that.)
> Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know.
It isn't really. It's possible if the video has B-frames but it's hard to predict how much dropping will cause how much recovery, and if you drop almost anything else the possible error is unbounded.
I also believed this until I got a family support case a couple of weeks ago.
I learned that if the bitrate is too high for the PC to handle vlc badly fails. (This was a fanless Intel PC, so the CPU is very much low end despite not being particularly old.) Of course I would not expect vlc to do any miracles here, but at least I would expect an error message explaining the problem. ffmpeg gives me warnings all the time if buffers are too small etc. In vlc I'd expect it a bit less cryptic...
Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know. Just decoding I-frames would be the most naive approach, but probably also a not lead to very much usable results.
Actually the family member found one solution themselves: Play it at reduced speed. VLC could have figured out that automatically. (And of course give a clear message to the user why it does that.)