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by pdimitar 1617 days ago
Just recently I finally got sick of the various defects VLC developed on macOS:

- Running videos off of my NAS routinely introduced audio lag even on very small videos (less than 1h long). My LAN and WAN are at 1GbE and my NAS uses ZFS with very adequate caching setup.

- Crashes 2-3 times a week. Pretty rare but annoying nonetheless because I usually leave one huge video to play for the entire day.

- On iOS and macOS it forgets the position of a video played very recently. That one is rather new, <6 months. Still not cool.

Eventfully enough was enough and I moved to MPV just two weeks ago. Rock-solid so far, never lags the audio, snappier animations, quick keys to jump between chapters -- it's all good stuff so far.

I heard a while ago that the VLC team is struggling with a huge rewrite. As a programmer I sympathize but as a user I can't excuse them. Few months of a rocky ride is fine but VLC definitely is not how I remember it from the past, during the last 2 or so years.

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Off-topic: can somebody recommend a tool that scans your videos and downloads metadata and posters for them? We're talking movies, shows, game playthroughs, music videos, and others.

5 comments

I use Subler [https://bitbucket.org/galad87/subler/wiki/Home] and when it confounds me I opt for MetaTV or MetaMovie [http://www.appfacture.com/en/]. I've also heard of iFlicks but never tried it [https://iflicks.app].
Thanks a bunch, much appreciated.
You're welcome!
The last time I used VLC to do some testings (on Windows), it doesn't even playback a typical video color range correct out of the box (TV range did not convert to PC range properly).

I haven't see such issue in any video players since OG MPC days.

After some quick googling I did find some solutions involving changing some video renderer settings manually, but IMO it's unacceptable for any media player on mainstream OS/hardware.

I do still respect VLC as an OSS project though, they made plenty of important contributions to the open-source A/V field.

Agreed, they've done a lot in the past and they have my respect. It's saddening that they're struggling nowadays and are dropping the ball. :(
100% with you, VLC on Mac is unusable and often won't even play things when I open them anymore - black screen, audio only, corrupt looking, I thought my media had the bits flipped or that something horrible had happened.

I use IINA now (linked elsewhere in this thread) and it's amazing, the rest of the internet seems to have found out about it years ago.

1. Kodi for an open everythin-included solution

2. Plex for a proprietary solution with good integration and remote access

3. tinyMediaManager for a minimal viable product solving your needs

Thanks a lot, didn't know about `tinyMediaManager` and will check it out.
i use metaX for my movie and show database, game playthroughs and others might need different tools
There's a more up to date fork: MetaZ [https://metaz.maven-group.org]. Which claims to be 'Two letters better than MetaX'. heh ;-)
Thank you! Will check it out.