[happytoexplain]

I'm always amazed when I see how many people are unfamiliar with VLC hate. It was notorious (to the point of it being a popular meme topic) for video artifacts, slow/buggy seeking, bloated/clumsy UI/menus, having very little format support out of the box, and buggy subtitles. I assume nowadays it's much better, since it seems popular, but its reputation will stick with me forever.

[gruez]

>It was notorious (to the point of it being a popular meme topic) for [...] having very little format support out of the box

???

I thought the meme was that it played basically everything? At least compared to windows media player or whatever.

The other items I can't say I've noticed, but then again I only play the most common of files (eg. h.264/h.265 with english subtitles in a mkv) so maybe it's something that only happens with unusual formats/encodes.

edit: based on other comments (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465349), it looks like it might indeed be caused by uncommon files that I haven't encountered.

[littlestymaar]

> I thought the meme was that it played basically everything? At least compared to windows media player or whatever.

Yes, that was in the 2000s though. During the 2010 VLC started falling behind because its shortcomings overweighted its capabilities.

[morshu9001]

Pretty sure VLC can play /dev/urandom

[dooglius]

What year was this? I don't know there has ever been a normal format it doesn't support, and I think this has been the case for at least 15 years.

[dotancohen]

Up until just last month I had never had a problem with VLC. But I don't pirate content so maybe I just hadn't encountered the problematic files. However, recording voice notes in Opus format on my phone, it turns out that VLC has a bug playing Opus files at certain bit rates. However for me this is easily worked around by just using MPV.

[u_sama]

I dropped VLC circa 2019 for all the reasons mentioned and ever since I use exclusively MPV, both on Windows and Linux.

So at least from those times

[mywittyname]

The only current VLC issue I encounter regularly is the subtitles one. I'm a lite video user, so I'm not sure the technical details, but some subtitle formats render black-on-black in VLC, but work fine on Plex/TV.

I've also encountered the odd "this video is corrupted" error that persists even after re-encoding. But I've never thought to troubleshoot to see if it's a VLC, and instead just get a different version.

[jlarocco]

I've never had problems with VLC, and I've used it off and on for 20 years.

I don't doubt that there's some obscure, elite videophile hate towards it, but I'm hardly going to stop using it because a few random internet strangers hate on it.

[perching_aix]

Kinda the problem with anecdotes isn't it? :)

My own anecdotal experience with VLC was that while every update fixed something, they also broke something in return - and these updates were common. This got annoying enough at some point for me to hop ships, and so I switched to mpc-hc and never looked back.

I've since also tried (and keep trying) the to-me still newfangled mpv, but I'm not a fan of the GUI or the keybinds. I know it can be customized, but that's not something I'm interested in doing. I know there are alternative frontends as well, but I checked and they're not to my liking either. So I mostly just use it for when mpc-hc gives out, such as really badly broken media files, or anything HDR.

[aiahs]

Out of pure curiosity, what kind of things were you VLC using for, for it to break so often? I'm almost never doing anything with video, so I'm completely clueless in this field.

[perching_aix]

I don't recall my issues being media file or workload specific [0]. It was specifically just general frontend stuff I believe [1]. Although I should probably also mention that I don't remember much to begin with, other than my decidedly negative conclusion that made me switch players, and the overall personal narrative around that. It's been quite a few years if not a whole decade.

[0] Doesn't mean there weren't any, but then I was not doing anything special. Just watched anime, listened to music, streamed YouTube. Hardly an extraordinary workload for VLC, or indeed any media player in general.

[1] I remember them changing around the volume slider widget back and forth ad nauseam for example, and that becoming in some particular way defective that I cannot recall.

[aiahs]

Thanks for the reply, yeah that's interesting, I remember also having issues with VLC as a kid (I'm in my late 20's now), but I always chalked it up to me being a noob and not knowledgeable, I wonder retrospectively how much of that were actual me-issues and how much VLC-issues. Recently one of my parents wanted to play a DVD via VLC which did not work, where the issues ultimately was missing DVD libraries which apparently can't be shipped in Ubuntu due to licensing issues (libdvdcss). 12 year old me wouls not be able to debug this issue to be honest.

[jlarocco]

And you think everybody else should stop using it because you had problems?

I'll make up my own mind on it.

[perching_aix]

Do you think everyone else should start or continue using it because you never had problems?

Let's be kind. Clearly not what either of us were thinking or intended to convey.

[knowitnone3]

You should make up your own mind. why bother reading comments at all? why bother reading reviews? I bet you watch every movie and never comment on how good or bad they are because you'll be telling everybody else what to do and that would be hypocritical. I wonder how you stumbled upon VLC in the first place - perhaps you read about it somewhere and followed that advice?

[gpvos]

Where did perching_aix say that?

[BitsAndObjects]

For a long time it was the only graphical user-friendly option for non-technical Windows users that had decent support for a wide range of formats. I don’t know about its early years, but friends, family and I have been using it for a good 15+ years without encountering the issues folks are describing in these comments.

It seems there’s a lot of open-source lovers that haven’t also accepted that bugs can get fixed, projects can improve, etc. They’d rather treat a project as though it was stuck at version 0 from 20 something years ago. Deeply ironic.

[miladyincontrol]

Agree. Never mind how far they were behind on the more power user options like scaling, dealing with mismatches in video framerate and monitor refresh rate, etc.

Havent used it in ages, but a decade ago it felt a joke for all the video artifacts and subtitle glitches.

The one part that does get me some about people who blindly still praise it as THE video player at least outside of more technically inclined spaces like this, is so many people assume it exists as some monolith. Clearly library free, entirely the original work of VideoLAN, gracious they be that they give it all away for free.

[mtVessel]

| I assume nowadays it's much better...

It's not, but the Linux weenies won't hear of it. Maybe it's a great choice on Linux, but on Windows, it often renders things much worse than stock WMP (both legacy and modern). Videos with a lot of motion play especially poorly.

But, yeah, it opens everything.

[gpvos]

Do you have sources for that? As far as I know VLC has actually always been famous for supporting basically every format.

[astrange]

ffmpeg supports every format. ffmpeg wrappers don't need add much value in order to also do this.

(Lots of corner cases apply and VLC developers do assist ffmpeg, host a conference, etc.)