Comment by EdNutting
4 hours ago
Interesting read, it’s a shame the ranty format makes it 3x longer than necessary.
Not sure why it takes a dump on VLC - it’s been the most stable and friendly video player for Windows for a long time (it matters that ordinary users, like school teachers, can use it without special training. I don’t care how ideological you are about Linux or video players or whatever lol).
I don't believe it's the case anymore, but it was very common for VLC to cause video corruption (see [1] for example of what it looked like) in the past, the hate just stuck around and I don't think it's ever going away.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/glitch_art/comments/144vjl/vlc_star...
13 years since that post and this is the first time I’m hearing of this long-past issue.
Haters gonna hate I guess.
It has never been very common for VLC to cause video corruption.
VLC works great on Linux too! It's one of the few programs where I expect the exact same look and feel regardless of the underlying OS.
mpv is okay but its complete reliance on command line flags and manually written config files makes it a bore.
> where I expect the exact same look and feel regardless of the underlying OS
Slightly ironic, as I think a new UI is underway (and coming soon?). Not sure what version it's planned for, but I think some beta has it enabled by default already, was surprised when I saw it. So the consistent UI is here today, and will be in the future, but there will be a slice of time where different users will run different versions where some switched to the new UI, and some haven't. But it'll hopefully be a brief period, and of course it's still cross-platform :)
VLC is pretty much one of the default things I download on any of my computers. Right now I use mac and it's my default video player here too!
He's talking about using VLC for transcoding or encoding, where the functionality has lots of issues and is kind of bolted on the side. VLC for playing is totally fine.
In the anime fan subbing community (which this document is likely from), it's very common to hate on VLC for a variety of imagined (and occasionally real but marginal) issues.
Why is that?
At least for the real part there was the great 10-bit encoding "switch off" at around 2012 where it seemed like the whole anime encoding scene decided to move into encoding just about everything with "10-bit h264" in order to preserve more detail at the same bitrate. VLC didn't have support for it and for a long time (+5 years?) it remained without proper support for that. Every time you tried playing such files they would exhibit corruption at some interval. It was like watching a scrambled cable channel with brief moments of respite.
The kicker is that many, many other players broke. Very few hardware decoders could deal with this format, so it was fairly common to get dropped frames due to software decoding fallback even if your device or player could play it. And, about devices, if you were previously playing h264 anime stuff on your nice pre-smart tv, forget about doing so with the 10-bit stuff.
Years passed and most players could deal with 10-bit encoding, people bought newer devices that could hardware decode it and so on, but afaik VLC remained incompatible a while longer.
Eventually it all became mutt because the anime scene switched to h265...
Mostly that VLC has had noticeable issues with displaying some kinds of subtitles made with Advanced SubStation (especially ones taking up much of the frame, or that pan/zoom), which MPV-based players handle better.
If you want a MPV-based player GUI on macOS, https://github.com/iina/iina is quite good.
Follow-up comment: I love how the author’s one brief take-down shot at VLC is currently the dominant criticism in the HN comments (inc. mine). 10,000+ words and the entire lot is being questioned because of one dubious throwaway comment about VLC.
A lesson to learn in that.
Lol
There was an article[1] yesterday where a single poor word choice derailed much of the comment section with rat-holing and nitpicking until the author revised the article. HN's gotta HN.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46413256
It seems to me he’s talking about using it for re-encoding/conversion as part of your editing workflow and is not really talking about its media playback capabilities. In that sense he is very much correct.