Comment by Etheryte
5 hours ago
Exactly, very hard to take the rest of it seriously after the VLC bit. VLC has literally never left me hanging, across I don't know how many decades. It's gonna take more than a trust me bro to challenge that.
5 hours ago
Exactly, very hard to take the rest of it seriously after the VLC bit. VLC has literally never left me hanging, across I don't know how many decades. It's gonna take more than a trust me bro to challenge that.
You're talking about VLC for video playback, TFA is taking about video editing.
VLC ignores a lot for it's outstanding video playback support, which is great if you want the playback too just work... But that's the player perspective, not the editing/encoding
While VLC is excellent at playing every format under the sun, it's not good at playing all those formats correctly. Off the top of my head:
- Transfer functions are just generally a mess but are close enough that most people don't notice they're wrong. Changing the render engine option will often change how the video looks.
- Some DV profiles cause videos to turn purple or green.
- h.264 left and right crops are both applied as left crops that are summed together which completely breaks many videos. They could just ignore this metadata but from what I've heard their attitude is that a broken implementation is better than no implementation.
The author did mention to use MPV, which is much much lightweight than VLC. Being using it as default for quite some times now.
what are you talking about? Of course it's only about playback just like the other 2 alternatives
> single best media player out there ... VLC is not recommended.
Literally the first sentence
> Hanging out in subtitling and video re-editing communities, I see my fair share of novice video editors and video encoders, and see plenty of them make the classic beginner mistakes when it comes to working with videos.
Seriously, you quoted pretty much the only sentence in the whole article that's about plain playback, and even in that bullet point, the following sentence mentions hardcoding subtitles.
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VLC has always caused problems for me when seeking backwards (graphical glitches). mpv has never caused any issues in this regard.
VLC and mpv literally use the same underlying codec library. (As well as ffmpeg.)
VLC is great for playing stuff back, but can produce some horribly incorrect video files especially if you're dealing with stuff for editing.
There's a reason why VLC isn't used in broadcast stuff and ffmpeg is.
IIRC VLC used the wrong primaries for converting to RGB for a long time (years) even after it being reported to them as wrong
>even after it being reported to them as wrong
Source?
I'm not the OP of the claim (and I love VLC) but maybe they're referring to this early 2018 issue: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/19723 which seems to be being actively worked on.
There's also https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/25651 but that's an off by one error so likely not really relevant to video playback for the average user.
VLC has left me hanging many times. It's play a file wrong or not played at all while mpv plays it no problem. Do not use vlc.