Comment by dylan604
1 month ago
my biggest pet peeve was that VLC was always considered a streamer and treated local files as streams as well. for the longest time, stepping within the video was not possible. reverse play was also a bane as well, even with i-frame only content. i have long found players that are better for me, but still find myself using VLC frequently because it still has features these other players do not.
This matches with my observation, VLC tends to be more tolerant of slightly broken files or random issues that you encounter when streaming. Especially for hls streams, vlc often works when ffplay refuses to play it, I believe because vlc uses their own demuxer (instead of relying on libavformat).