Comment by Drybones

2 months ago

Nearly this entire HN comment section is upset about VLC being mentioned once and not recommended. If you can not understand why this very minor (but loud?) note was made, then you probably do not do any serious video encoding or you would know why it sucks today and is well past its prime. VLC is glorified because it was a video player that used to be amazing back in the day, but hasn't been for several years now. It is the Firefox of media players.

There is a reason why the Anime community has collectively has ditched VLC in favor of MPV and MPC-HC. Color reproduction, modern codec support, ASS subtitle rendering, and even audio codecs are janky or even broken on VLC. 98% of all Anime encode release playback problems are caused by the user using VLC.

We even have a dedicated pastebin on a quick run down of what is wrong: https://rentry.co/vee-ell-cee

And this pastebin doesn't even have all the issues. VLC has a long standing issue of not playing back 5.1 Surround sound Opus correctly or at all. VLC is still using FFmpeg 4.x. We're on FFmpeg 8.x these days

I can not even use VLC to take screenshots of videos I encode because the color rendering on everything is wrong. BT.709 is very much NOT new and predates VLC itself.

And you can say "VLC is easy to install and the UI is easy." Yeah so is IINA for macOS, Celluloid for Linux, and MPV.net for Windows which all use MPV underneath. Other better and easy video players exist today.

We are not in 2012 anymore. We are no longer just using AVC/H264 + AAC or AC-3 (Dolby Audio) MP4s for every video. We are playing back HEVC, VP9, and AV1 with HDR metadata in MKV/webm cnotainers with audio codecs like Opus or HE-AACv3 or TrueHD in surround channels, BT.2020 colorspaces. VLC's current release is made of libraries and FFmpeg versions that predate some of these codecs/formats/metadata types. Even the VLC 4.0 nightly alpha is not keeping up. 4.0 is several years late to releasing and when it does, it may not even matter.

48 comments

Drybones

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BoppreH  2 months ago

I'm also surprised by people's defense of VLC. It's a nice project, especially when it was created, but the bugs I regularly encountered were numerous and in seemingly common use cases.

Here's a post I made 4 years ago describing each bug, shortly before switching to MPV: https://www.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/pm6y1n/too_many_bugs_o...

  • amelius  2 months ago

    My main problem with VLC is that when I accidentally hit the wrong key on my keyboard (usually in the dark, because that's how I watch movies), it is quite often almost impossible to get the settings back to what they were without restarting the player.

  • centur  2 months ago

    Honestly, I'm absolutely not. I still vividly remember those times when we have to install codecs separately. And every month something something new and incompatible pops up on a radar, which sent all users on a wild hunt for that exact codec and instructions how to tweak it so the funny clip could play. Oh dear I'm not loking back to times od all versions of divX xVid, matroska, mkv avi wma, mp4, mp3 vba ogg and everything else, all thos cryptic incantations to summon a non-broken video frame on a modern hardvare, for everyone but few people in anime community who drove that insanity on everyone else. I'll die on a hill of VLC, despite all its flaws, because it gave an escape route for everyone else - if you don't give a F about "pixel perfect lowest overhead most progressive compression that is still a scientific experiment but we want to encode a clip with it" and simply want to view a video - vlc was the way. Nothing else made so much good to users who simply want to watch a video and not be extatic about its perfect colour profile, loosless sound and smallest size possible.

    All other players lost their plot when they tried to steer users into some madness pit of millions tweaks and configurations that somehow excites aughors of those players and some cohort of people who encode videos that way.

    I istall vlc very single time, because this is a blunt answer to all video playing problems, even if its imperfect. And walked away from ever single player who tries to sell me something better asking to configure 100 parameters I've no idea about. Hope this answers the question why VLC won.

jaapz  2 months ago

> It is the Firefox of media players.

So... the better option?

  • BloodyIron  2 months ago

    > So... the better option?

    Depends on what you care about.

    For me, Firefox really lacks in handling of very large amounts of tabs and a lot of features that I specifically use Vivaldi for. Does that mean Vivaldi is the best? Yes and No, it depends on what you care about.

    Is Firefox still a good browser? As far as I know, yes. But I don't use it much at all because it doesn't give _me_ what I want and need.

    And yes, I do actually need a large amount of tabs open at the same time very regularly due to the depth of references I work against in my line of work. That's on top of saving lots of bookmarks and syncing them via nextCloud.

    You like Firefox? Great, keep at it.

    You want to see features that aren't necessarily elsewhere? Consider trying Vivaldi and seeing if it's great for you or not.

    Let's not act like browser selection is binary, because it isn't, and it really hasn't been since netscape navigator was new. And even then it's up for debate.

  • izacus  2 months ago

    This kind of insulting quip, refusing to engage with the body of the post, is really inappropriate. Can you please not behave like an arse?

  • Drybones  2 months ago

    IDK where you have been for the last decade, but Firefox has not been the better option since Chromium was made

    Disliking Google Chrome proper is one thing, but Chromium is superior in every way. Rendering, features, speed, memory management

    • lelanthran  2 months ago

      > Chromium is superior in every way. Rendering, features, speed, memory management

      Being faster, prettier and using less memory[1] is pointless if the browser won't let me block all ads.

      I mean, it's like comparing a turd sandwich made with expensive exotic bread, and a cheese sandwich made with cheap grocery store break.

      Sure, the one has great exotic bread, but I don't want the turd it comes with.

      So, yeah, it actually doesn't matter how much prettier, faster or smaller web pages are with Chrome, at least FF lets me (currently) block almost anything.

      ---------------------------------------

      [1] Chrome beats out FF in exactly one of those, and it's not the memory or speed. Turns out ads take up a lot of RAM, and slow down pages considerably.

nticompass  2 months ago

MPC-HC is still a thing? I remember installing that (and K-Lite Codec Pack) on Windows, back in the day. Haven't used, or even thought about MPC-HC in years.

thegrim000  2 months ago

I've really felt gaslit over the last decade from people continuing to promote VLC as such a great thing, when I've had nothing bug bugs, crashes, glitches, issues with it for a full decade now (on Linux). From 10-25 years ago I definitely used it for everything, all the time, but now even the default Ubuntu totem video player (or whatever it's called) seems like 2-3 times as likely to be able to play a random video file without an issue as VLC does.

xnx  2 months ago

MPV is not user friendly, but I was very impressed by the gapless playback.

monster_truck  2 months ago

Honestly the pastebin link needs to be re-submitted and frontpaged.

I even encounter this in professional a/v contexts! If VLC can read and decode your stream, that's a good sign that most things should able to view it, but it absolutely should not be trusted as any measure of doing things correctly/to spec.

Numerlor  2 months ago

I did recently see someone compare mpv and vlc on a 8k HDR @ 60fps file with mpv really lagging while vlc doing it fine. I could confirm the mpv lags but don't have vlc, so not sure if it's just better in that specific case or did something like no actual HDR

  • arch1t3cht  2 months ago

    This may just be because mpv has higher-quality default settings for scaling and tonemapping. Try mpv with profile=fast, maybe. To properly compare mpv's and VLC's performance you'd need to fully match all settings across both players.

    • Numerlor  2 months ago

      It was with the fast profile using both software and hardware deciding, important detail I forgot was that the video was av1. Don't have the link to it now but it was from jellyfin's test files

jiggawatts  2 months ago

> It is the Firefox of media players.

Ironically, my main gripe about Firefox is that it has no support for HDR content and its colour management is disabled by default… and buggy when enabled.

usefulposter  2 months ago

Many HN readers won't be familiar with the fansub culture that this writeup originates from, so sharing a helpful resource in case anyone is interested in learning more:

ENTRY LEVEL FANSUBBERS' BEGINNERS GUIDE:

https://github.com/zeriyu/fansub-guide

Hope this helps anyone interested in the ancient art of subbing Japanese animes!

Be sure to read every link thoroughly, and don't worry, there are more link lists linked from the above link list.

Arigatou gomenasai!

  • ambicapter  2 months ago

    Wait, so this categorical dismissal of VLC is just coming from a specific fandom community?

    • sho_hn  2 months ago

      To be fair, it's a fandom community with high requirements and standards toward video players and that really knows its stuff.

    • RulerOf  2 months ago

      I generally dislike anime and tend to reflexively roll my eyes when someone suggests I watch it, but I've been complaining about VLC for at least 15 years.

      Its main claim to fame is that it "plays everything," and it rose to prominence in the P2P file sharing era. During this time, Windows users often installed so many "codec packs" that DirectShow would eventually just have an aneurysm any time you tried to play something. VLC's media stack ignored DirectShow, and would still play media on systems where it was broken.

      We're past that problem, but the solution has stuck around because "installing codecs will break my computer, but installing VLC won't" is the zombie that just won't die.

ifh-hn  2 months ago

Knowing nothing about video stuff my only question from this is: what's wrong with Firefox?