VLC 0.9.9, The Best Media Player Just Got Better 488
Matt Asay points out a recent update to VLC as they narrow in on a 1.0 release. Already a favorite of many, the open source project has made great strides in recent history towards really solidifying the position as best-in-class. This update, 0.9.9, fixes several display bugs and sees some definite performance improvements. "If you've yet to try VLC, do so. Whether you just want to play media files or also want to convert them, VLC can handle just about anything you throw at it. When all other media players fail, whether on Windows, Linux, or the Mac, VLC will almost always deliver. You can download VLC media player 0.9.9 here. It's open source, but that's not why you'll want to keep using it. You'll use it because it's better than its proprietary peers — by a long stretch.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:VLC is OK. (Score:5, Informative)
mplayer gets my vote for being the BEST player out there, not only because it supports most everything, and has an unintrusive UI as the parent post pointed out, but also because it doesn't hang and crash when it runs into data that isn't perfect.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry... though I appreciate VLC, I think its far from the best media player. My vote would go to the numerous incarnation of MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu]. From Xbox Media Center [xbmc.org] to SMPlayer on Linux [sourceforge.net] and Windows [dummwiedeutsch.de] to MPlayer OSX Extended [mplayerosx.sttz.ch] on Mac OS X, MPlayer has always been able to play whatever weird codec or container I toss at it. Meanwhile, every time I've attempted to use VLC (mainly on OS X) I've become frustrated by hangs and crashes... Maybe I'll hate this version a little less?
Revert interface to 0.8.6, or use OSX GUIfor win32 (Score:5, Informative)
VLC peaked at version 0.8.6. This was the last version to use the "correct" user interface on windows. That version was a very easy to use interface that looked like it had been designed after 1995. The 0.9 and forward versions have a poorly designed interface that looks like they ripped off the Mosaic interface for Win 3.1
VLC has an amazing GUI (Especially at full-screen mode) for OSX, and the linux version isn't far behind. I don't see why VLC for WIN32 has to be so awful, considering that Win32 is by far their largest audience.
VLC hasnt added any significant functionality since 0.8.6 so while I'll check out recent releases, until they fix the awful interface that is on all the 0.9.x series, I'm sticking with that. Yes, I am aware that 0.9.x is skinnable, but there is no true "classic" skin for the 0.9.x series.
Re:VLC is OK. (Score:2, Informative)
Be sure to grab some BASH completion scripts for MPlayer's startup command line parameters. Most distros have them maintained as packages.
The CLI is fine, but I don't like reading its manpage *every* darn time...
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't get me wrong, I use VLC for most all other things, but they don't include proprietary codecs with the program. You can get them, but they don't always work.
Re:VLC is OK. (Score:5, Informative)
Unintrusive UIs would probably be what VLC/Quicktime use on OS X, with a control set that fades in and out if you move the mouse, in addition to the keyboard actions.
Don't forget support for the apple remote... that's one thing (out of several) I really love about VLC actually - sitting back on my couch and watching movies/TV with the ability to control it from the apple remote (which regardless of ones thoughts on Apple products in general, is a very nice little remote just for the simplicity). It's actually pretty much all I ever use the remote for as well, since I'm not much of an audiophile and FrontRow is just useless to me.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:2, Informative)
Not sure why this guy got modded Troll
Probably ignorant knee-jerk Microsoft hatred (someone assuming Media Player Classic is a MS offering. It isn't.)
Re:Eh... (Score:4, Informative)
I also HATE that VLC doesn't let you click on the frame to pause. Nothing happens when you click on the frame, so why not pause! Having to navigate to the little pause button every time is lame.
Spacebar pauses.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
My preference is for MPC, particularly the one bundled with the CCCP (cccp-project.net). MPC works wonderfully for pretty much everything, and what it lacks in interface is more than made up for in features. And the CCCP version is customized to run as smoothly as possible with the codecs it comes with (plus, if there's anyone I trust with getting the most out of my videos, it's the geeks of the anime encoding community behind the CCCP).
VLC did save me once recently.. (Score:4, Informative)
I will say that VLC did just recently play a DVD that none of the other DVD players I have (mplayer, xine, etc...) wouldn't even touch. Heck the other players would crash and burn badly - even lsdvd had troubles with this one DVD - the Dark Knight.
What I don't like about VLC is how there is absolutely nothing intuitive about what combination of codecs will work on a transcode. With a recent example, I could get MPEG2 video to encode into a mpeg container or an avi container, but I couldn't get any audio to go into the same container at all. Using mpga would crash the program where using mp2a would go through the motions but you would end up with no audio in the output.
If you find that you need "support" of any sort for VLC, good luck with that. I have found in many cases that the forums are unmonitored and the IRC channel folk ignores people with real questions.
I just don't think that VLC deserves the title of "the best" in anything.
VLC crashes a lot (Score:3, Informative)
Recently I tried to play a DVD, and vlc crashed on me after a few seconds.
I thought maybe I needed the latest version, so I downloaded the latest at that time v0.9.8a, and while it seems they have finally made the subtitles look better, it crashed too.
Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player had no probs playing it.
I also never managed to get VLC to remember the deinterlace setting I pick (I tried the various filter and stupid obscure config stuff found on google and still it didn't work).
Overall I have a bad impression of VLC. Best to only use it if the other players can't play it.
p.s. if you are using Media Player Classic, avoid the haali media splitter crap. It causes crashes and instability[1], especially if you are using it with other stuff like windows movie maker (which someone found out the hard way - not me fortunately).
[1] http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/codecs_and_filters/haalimediasplitter.cfm [afterdawn.com]
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
The switch from vxWorks to QT was a pretty heated debate. And I think our side lost...
They had fairly good reasons for it, but it still makes me unhappy. I'm not complaining though, it made me switch to mplayer which is a lot nicer to me after some tweaking.
In less sensation, personal terms... (Score:2, Informative)
I've finally settled on a Windows combination that has both significant geek appeal and even more significant wife-acceptance-factor (though really, that's not much of an issue since my fiance has a geek mindset, too):
All of this for really not that much cash. The PC was almost a grand a year ago when I bought it but of course you could get the same specs for much cheaper now. I wanted a dedicated machine because I knew I was much less likely to mess that up than my primary machine. SageTV was $80. I donated $20 to the LM Remote Keymap people because it was such a useful tool. I just wanted something that would work and could play blu-ray/hd-dvd (that was before BR won). And one that I wouldn't have to spend hours on due to quirky hardware problems because I'd built it myself.
I also needed something beefy enough to handle HD mkvs and whatever else might come out in the next few years. My old repurposed machine started to skip a bit on the HD.
So there you have if, whether you cared to know or not. Just posting this because it might help someone else who has gotten really sick and tired of trying to cobble together various apps and front-ends and wireless keyboards and mice and just want something that works reliably and smoothly while they're sitting on the couch with a remote.
CCCP and Mplayer (Score:2, Informative)
The only way to go Comrade!
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Using VLC for HD video, especially 1080p video, is horrible compared to Zoom Player. Most anime I get now is in high-def, and VLC has issues with keeping up with the video when I skip to points - it takes about 10 seconds for VLC to catch up and display the video. Zoom Player is instantaneous. MPC isn't as fast but you don't get the annoying compression blocks like VLC gives you when skipping around a video file.
Also, on VLC, when I try playing an MP3, I have to reset the damned EQ every time the song changes - that gets annoying as hell.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:3, Informative)
"MPC has issues with subtitles.
Could you elaborate on this? The main reason I use MPC is that it has far and away better support for subs (via directvobsub) than VLC. Maybe you have something configured wrong?
As for mplayer: it comes pretty close, but the lack of a user interface (When I have to google for an appreciable amount of time and dig out the build number just to find out how to change the volume in increments you've got user interface issues), the occasionally out-of-whack subtitile support, and lack of support for .mkv Ordered Chapters, means it's just not an effective everyday player for me.
Media Player Classic Homecinema (Score:5, Informative)
VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player [videolan.org] was good up to the 0.8.6 releases and after that it took a bit of a tumble in design and lost popularity because of its tendency to crash or freeze at any minor error or corruption in the media files.
Media Player Classic Homecinema [sourceforge.net] stepped in and took the reigns after that. This player includes internal decoder filters for MPEG-2 (DVD), MPEG-4 (XviD, DivX), H.264 (Blu-ray), and VC1 (Blu-ray) along with audio decoders for AC3 (Dolby Digital), DTS (Digital Theater Systems), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), etc. It also includes native support for MKV (Matroska) and AVI (Audio Video Interleave) file formats.
The most important feature of MPC-HC is the hardware accelerated DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) [wikipedia.org] decoder filters for the H.264 and VC1 Blu-ray codecs allowing this player to leverage ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards to handle the work load with complex 720p and 1080p movies. The difference in CPU usage goes from 70-100% on software decoding with dropped frames to 5% on DXVA decoding and no dropped frames, of course this is relative to the CPU being used.
DXVAChecker [infoseek.co.jp] is the best tool to use to determine if your video card and latest drivers support hardware acceleration. It will list the list of video streams that are accelerated such as MPEG2, WMV9, VC1, H264 along with DXVA1 (XP DX9) or 2 (Vista DX10) for the version along with the resolution such as 720x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080 that is supported.
FFDshow Tryouts [sourceforge.net] is another codecs to look into is that is based on libavcodec and ffmpeg-mt (multi-threaded) and handles pretty much all audio and video codecs in software using CPU decoding and includes a lot of filters for audio 2.0->5.1 up-mixing, real-time AC3 encoding for surround sound, noise filtering, and video filters for noise, sharpening, and subtitle support.
CoreAVC Pro [coreavc.com] codec is the most efficient software and hardware nVidia CUDA accelerated H.264 (Blu-ray) decoding. In hardware CUDA mode it users ~15% CPU to perform decoding and in software mode it users 50-70%, relative to the CPU being used of course. This codec a bit more efficient than FFDshow in software but a lot better in CUDA mode, nVidia video card required.
Haali Media Splitter [cs.msu.ru] is the preferred splitter for MKV (Matroska), MP4, and AVI files. This is the recommended splitter for these file formats over the internal splitters that usually come with the players.
MPlayer Media Player [mplayerhq.hu] is also a complete alternative that now has hardware acceleration support for nVidia video cards with the latest SVN releases.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Ctrl-Up/Dn works fine for me.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
I used to be a bigger fan of VLC, but on a lot of videos, I've recently had problems where after I hit pause, video will continue for 5-10 seconds before it finally pauses. Also, with a lot of videos I would get audio but no video for the first 5-10 seconds of playback.
It also gave some audio stuttering on some videos that played back fine in MPlayer.
MPlayer's biggest drawback is the fact that without some sort of frontend, it's UI stinks. SMPlayer solves that problem though. I've started to really like SMPlayer.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:3, Informative)
Do you mean wxWorks?
VxWorks is an embedded operating system, not a graphical toolkit...
MPC Homecinema (Score:5, Informative)
Media Player Classic was great, but it's no longer updated and has several security flaws that are un patched.
There's a current and very good fork called Media Player Classic Homecinema [sourceforge.net], you just needed to do a very small amount of research.
Re:VLC vs mplayer (Score:1, Informative)
While I think mplayer is a great application, I've found VLC to be much more stable. Mplayer regularly crashes on me and can't handle some of the video files VLC handles without problems.
Granted, I think the mplayer interface is nicer and the command line for mplayer is great. I highly recommend both players.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Because some of us don't want to be toaster operator and use VLC for it's real power. Video streaming. The whole reason that VLC was even made. To make it really easy to stream video and audio. I can make channels and stream live feeds. I do that here in the office.
Streaming from a server that I can control from the command line or web interface. Having a GUI on everything is not an advantage, most of the time requiring a GUI is a hindrance.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:3, Informative)
Don't you mean wxWigdets [wxwidgets.org], formerly wxWindows ?
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:3, Informative)
Seconded for ZoomPlayer. VLC used to be my default player, but it kept occasionally crashing to desktop, and it had laggy controls sometimes. Mediaplayer classic used to be my default player until I started using Vista64, and I couldn't get it to run at all most of the time.
ZoomPlayer [inmatrix.com] just seems to run everything I throw at it, has a decent interface, and has no lag on controls etc.
Correction (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem's I've found with VLC over MPC, is that VLC does not support the Windows interface for media control buttons on keyboards.(Rather minor, but when watching something full screen, having a working hardware play/pause button is nice.)
Vlc seems to lack a rewind feature, requiring me to try jumping back with the scrolling bar.
Unfortunately, the VLC build's I've used tend to crash when using the bar to jump.
How ever, VLC does have some nice features. It is willing to stream video from certain types of online services, and save the raw stream to my harddrive. It can transcode video. It is perfectly happy to start playing a video I'm downloading through another means (as long as the download is linear), and not have any issues as long as it does not catch up to the most recently downloaded bit. (I've had VLC downloading streaming video before, and run another instance of VLC on saved file. That has it's uses. If I pause the video, or if the window I'm watching the video in crashes, it won't impact the streaming).
I have also found that VLC does tend to play a few files that nothing else will. There are very few files like that, but I've seen one or two.
It's Video LAN Client (Score:4, Informative)
It seems everyone misses the point of this player.
Did you know you can stream VLC content to a) the screen obviously b) the network and c) to a file in another format? (and probably more)
Did you know you can create custom GUI's for VLC?
Control it via http?
Plays DVDs,Capture Cards,Network streams and files? (and probably more)
I always thought they used the mpc engine as the player and just added on the rest of the goodies.
I figured if VLC couldn't play it, it wasn't worth looking for alternatives.
Right now VLC (on XP) is streaming cable TV to my network. I'm currently watching that stream on my Linux box. I use an Ipod touch to control VLC from a (customized) http interface. I use Prism to display the same http interface for mouse control.
Sure i could use MythTV, but I enjoy the tinkering. ooo I might just have to go make VLC to some DVRing.
Thanks VLC
Re:MPC Homecinema (Score:4, Informative)
It's "current" as of September 2008..
O Rly? [sourceforge.net]
*cough* [doom9.org]
np: Autechre - We R Are Why? (WAP72 12")
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that I can't do simply things like watch a video in a VIDEO PLAYER is prof that VLC needs a GUI re-write.
These are just a few completely standard ways (ie. they don't require you to know anything about VLC in particular, just general Windows usage).
VLC's GUI isn't the best out there, but I find it difficult to believe that anyone on Slashdot could actually be unable to figure out how to watch a video in VLC.
MPC is great. I used to use it, but now I use VLC for a number of reasons. If you prefer MPC, that's cool. But to say that VLC's GUI is "100% BAD" and in need of a complete re-write is just silly at best, and your attempts to paint VLC as completely unusable for basic tasks is ridiculous.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:1, Informative)
(Rather minor, but when watching something full screen, having a working hardware play/pause button is nice.)
The space bar does that
Vlc seems to lack a rewind feature, requiring me to try jumping back with the scrolling bar.
ALT and the left arrow jumps about 10 sec back, CTRL and left arrow jumps 1 min back...
I'll let you guess what the right arrow with CTRL or ALT does.
Tools...Preferences....Hotkeys
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:3, Informative)
Has any Windows user here other than myself even used VLC in the last year? Their interface was completely redone and is very similar to mpc now...
Re:MPC Homecinema (Score:5, Informative)
You really shouldn't need any codec downloaders or codec packs.
MPC-HC has integrated a good deal of libavcodec (same library used in mplayer, ffmpeg/ffdshow, VLC, xine, gstreamer/totem, etc.) Out of the box, MPC-HC should play back virtually anything you throw at it. It also has integrated subtitle support that is superior to directvobsub. After all, the author of MPC is the same guy who wrote directvobsub, and MPC can render the subs at native screen-res, which looks quite nice.
Personally, though, I install three things for media playback:
1) MPC-HC: eed a player, and this one is great.
2) Haali's Splitter: This Matroska (MKV) splitter is better than MPC's own, but I primarily use this to get Haali's Renderer. It does accurate two-pass bicubic scaling, and supports buffering of raw uncompressed data (good for handling CPU spikes). Supported by MPC.
3) ffdshow-tryouts: This fork of ffdshow is widely regarded as the successor to ffdshow. This will provide all the codec support that MPC-HC might be missing, since MPC-HC focuses on the mainstream codecs rather than the more esoteric ones. I tend to use ffdshow as the default codec in order to use some of the ffdshow filters. Primarily, deband, which I desperately wish somebody would port to mplayer, and the occasional other filter like yadif deinterlacing or perhaps an unsharp mask.
Of course, since I'm a Linux user, these days I just use smplayer. Unfortunately, smplayer is extremely buggy, and mplayer/smplayer have rather limited support for DVD menus via libdvdnav. And again, I'm flabberghasted that nobody has ported ffdshow's deband filter to mplayer; it's an enormous quality improvement on pretty much every video, and has absolutely no negative impact on level of detail.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:3, Informative)
By default, MPC's internal subtitle support is disabled. So I'd suggest taking a look at your settings.
MPC's author is the same guy who wrote directvobsub, the defacto standard for ASS/SSA subtitle rendering; sub support is generally better than every other renderer out there. Competing sub renderers are things like libass (used by mplayer), which is horrible and incomplete (useless for anything but basic subs).
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Case in point, I got the most recent BSG DVDs and tried to play them on everything I had.
That's why you should have just downloaded AVIs from BitTorrent. You get better resolution, too, since you can get 720p HD versions, at only about 1GB per episode.
I have no problem playing AVIs from BitTorrent on mplayer or VLC.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:3, Informative)
>>VLC is far superior to Media Player Classic.
VLC crashes and dies on corrupted files a lot more than media player classic, and if you are unfortunate enough to install the VLC plugin for firefox, it'll kill firefox with it. This is with an older version, but IMO it is just not worth the effort.
Actually, the biggest issue with VLC is its shitty playlist support (awkward autorepeat options) and the fact that if you double click a video to go to fullscreen, it'll go back to windowed on the next item in the playlist, but still act like it's in fullscreen mode.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:2, Informative)
That's not true. Media Player Classic is a Windows only application based on Microsoft's DirectShow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Player_Classic#DirectShow.2C_QuickTime_and_RealPlayer_architectures [wikipedia.org]
Media Player Classic is primarily based on the DirectShow architecture, and therefore automatically uses installed DirectShow decoding filters. For instance, after the open source DirectShow decoding filter ffdshow has been installed, fast and high quality decoding and postprocessing of the DivX, Xvid, H.264 and Flash Video formats is available in MPC.
MPC provides DXVA beta support, for newer nVidia and ATI video cards when using an H.264 or VC-1. This provides hardware-acceleration for playback.
In addition to DirectShow, MPC can also use the QuickTime and the RealPlayer architectures (if installed on the computer) to play their native files.
MPlayer is based on libavcodec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPlayer#Legal_issues [wikipedia.org]
Most video and audio formats are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project. For those formats where no open source decoder has been made yet MPlayer relies on binary codecs. It can use Windows DLLs directly with the help of a DLL loader forked from avifile (which itself forked its loader from the Wine project).
The combination of CSS decryption software and use of formats covered by software patents places a fully-functional MPlayer in the legal bind shared by most open source multimedia players. In the past MPlayer used to include OpenDivX, a GPL-incompatible decoder library. This has since been removed, making MPlayer itself completely free software. Usage of patented codecs in free software however is a still pending potential problem affecting FFmpeg, MPlayer and similar software when used in countries where software patents apply.
The difference being that you can pretty much always find two or three DirectShow codecs for any particularly any audio or video format, and usually one of them is really good. With something like mplayer either a file works or it doesn't. If I want to watch a movie, I don't want to have to write a codec and give it away for free as part of something like mplayer. Also MPC has a nice clean user interface and you can just install filters to do advanced stuff. Last but not least DirectShow has GPU acceleration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceleration [wikipedia.org]