he's referring to the section in the change log specifically titled "FOR ANIME FANS"

i laughed too when i saw it

There are a number of features largely specific to anime fansubs, e.g. heavily styled subtitles (to replace Japanese text on signs, etc) and MKV segment linking. It's not spurious. And "neckbearded virgins" is rather silly when anime as a fandom is hardly gender-specific (unlike, say, Slashdot).

It's simpler than that: they're based in France, which doesn't recognise the same laws as the USA. Their legal page goes into detail.

VLC 2.0? That's nice. I'll keep using my even lighter weight video player that plays even more "darn near everything" than VLC.

Even the built-in filters for MPC-HC are very good, but extending it with Haali's Splitter and ffdshow or CoreAVC results in even better performance.

Have you ever heard of mplayer ?

I can't imagine how you have VLC set incorrectly so that it "washes out" color - a default install will reproduce video per-file. I can see no difference between a default install of MPC and a default install of VLC in terms of color.

It sounds like they're using different overlay/buffers and on your system your video has separate settings for each - this is especially common on ATI video cards. It will detect overlay video as "video" and apply its video "enchancements", but then not detect the video for any program which does its own rendering and - naturally, not apply any "enchancements". The same is possible on nVidia, however as a difference, nVidia drivers default to no video enhancement, unlike ATI.

Almost all media programs try to steal all file associations on install. You can simply tell it you don't want to, easy enough. However, this is the norm. Nothing special going on here.

HOWEVER, to answer your question - yes, it seems there are many improvements in VLC, and in my limited testing it's much better at handling very large, very high resolution video with no lag or banding which sometimes appeared in 1.x.

There is no "tax", and the new system being introduced in 10.8 merely adds a layer of UAC-style authentication to apps not from the App Store or identified developers (and any developer can get a digital cert from Apple for free, with no vetting process). The large majority of developers who make Mac software but don;t sell via the App Store will see no functional change to their apps on 10.8 from the user perspective, since they'll all be signed already.

If a developer doesn't get a digital certificate then the OS merely asks the user whether they'd like to add the app to their whitelist the first time it is run, but then never again after that. Other than the first request, the OS won't block the app at all.

Or, you could just turn the whole thing off in the preferences and it will never query you about any app from any source.

So no, you haven't heard plans that "everything will have to go thru the app store" - you've heard that 10.8 has a new feature that adds an extra (optional) step when you launch non-signed apps for the first time.

MPC-HC isn't actually a full featured media player. It is just a wrapper for DirectShow and Windows Media Foundation, Windows' own highly competent video interfaces. It doesn't actually handle any of the demuxing or decoding itself, it uses the relevant system filters.

Now this is useful in that anything you've taught Windows to play, it can play. It doesn't have to specifically support it. This also makes it lighter weight, since it doesn't have to have any of that kind of thing with it.

The disadvantage is that if the system doesn't have the codec, it can't handle it. Or if the system codec is problematic or the like it'll have problems.

VLC is an all-in-one package. It does all its decoding internally. The only thing it relies on the OS for is things like providing a video rendering interface. So while you can't just feed it new codecs, it doesn't need anything to be on the system. It is self contained.

I keep it around mostly for problematic files. Some of the pro software I install replaces things like the default MPEG decoders with new ones. These new ones do not tolerate MPEG files not to spec. Makes sense, they are for production and you want to make sure it is done right. However sometimes there's an old video that is encoded wrong, but I want to watch it. VLC can handle that, it is pretty robust at playback.

It isn't the be-all, end-all of media players, but it has its place.

Allow me to enlighten you then. [youtube.com]

it's basically the same except the icon is a bit to the left. i really don't know what Kenja is talking about.

So it sounds like Windows Media Player, except it's not modular and easy for end users to add new codecs?

It's designed to play everything without ever installing any codec. End users shouldn't know what a "codec" is, they should double-click a file and see it play, which is what VLC is all about.

And it's just now getting Blu-Ray support?

It think that after Mplayer, it's the first free media player getting support for it. Windows Media Player doesn't support Blu-Ray yet, for example.

Not that I've ever really had a problem with codecs.

Many people have. It's very easy to run into problems with codecs if you use them. There is no standard user interface to maintain them, so you have to rely on their installers to do the right thing when you install and uninstall them. Which often doesn't happen.

Videos just seem to work on WMP and MPC just fine every time I try, and I never install any "codec pack" or anything other than XviD perhaps. Honestly I can't figure out why I'd want this still.

That's because you only used one of the few formats supported by WMP - in this case you have little to gain from VLC. But suppose your grandmother wants to see some family clips taken with somebody else's digital camera. She will double-click them and they won't play. You can either:
- ask her to dig the FOURCC identification in the video clips, ask her what OS she uses and what version, find a codec online which is good for her case, tell her to download and install it, then cross your fingers and hope it works because there is no well-defined way to debug problems if things don't go well at this point. Note that a broken codec will harm *all* media playback on her machine.
- tell her do download and install VLC and double click those videos again.

You can capture your desktop and stream it to another room via IP. Or you can capture a football match from your TV card and stream it into your neighbour's house. Or you can convert a DVD into another format. It's both a generic tool for advanced users and an easy to use player for regular users.

vlc works *better* on windows than on linux. drag and drop has never been a problem, it plays any damn format you throw at it. it can even capture network streams and encode them into whatever you want. it repairs partially broken avis. it does not care if your file has chunks missing. the ui is the simplest you can get without removing any essential features. it can use your bluetooth earphones to play/pause/next.
once (in ye olde vista days) my fucking graphics driver crashed while watching a movie in vlc. it switched to s/w rendering on the fly, while aero went to fallback mode in the background, error notification appears saying 'your graphics has crashed'. after 30-40 seconds the drive gets restarted, aero comes back and vlc switches back to h/w rendering. all this without any interruption in the playback. i think that is amazing. i dunno why you guys think it crashes hard.
on linux, sometimes right click menu is a bit buggy while in fullscreen.
on windows vlc is the nearest you can get to the ideal video player.

Richard O'Dwyer [wikipedia.org]

I don't watch any anime, but the picture quality in VLC v2.0 has improved quite a bit over v1.1. VLC is still not offloading as many things as I might like to my graphics processor *(HD 6870), but its CPU utilization is not high on my Core i5 based system. I forgot which settings I used before to make some content end up forced to decode on the graphics card; I went ahead & axed the old settings in case they would break things in the new version.

The big positives I noticed right away: The technique VLC uses for dealing with interlaced content improved in terms of output quality in v2.0. I still don't have a solution for the 24 frames issue that causes some HD to stutter a bit, but I imagine that has to do more with how things are encoded than the player.

I've only played around with a few videos with it so far, but I do like the improvements that I can see. I also like the improvements that I can hear!

Its nice when a new version is actually an improvement, and not just more pure bloat that gives the same level of performance at many times the original install size.

I upgraded to 2.0.0 on my old PowerPC G4 iMac, which I like to use as a movie player "for the design". Warning for that! No sound, red stripes all over the frame... The upside is that it's really easy to downgrade, just move the old app bundle back from the trash can to the applications folder.