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.
Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a Windows user. I prefer Media Player Classic to VLC. It just works better for me.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Ditto. For those few times when MPC won't play something or has a problem playing it smoothly, I fire up SMPlayer.
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: (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.)
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Not sure why this guy got modded Troll. Case in point, I got the most recent BSG DVDs and tried to play them on everything I had. VLC didn't work beyond the root screen. Windows Media Player failed. Intervideo DVD player crashed every time. It wasn't until I loaded the K lite codec full that I could get it to play...and only on the Media Player Classic frontend.
I have an Ice Age 2 DVD that won't play on anything except my custom-compiled mplayer. Doesn't even work with the same version on Windows.
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).
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I got the most recent BSG DVDs and tried to play them on everything I had. VLC didn't work beyond the root screen. Windows Media Player failed. Intervideo DVD player crashed every time. It wasn't until I loaded the K lite codec full [free-codecs.com] that I could get it to play...and only on the Media Player Classic frontend.
Sounds worse than DRM!
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm curious... how many dicks are in a back, exactly?
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Exceptions:
1. DRMed Windows Media Audio/Video
2. Some audio codec used in a 3gp file I have
DVD video is so easy to play on so many things. I've never had a problem with it in vlc. It's CSS and MPEG-2, not some weird and exotic combination of brand new codecs.
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, Insightful)
+1. Media Player Classic has been so good on difficult files that if it fails, I generally just give up (on the assumption that figuring out how to play such a difficult file will be more trouble than it's worth).
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Media Player Classic was great, but it's no longer updated and has several security flaws that are un patched. You can run a Secunia offline scan (download the scanner) and it will give you all the details about this.
VLC is far superior to Media Player Classic. It can play almost anything. It has a problem with WMV's that are encrypted or require a codec download (usually a virus if p2p.) On Mac, it can play encrypted DVDs too. Add the playlists for Shoutcast and you have tens of thousands of audio and video channels.
You can merge streams such as two axis video cameras into a single display. You can overlay things. You can record it to disk or re-stream it. You have many effects such as motion detection and motion blur which when set to max, is pretty nice for CCTV use.
And with VLC, you don't have to hunt for CODECs like you do with WMPlayer.
It's really worth trying out.
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: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: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: (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
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
But VLC does provide keyboard control using regular keys. The spacebar is your hardware play/pause button. Yes, if you've got media control buttons, it would be nice to be able to use them. But VLC's way of doing things works even for those who just have a plain old regular keyboard.
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Has any Windows user here other than myself even used VLC in the last year? Their interfac
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 hav
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Try Zoom Player. It comes with the CCCP pack and much easier to use than VLC, looks better, may not have some of the same functionality but for playback it's unbeatable. Also, the scroll-wheel zoom in/out feature rocks.
VLC still has issues on my machine where I'll hit the spacebar to pause, then hit it again and the file will 6 out of 10 times start playback at half speed.
MPC has issues with subtitles.
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"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 Order
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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)
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.
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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.
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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: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?
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
THANK YOU. Somewhere along the line they borked up the GUI starting with anything after 0.8.6. The current GUI looks like it was designed by the MOSAIC team for compatibility with Win3.1
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Do you mean wxWorks?
VxWorks is an embedded operating system, not a graphical toolkit...
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Don't you mean wxWigdets [wxwidgets.org], formerly wxWindows ?
Correction (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't really like the new interface either; it takes up too much space. I mostly use the keyboard shortcuts anyway.
What really bugs me, though, is that they completely re-did the playlist and it's now virtually unusable. I haven't been able to figure out how to get the files to sort and play in the order I want them to. At least the old playlist, buggy as it was with its drag-and-drop, allowed me to set the order.
One thing I do wish they'd do is make it capture snapshots at the scaled resolution instead o
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VLC on my OSX system has only successfully played one DVD for me. Since then it steadfastly refuses to play anything. Not sure why... I've taken to running it on a Windows system, which has no problems.
I use it because it lets me play movies without sitting through unskippable crap and accusations of being an international criminal, etc.
I'll give this new VLC version a try. I'll also try the MPlayer version you mentioned. Thanks.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. Does it rescale video decently now, or is it still a pixelated mess (see, this worked fine in old versions, and then, somewhere along the line, it got broken. "It was ffmpeg's fault," but somehow mplayer didn't have the same problem)? And when you use it to transcode, does it produce MPEG-2 output that is correct-enough to be played by... any other player? 'Cus it hasn't yet in any version I've tried previously. And how about subtitles; does it handle them correctly now?
(VLC has an identity cri
New, but not necessarily better. (Score:2)
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can almost forgive elitism in some avenues, but this is just making your life more complicated for no good reason.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I'm watching a movie, not the graphical interface.
I'd rather hit the volume up button on my keyboard instead of waggling the mouse until the overlay pops up and then wait while it blocks part of the movie until it fades again.
Re:Better than mplayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Ctrl-Up/Dn works fine for me.
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:4, Funny)
An yet your TV/DVD/etc. lacks a GRAPHICAL user interface, even though it performs all the same functions.
Yes, horror, you must find the right button to turn the volume up, or change the channel. Clearly, dragging a mouse cursor around the TV screen would be a vastly superior UI...
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.
NOW SEEKS IN FLV FILES! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm surprised that this isn't listed as one of the improvements anywhere.
That was what made Miro a PITA. Miro is based on VLC for playback support. It is now going to be USEFUL for me! Fantastic.
VLC is OK. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
But the best thing about mplayer, is that there are many GUIs for it. I use kmplayer as its pretty minimal but saves me from the CLI, but smplayer is fairly good too and im sure there are plenty more.
Re:VLC is OK. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:VLC is OK. (Score:5, Interesting)
why someone would prefer it over using mplayer
On Mac machines. VLC is one of those rare applications that works best on Macintosh. My personal preference for it stems from the clean GUI, the working DVD support, and the fact that it will actually play full-screen on your second monitor while still letting you work on the first monitor in other applications.
It's also a fine player on Windows and Linux - though not as compelling as those platforms have other very good choices.
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: (Score:2)
VLC is the player on Mac and Windows which is least picky about mildly corrupted files, but any version crashes frequently for me.
I've found a few ways to fairly consistently make it crash, on four different computers, with a mix of OS X, Windows XP, Vista 32/64 and Ubuntu 8.x+:
1.Dragging a bunch of files into VLC and playing, then adding more will sometimes crash.
2.Dragging a directory of MP3s will crash it most of the time.
3.Adding files one at a time before even playing will sometimes crash it.
It seems t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That doesn't strike me as being an unintrusive UI, so much as the omission of a visible UI. That's intrusive in its own right, since it leaves you fumbling for controls until you read the manual and memorize the keys.
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
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: (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:VLC is OK. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sort of surprised at the arguments.
Both VLC and mplayer are so insanely good, so much better than any alternatives, that it's kind of like arguing about whether you should drink belgian beer or german beer compared to drinking raw sewage.
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Personally, I like the cross-platform streaming.
I use it to stream video from my Ubuntu TV rig to VLC on my fiancee's WinXP box.
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VLC is an OK media playback application. I, for one, never understood why someone would prefer it over using mplayer [mplayerhq.hu].
I used mplayer for years, I tried a windows binary, didn't like it much. The command prompt is horrible in windows, and all of the GUIs I've found just didn't work all that well. VLC was a nice slim media player, worked well with any file I threw at it (like mplayer), it had a nice playlist I could drag and drop files onto, and it was easy to use. Same thing on my mac.
In linux I use mplayer for everything, but linux is more command line based, I'm used to it. I know how to quickly navigate a linux system wi
Not so hot for hi def content (Score:4, Insightful)
VLC has been a non-starter for me because I can't use better performing codecs for high definition content. The internal codec doesn't approach the performance of several other codecs. I'm sticking with Media Player Classic for my XP system. It's a much better player.
By the way, does anybody else feel like the story's headline looks like it came straight from Digg?
Anybody know how to get spdif working? (Score:2)
You'll use it because it's better than its proprietary peers
It's also the only player I can't get to output properly to spdif on any computer I try it on. It's the _only_ player I can't get to output to spdif.
It did work on the versions a few years back, but those are useless with current codecs and containers so that's no help. For the past umpteen versions it has output nothing but looping sound. If anybody knows the magic to fix that I'd be thrilled. But Mplayer Classic HC and ffdshow does the job pretty well so it's not a big deal.
Re: (Score:2)
That was supposed to be "Media Player Classic", not mplayer. But I'm sure nobody intentionally misunderstood that... For sure..
mp4 issues fixed? (Score:2)
It's kind of annoying to have to keep a copy of VLC 0.9.x and 0.8.6i around - have they fixed the mp4 issues that were introduced with the 0.9 series yet?
Depends on my OS (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Revert interface to 0.8.6, or use OSX GUIfor wi (Score:5, Interesting)
I too absolutely hate the new QT interface and I want them to bring back the ability to use the wxWidgets interface that was used in 0.8.6 releases. Apparently the wxWidgets interface of VLC is no longer maintained, therefore they dropped it in the 0.9 releases. Because of this I still continue to use 0.8.6 on my machines. :(
Eh... (Score:3, Interesting)
Eh, VLC is okay. I've found it to be more processor intensive when decoding MKV's than Media Player Classic - to the point where the old PC i repurposed as a media center can play 1080p movies just barely smoothly in media player classic, but it chokes if i need to use VLC (media player classic has options for choosing an audio stream but never actually shows more than one stream! grr).
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.
ALSO hate that even in full screen, the progress bar stays small, so I don't have much resolution when i want to skip back a little.
So yeah, best player ever? meh. It's nice, and i love all the transcoding features etc. is has, but that's not media playing, that's something else. As a media player, VLC is just ok.
-Taylor
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: (Score:2)
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.
Of course it does, but generally i keep my keyboard stowed when using my Media Center. The mouse is small so I keep it with the remotes, and I would be nice if I could just click on the frame, which I've grown accustomed to. And besides, nothing happened when you click the frame. *something* useful should happen there, it's a very simple UI point. Who thought *nothing* was a useful function? Maybe people who keep accidentally clicking the screen? I have no idea.
-Taylor
Re:Eh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it does, but generally i keep my keyboard stowed when using my Media Center. The mouse is small so I keep it with the remotes
Well, http://wiki.videolan.org/Mouse_Gestures [videolan.org] then...
From your link:
left : Short time skip backward (10sec by default)
right : Short time skip forward (10sec by default)
left-up : Faster
right-up : Slower
left-down : Go to previous entry in playlist
right-down : Go to next entry in playlist
left-right : Play/Pause
right-left : Play/Pause
up : Volume up
down : Volume down
up-down : Mute Volume
down-up : Mute Volume
up-right : Change Audio track
down-right : Change Subtitle track
up-left : Enter fullscreen mode
down-left : Quit VLC
Hmm... They do ALL that and they can't add
"Single click: Play/pause"? Lame. I mean, obviously not everyone cares but it works REALLY well being able to click to pause in MPC. Gestures? Gestures are like the red-headed stepchild of interface methods - they are weird and people don't like them. Meanwhile, *clicking* the mouse, the thing it was designed to do, does nothing. I find this highly irritating.
And even if there is some way to force it, or make it work, or open some config file and change a line, why the hell isn't it standard!? It works well and fits right in where there is currently NO interface feature. It seems dead obvious to me and its simple things like that that make me question a project. Forget about pausing, who uses VLC and doesn't wish the trackbar expanded when you went full screen? I have a nice 1920x1080 TV and the trackbar is only like 600px wide. WTF? Try scrolling back 60 seconds in the godfather on a 600px wide trackbar 'cause your friend distracted you on a good part. That's damn tough, 60 seconds is only 3 pixels! if it were 1920 wide it would be 10px - tough but 3 times easier! I mean if this were a beta that would be fine but VLC has been around forever! I know they're still not at v1.0 but gmail is still in beta, so that's not always in indicator.
And the fact that it's more processor intensive than MPC? How many people are working on VLC that they can't even match MPC? MPC even streams better over a LAN at my place, which is funny because VIDEO LAN CLIENT should be better!
-Taylor
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
up up down down left right left right b a start
Re: (Score:2)
Have you considered using XBMC? It uses mplayer and ffdshow and has a nifty interface. It has mouse, keyboard, and remote support... And it's available for win, mac, lin, and xbox.
VLC OS X (Score:2, Interesting)
I've always had bad experiences with VLC on Mac, no matter which version. Converting videos to mpg, mp4, or anything else I try results in unreadable files.
While I donno if others are experiencing the same issues, it's disappointing that it's been consistently unreliable for me.
Subtitle Problems (Score:2)
Have they fixed their long-standing issues with styled subtitles? Many, many, many anime release groups specifically warn not to use VLC because it has issues with external subtitles, and specifically, SSA/ASS subtitles.
Which is another reason I use mplayer. (mencoder is the first reason)
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yes they finally fixed the problems with subtitles
The most important question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Did they make a better desktop icon yet?
Why? The orange cone icon on the task bar clearly says "Caution: Porn playing!"
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 is illegal in the US (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to use VLC legally in the US, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen any time soon.
VLC FAQ [videolan.org]
Re:VLC is illegal in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
Who the fuck cares?
This is one of those laws like "Thou shalt not smoke pot" or "Thou shalt not have sex before 18" (at least around here.) No victim. No harm. Not enforceable.
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):
CCCP and Mplayer (Score:2, Informative)
The only way to go Comrade!
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.
A warning about VLC and privacy - album art (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe it's resolved since then, but if VLC wasn't concerned about its users then I wasn't going to waste more time on their behalf either. Album art downloads tend to do Google searches and download the first image returned. For at least some releases of VLC, this gets triggered for videos as well as audio. The end result is, every time I watch a video that I have on my local network, VLC advertises the fact that I am watching it. To the largest data mining company ever, Google. Unencrypted for anyone to see.
I posted a question to VLC forums, they seemed very unconcerned about this.
Somehow I enabled album art download. I don't remember doing it, but I am told it is off by default in every release so I did it, as opposed to VLC doing it automatically, so it's not necessarily a big deal. but I don't remember turning it on and had no way to know it was on until I got "out of disk space" errors and went looking for things to delete.
Anyway, more details here and read for yourselves.
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=55288&p=182407 [videolan.org]
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
Holy shazbot batman (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of polishing your knob in an article about how good you are, why not just TELL US what features makes the product so innovative than say 0.9.8, or 0.9.7, etc..
In terms of the poster's 'I'm the best' position, I'd say they fall flat in that regard as well.
1. For windows nothing can beat Media Player Classic. Nothing. It has just enough GUI to do what it was designed for, to play videos. It has all the configuration you'll ever need in the background, and if you don't it generally works out of the box for 90% of the things you want.
As for codecs, you have several options on how to get all the needed codecs, and you can bet that a large number of them support DxVA (where applicable) out of the box, which means you have a fast low overhead media player that plays pretty much everything you throw at it.
For Linux, that's a different story. Linux's equivalent of DirectShow(The decoding pipeline for media content) is gstreamer, but it suffers from a serious lack of adoption. We have Totem, but lets admit that if there's anything you need outside of the totem defaults, you're screwed.
The alternative is to use all-in-one-package media players. The obviously suffer in that if the codec / format / playback feature you're looking for isn't supported by the player, the whole stack becomes useless. But, this is sadly exactly what you're stuck with. Our options are: VLC/Xine/Mplayer and gui variants thereof.
VLC is fine, but its never had specifically good support on my hardware, and there are -many- videos that fail to play where other players can.
Xine is why software developers should never be put in charge of UI design. The UI stinks so badly, that the only time I ever open it is when all other players fail to play properly.
Mplayer is probably the most codec compatible player out there, but then again, there's no GUI for people to interact with. Unless you're a keyboard/command line nazi, you'll most likely decide that there's no point in Mplayer without one of its many available front-ends. I've tried a few over the years, and the only one that (finally) met my happy path requirements for > 80% of the time was SMPlayer. It is a great frontend to Mplayer, and gets my thumbs up. It keeps the complexity of selecting appropriate devices within the preferences if I really care to tweak them, but the out of box experience is also pretty good.
For anyone reading this post who is actually a contributor to these projects, PLEASE try to focus on supporting a pipelined system like gstreamer, or writing codecs that can be plugged in willy nilly instead of monolithic all-in.
I think a real winner on linux would be:
1. A user interface akin to SMPlayer, in terms of its toolbars, layouts, config (in general)
2. A container/codec glue that is well understood and powerful enough to support codecs, overlays, user input, etc.. I think gstreamer is this tool, but maybe it needs work on the input side of things *shrugs*
3. A set of simple codec/container implementations with simple APIs so that they can be plugged into any pipeline without gratuitous hacks. Ideally, these implementations could be interchangeable and upgradable without requiring recompilation of their glue layer
Ack, that's about it.
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Fine we can just change it then. (Score:5, Funny)
"VLC: Best media player for jerks!"
Re:Fine we can just change it then. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Saying your the best will only lead to a letdow (Score:2)
Well, it may be the best "overall" media player, but I've found it's not better than mediocre in any area. I ended up having three or four media players, and just using one based on what I'm watching/listening to.
About all I used VLC for is my TV Tuner because I didn't feel like getting MythTV set up, and along with a command line channel switcher, it worked fine.
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What the hell does this, and why?
What insane reasoning do you use to stick a video file inside a RAR (or any other compressed archive for that matter?) Jamming a compressed file into a compressed container usually results in a file size increase. I would stop complaining that VLC doesn't support something insane, and try to justify why that behavior is in any way valuable and -not- insane.
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Split archives much?
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Mplayer, XBMC (built on MPlayer). And Rars were (are?) the best way of distributing things over usenet or DCC. If a piece fails, you just get that piece. While it annoys me to no end that people still use it on bittorrent (since it's already chunked).
Re:Until... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of the "content release teams" will make their official releases in multipart RAR format.
Apparently, Usenet is now for the "1337".
The end result is that even if you get such releases via BitTorrent, there's still a good chance they're distributed as multipart RARs. A video player that can play such files lets you view the video in its "seedable" form.
Of course, I just simply stop seeding such content much earlier than I normally would. If someone wants me to seed, they should make it EASY for me to seed by having the "seedable" form equal the "viewable" form.