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The creator of VLC just won the European SFS Award “in recognition of his outstanding and lasting contributions to the Free Software movement and his long-term dedication to the VLC project.”
Til vlc is older than me
TIL I’m older than you.
TIL I still need to schedule that colonoscopy
Get checked everyone! If you listened to the album “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory” in HS, it’s time for a mammogram and/or colonoscopy.
Hey now I’m not that ancient, I was listening to Amish Paradice in high school, but I am getting to the age where I need to schedule a colonoscopy…
sad ffmpeg noises
sad mpv noises
Dont you mean sad libavcodec noises?
VLC, IPlayer, and FFMpeg are interfaces for libavcodec 😀
I did a CTF once where one of the challenges was forensics on a video file. It had the header ripped off, the entension removed, and was split into chunks that had to be ripped out of a pcap and reassmebled
VLC just played the mangled chunks as-is. It was an unintended cheat code for the challenge
VLC: “I am 4 Parallel Universes ahead of you”
I had it once play a video recorded on an old Motorola razr circa 2004. It was this super obscure file format, that basically only this one phone used, and was never used on any other phone.
VLC didn’t care, played it right out of the box without any problems.
It supports an obscure single use, 2004 video format. If aliens come to earth, VLC will be able to play their files too.
And it still supports devices with Android version 4.2 (released on November 13, 2012) and newer. That’s a 13 year old release.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.videolan.vlc/
Perfect use of old devices as a media player. It struggles with modern file formats but having modern UI and support this long is epic.
Which is what I did. Had an old 2nd gen Nexus 7 from 2013 which I used as an occasional media player. Finally died back in January, had VLC running on it until its last day!
I have a 2013 phone running Android 13. Sony Xperia Z, found in e-waste in 2023 in great condition (except for dust in the camera). I used it a lot and even replaced the battery, although that didn’t make much difference, it just kept overheating and discharging like crazy on modern websites. The notification LED broke in a peculiar way (likely shorted driving transistor, burning it out within hours) and so did the vibrator. Recently, I dropped it and the back shattered but I still carry it every day, although now it’s a secondary phone (can’t get some apps running on my primary one although both are degoogled). It has a 32-bit processor, noisy camera and no fingerprint reader, but a 5" 1080p LCD, MHL (HDMI over microUSB), NFC and headphone jack. And a mediocre FM transmitter that can be enabled with custom drivers for the Qualcomm chip. It was covered in Janus Cycle’s video on monoliths.
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Arch split out the h264 decoders from vlc, and its not installed by default, so last time I needed to use it, it didn’t work. No idea why they did that.
Most likely patents and licensing.
The packages still exist, you can install them, its just not by default. Their argument for splitting is that they can be updated independently, but that doesnt explain why the h264 plugins aren’t just included by default.
useful things are bloat apparently
Logic: Ok, you installed a video player. Fine. It has a GUI, settings and all. Oh, you want to play any videos with it? Go search for their dependencies.
Yep, and lately it stopped working altogether. I have since switched to mpv.
mpv is better
… go on
Faster, simpler but not user friendly.
What’s the point of simplicity if it’s not for user-friendliness?
Measuring epeen mostly.
Depends on your usecase. It’s user friendly if all you care about is playing a video, but not if you want to push it further.
I mean, it is user-friendly in some ways, depending how you define that.
Double-click a video and it opens. You get a visually appealing, sleek and minimalistic UI that helpfully appears only when your mouse is over the video, and otherwise gets out of the way. You can seek, adjust volume, select audio language and subtitles, and that’s it. Very uncluttered, obvious and easy in the way that modern applications try to be.
For most usage, that’s enough. It’s when you find yourself needing to pan/scan, or change subtitle offset, or enable looping etc you discover there are no buttons or menus for those things and you have to go hit the docs to discover what the keybinds are.
Minimalism rarely is ever user friendly is the problem.
Minimalism has the assumption the user preknows how to do everything.
User friendlyness is how you end up with button gore. It’s why UI/UX is so hard to do well.
We can’t simply say minimalism is bad, though, because the truth is “it depends”.
The iPod Shuffle music player from the mid 2000s could be considered a minimalistic design. It had no screen, with only buttons for next, previous, play, pause, volume and (as the name suggests) shuffle. The player had far less functionality than its big brother iPods, but because it had less functions, the interface didn’t need many buttons.
It was, perhaps, “truly” minimal.
In software we do sometimes have true minimalism, but more often than not we actually have a lot of features, but have to choose to hide some amount of it and have a simpler interface, and the amount we choose to show or hide may determine how “minimalist” or not it appears.
So you can have minimalism via simply /not having/ functions, or you can have minimalism via hiding.
When you open a CAD program for the first time, you are likely immediately intimidated by the sheer number of buttons and toolbars, with no idea what to press. But a minimalist CAD program would be a nightmare because it ruins any discoverability of features. Showing the complexity is necessary.
On the other hand, an image viewer which is secretly also a featureful image editor - but hides all the edit controls behind an ‘edit’ button until you ask for them - is perhaps an appropriate time to hide it.
To look at mpv specifically, my personal opinion is that the lack of any option toolbars is ‘bad’ minimalism because it forces you to the wiki to find out how to do things with keybinds, but the main interface is ‘good’ minimalism because it shows you the controls you need probably 95% of the time, and nothing extra beyond that.
Don’t they both use ffmpeg so their codecs support is exactly the same?
Yep, to me, simply because it can be color managed. Just because VLC will play anything, doesn’t mean it’ll play it well.
Both are good tools for the job. I use mpv but VLC just works for 99% of use cases. mpv is best for working with terminals, vlc is best for GUI and is consistently easy on any operating system, even android.
Eventually, after I stop using my steam deck I’m going to turn it into a VLC machine. With emulators on it too
Isn’t a tablet gonna offer a larger screen for less weight if all you wanna do is watch videos
Music
Then a small dedicated music player like an ipod is even better, you wanna lug around a steam deck just to listen to music?
Idk who knows what I’ll use it for down the road.
I rarely take a laptop on trips anymore (unless its my work one), bt kb+mouse, plug in 4tb ssd (that has built in hdmi out). shitty plywood stand that i made. It’s cool.
frankly the shitty cheap used laptops that i get, its probably better performance than any of them if i do need to do anything serious.
Me, upon installing Debian KDE distro, and having Dragon Player pop up: I ALREADY INSTALLED VLC, WHAT THE HELL DUDES
It’s so bizarre that KDE “makes” its “own” videoplayer when libVLC is literally a dependency of KDE.
The real question is why they make two! Did a fresh install of Fedora KDE the other day and had to remove dragon and installed haruna.
They’ve been trying to replace all of their software with
Qt4Qt5Qt6 versions for like 7 centuries now.Two? Don’t forget Kaffeine!
Nah. mpv.
Until you want to add external subtitles
When the file is called
video.mkvname themvideo.srt. MPV will pick it up automatically.I know, but what about when I have several subtitle files? Different languages, or maybe several subtitle files I downloaded and want to check which one matches my video? mpv has zero flexibility.
With VLC I can just “Subtitle / Add subtitle track” or add the language code after the filename (
video.en.srt,video.fr.srt,video.spa.srt), with mpv: just one file at a time: rename, launch, retry.
I don’t know what it is about mpv that makes it my favourite. Gstreamer is performative enough. FFplay is also pretty clean. Cvlc is fine.
I think I just like that it has sensible controls, and ultimately gets out of the way
I really like the configuration aspect of it. You can customize how it works internally and how it even looks. For example, I use a big 1m diagonal TV as my main screen and I sit about 45cm in front of it. So with bidirectional integer scaling, Full HD looks kind of blurry and bad, but with lanczos scaling it looks great! And that’s why I like MPV.
If I want a program that calls a video player seemlessly for the end user mpv is great.
If I want an actual app that is human useable and doesn’t require arcane bullshit. I’ll use VLC.
Different use cases really.
I’m continually impressed that mpv can run from a tty. It does not need X11 or Wayland, it can render directly to the framebuffer itself!
VLC is good but I like MPC-HC best. Open source and has a shit load of nerdy ass technical options and great upscaling through madVR.
Somehow I’m unable to let VLC play any kind of video on my Arch (actually cachyos) laptop. Whatever the format it says codec is missing even if I installed everything (mpv, totem and others can play them).
(I tried to install vlc-git from aur but then gave up when after 30 minutes was still compiling, I don’t have enough patience to wait all that time every time I run
yay)I’m forced to run the flatpak version of VLC for some reason, the only way to make it work
You should read the wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VLC_media_player
Likely you just want vlc-plugins-all
Back in the day Media Player Classic was this for me. I didn’t know enough about codecs but I knew that player seemed to have all of them.
Of course it’s now superceded by vlc (and maybe even was at the time) but it’s still a fond memory of working out why the video I downloaded only played audio.
the only one that could play the videos i recorded on my BlackBerry 2008-2012
There are other media players?
Developed by the French and funded by the EU. I’ll download it.
If you’re telling us you found Lemmy before vlc that’s honestly remarkable.
Despite that I still like it
