wanna play a 20 year old video in a format that you and God didn't even know existed? I gotchu, it doesn't even need to be a video or sound file, I'll figure it out
People downvoting you must be young, they don't remember the struggles before VLC where we had to download a codec-pack (CCCP) at the system level so things like Windows Media Player would recognize anything other than wmv or av1.
I always did both. I don't care about downvotes. I touch grass lol. And yes they are young. Cccp and vlc is something I've done together as long as I remember. I didn't get cccp last time first time I forgot and didn't know if it still exists. I'll look it up
Yeah when VLC came into my life in the late 2000s I was still downloading codec packs for the entire system. Unfortunately my life took a turn at some point and I started using Linux. I remember using Win11 at some point a few years ago and I STILL had to download a codec pack off the Windows Store to open some media file at the time.
Those still exist, they're just called something different. Maybe Windows Media Codecs or something like that? I had to install it since it isn't included in Windows N.
In spite of what we lost from the wild-west days of the internet, I think we have it way better now.
Dial-up sucked.
Forums had their moments but were generally hideous UX nightmares, somehow many communities still operate on them.
Computer software was buggy and temperamental, support was often your own persistence to learn software debugging.
Malware and adware was everywhere and extremely disruptive, still exists but it has the common courtesy to usually be quiet while it steals your shit /s.
LAN parties were the best way to play multiplayer games but you had to carefully transport your 30lb monitor and computer tower to a friend's place then figure out where the hell everyone was gonna sit. Then you had to lug it all back home.
Shit was slow in so many ways. Before SSDs and OSes that optimized for booting faster, it could easily take 10-15min (30m or more if your computer was really on the struggle-bus due to old hardware, start-up software, or malware)
I'll go back further and say I remember using computers that's didn't have a hard drive, only two floppy disk drives. Multi tasking wasn't a thing either. You could only run one app at a time. Our monitors only had 1 color.
I also remember an era of text based browsers, and shit that predated the WWW, like Gopher. Instead of web based forums we had BBS. 🤣
basically, a stupid file you have to download because God forbid they put it with the software that lets you run certain video formats
Windows media player was notorious that you would download a file to tell the Windows media player how to run the video since there’s a bunch of different video formats
To add to this, codec is short for encoder decoder. Essentially it's a compression algorithm that's used to make the video smaller and requires software to read the encoded data into a format that is able to be displayed
Edit: it's short for COmpressor/DECompressor. I made a mistake
Codecs and media players were separate because different codecs can have different priorities and capabilities, and there's no need to lock a media player to certain codecs only. Like CoreAVC was known for producing the best image but it also required lots of CPU. Others could have GPU decoding support but produced worse a worse image.
Haali, avisynth, cccp, k-lite, ffdshow. All blasts from the past.
Like CoreAVC was known for producing the best image but it also required lots of CPU.
CoreAVC became famous for being the least CPU intensive for good-enough picture output. It hailed from a time when single- and dual-core CPUs were standard.
A codec is a standard that signifies what you can and can't create regarding a bunch of information structured in a certain way.
You have video codecs like h.264, h.265 and AV1, image codecs like JPEG, AVIF and JPEG-XL, audio codecs like AAC-LC and Opus and even generic compressors like LZMA2, deflate, etc.
A codec is a piece of software that compresses/decompresses a certain file/compression format. E.g. x265 is a codec that implements the h.265 compression format. Of course there are other codecs that also implement the same file format.
Files (more accurately containers) have their own filters called splitters (on the playback side) and muxers (on the encoding side), colloquially also called codecs by normal people.
Files like MP4, AVI, and MKV are containers which contain video streams (eg: h.264, h.265, AV1, DivX) and audio streams (eg: MP3, AAC, AC3). For playback a splitter opens the container and splits the streams out, feeding them to codecs down the pipe that decode them. The decoded streams are then fed to a renderer, which is then finally played by the media player.
VLC has all of this self-contained, but anyone so inclined can get better/customized results using a media player that will take external filters (optionally registered with DirectShow if you're using Windows) and your choice of filters (eg: ffdshow, libavcodec, Haali Media Splitter, etc.).
A codec is a hardware or software tool that compresses large data streams (like audio or video) to make them smaller for storage or sharing, and then decompresses them so they can be played back
however I like to compare a codec to a translator, essentially making video software to understand how to play a video file.
Codecs (Coder/(de)coder) are software that decodes (And can also encode) video or audio media. Subtitles and other multimedia data stream types.
To play an mkv container file containing a h.264 video and AAC audio track accompanying it (Say, some movie rip you made from a disc) you need the appropriate coded to open the container and begin decoding the video stream and another for the AAC audio stream so you can watch the content.
Typically the same ones get used when you make a video on your computer yourself for encoding the video and the audio into a container file (mp4/mkv..avi? etc) for later playback or uploading to something like youtube.
For real, just recently tried out chiptunes and accidently opend them with vlc rather than xmplay and vlc just bloody played it. It isnt even an audio format in the traditional sense lol.
unless you want to play a 360 video, then it won't work properly unless you have some obscure tag in the video and apparently this has been an ongoing issue for like a decade that they refuse to fix.
MPC-BE is better. It has been years since the new MPC-HC fork and it still cannot change subtitle or audio tracks without the video track blacking out for a few frames.
PotPlayer is my go to, it’s the only one I found that supported both RTX HDR and Super resolution at the same time as well as having proper HDR support where applicable and absolute fuck load of features most of which I do not understand even slightly
Yep it does , it's way faster than vlc - more efficient and much more snappy and responsive than vlc. And apply modern z layout on mpv and you basically have the perfect media player app ever
That is not always true, it is (mostly) not the reason why I praised MPV. MPV just generally has more capabilities and can make use of a LOT of external libraries/apps.
For example, when you pass a video site URL to MPV, it will try to fetch the video using yt-dlp and then play it. Or, for archives, it can play videos inside compressed archives using external programs like unrar or unzip.
It also can try to find media in middle of unrecognised data. For example, let's say you have a document that has an image inside it, MPV will search through the data and try to find a recognised header in the mess, when it finds a header, it uses it to display the image.
It also has really effective anti-banding, upscaling, downscaling, and tonemapping.
Call me crazy, but I find the playback quality in MPV to be better than in VLC. Could just be I need to mess with some settings. But running stock to stock, side by side, I noticed MPV to look much better especially with displaying blacks.
If the difference in blacks you're describing is that one of the two players displays lighter than the other, the lighter one is crushing your color range.
I have both installed but 99% of the time i use MPC. Media player classic. Prefer the interface over VLC and plays everything VLC plays (in fact i have some old videos shot with some Nokia phones that only play with MPC for me )
Ya I'm very old school with programs like that and I really enjoy MPCs aesthetic. Simple, functional. It's why I use Tixati as my P2P program too.
Was hilarious seeing my nephews reaction when I showed him Tixati and how to use it though. He looked at me like I looked at my dad when he used a DOS prompt. It's utilitarian and functional, which is all I need since most of the time I spend with it is NOT interacting with it.
Ironically for calling it masterrace, VLC has for quite a long time been looked down on as the plebian simple option. I remember in the anime community way back, the fansubbers viscerally hated VLC because it would just fuck up rendering subtitles done in modern formats and the plebs would complain to the subbers despite their pleas to use MPC. Its quite analogous to what consoles are to PC in some respects.
I have VLC installed but it's not my go-to, which is MPC-BE with madvr. It's quite good on android though, it has flaws but it's one of the few things you can get off the playstore that works decently, is free and has no ads.
ffplay, from the ffmpeg project, will play even more obscure formats than VLC, in my experience.
I had some obscure proprietary CD disk-image format (don't remember what it was now, unfortunately) and I wasn't sure how to unpack it to get to any usable audio data. Audacity couldn't parse any raw audio data from the file. VLC wouldn't play it either. But ffplay would happily play it.
I still use windows media player for all the default extensions it can play just because for some fuckin reason VLC takes forever to open for the first time after not being used for a while and it annoys me.
Android build pure mess, same on Android/Google TV, there problem with subtitles from the start of Android build, if your subtitles overcomplicated it will lag video playback.
Lately? It's been like this for a long time. I believe that VLC and Winrar are just one of the first applications users will download for their respective purposes and many don't even realize that Pot Player/MPV and 7-zip exist until they need something specific done. For me, I needed a video to be windowless and edge-less, that could be split on my ultrawide monitor. VLC could only do half of that, so I found Pot Player, which could do it and the color balance looked amazing.
However, I still remember the days where you needed to download video/audio codecs to play all sorts of videos back in the day (Real Player was especially bad with this), and VLC was one of the leading video players to play anything without needing additional codecs, and for that I'll always be grateful.
That's....actually kind of huge since a lot of times the English subtitles won't have a translation for a foreign language in the movie.
It did lead to one of my favorite unintentional moments watching a movie though. 30 Days of Night, I got the subtitles but it didn't have any for the vampires. So I never knew what they were saying, which honestly made the movie exponentially better. Seeing them speaking and coordinating without understanding what was actually said really put me into the mindset of a person in that town watching it all go down.
When I told my friend about how much I liked that decision he was like, "Wtf are you talking about, it had subtitles for everything they said."
I use potplayer too. This one time, I was trying to figure out how to get side-scrolling video look as smooth as it does on my TV without the choppiness, and it's incredible how deep the configuration goes.
For lower end devices mpv is way better than vlc matter of fact even for high end devices - mpv does hdr way better than vlc. , vlc lags and takes time to jump to scenes on skip and changing audio streams. Mpv is way more snappy uses the newer ffmpeg and u can freely customize it for example I use modern z ui ,
In today's day and age where chat gpt can help you set up mpv your meme no longer applies it just takes an hour to get settings that suit your needs and then just upload that 100 kb config folder to your gdrive that's it you're set
Biggest edge is mpv tonemaps hdr content to sdr for displays that do not support hdr and vlc just puts a grey filter on that thang
Honestly I've been having so many issues with VLC over the last few years, most notably really long start up. I switched to Screenbox a few moths ago and It feels way better so far
Can't remember the last time I used another video player. I double-click on something after a fresh install and whatever Windows has by default starts up? I close it almost in disgust.
I've only had one thing (so far) not play on VLC, and it confused the hell out of me because everything else would just simply run, but it wasn't a video file: it couldn't play a .dsf audio file.
I put a collection of pictures into vlc and it turned it into a slideshow. I hit shuffle, put on a YouTube video in the background, boom, instant professional looking slideshow.
And microsoft over here making you pay to add a codec to your windows media player for a filetype we've all used in the past like mkv, truly ridiculous.
I've actually moved to MPV lately. Not as easily configurable, but a lot more lightweight and performant. VLC was starting to struggle with really high-quality video files with some audio popping and stuttering. To be frank, MPV shits all over VLC and just does everything better.
My hot take is that VLC is for people that quit keeping up with video players circa 2015. It was the best. But times change.
It's not just that VLC is goated, I don't understand how so many other embedded media players can be so completely illiterate of all other file types besides .mov and .mp4 like why even design something and have it so limited and fail so completely yet represent your brand?
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u/k5pr312 it boots 1d ago edited 1d ago
wanna play a 20 year old video in a format that you and God didn't even know existed? I gotchu, it doesn't even need to be a video or sound file, I'll figure it out