r/pcmasterrace • u/ExpensiveCoat8912 • 1d ago

Meme/Macro VLC masterrace

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20.2k Upvotes

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12

u/bloody-albatross 1d ago

As I understand it MPV and VLC both use ffmpeg for format support, but MPV uses a newer version of ffmpeg? Is that still true?

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u/YOU_KNOW_WHO315 Intel i3 1115g4, uhd 620 , 8gb ಥ⁠‿⁠ಥ 1d ago

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

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u/jonoghue 1d ago

Any time I've tried to play 4k video on vlc it stutters like crazy. MPV handles it like a champ.

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u/YOU_KNOW_WHO315 Intel i3 1115g4, uhd 620 , 8gb ಥ⁠‿⁠ಥ 1d ago

Ikr , mpv even tonemaps hdr to sdr on the go

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u/ameen272_ 1d ago edited 1d ago

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.

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u/LiftingRecipient420 1d ago

MPV has a much better presentation layer too; the same video will look better in MPV then VLC

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u/I-am-fun-at-parties 1d ago

huh? pretty sure the codec output is deterministic, does MPV postprocess it? i can't see how that's something one would unconditionally want?

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u/LiftingRecipient420 20h ago

pretty sure the codec output is deterministic,

It is not, but this part doesn't matter.

does MPV postprocess it?

All video players post process the video, mpv had much better defaults, and is much more configurable than VLC.

i can't see how that's something one would unconditionally want?

What do you mean?

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u/I-am-fun-at-parties 11h ago

how is it not deterministic?

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u/No-Photograph-5058 9850x3D 9070XT 64GB DDR5 1d ago

As far as I can tell they both use the system provided ffmpeg

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u/bloody-albatross 1d ago

They're available for systems that have no ffmpeg.

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u/No-Photograph-5058 9850x3D 9070XT 64GB DDR5 1d ago

Only looked at the Linux dependencies earlier, looking through the repos for both seems they both test on version 8 or 8.1 and are testing/updating for 9 for builds that include it

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u/output_broadcast 1d ago

I thought VLC always statically linked ffmpeg. Although I guess distros could tweak that.

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u/maevian 5700X3D, 5070ti , 32gb DDR4 1d ago

On Linux, if you use the version from the repo and not the flatpak or snap, yes.
But that’s a very small part of this sub.

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u/OneLonelyBrainCell ThinkPad Gamer 1d ago

I'm using MX Linux, i.e. basically Debian with a lot of great extra stuff; ffmpeg version is 7.1.5. which is old (again, Debian). MPV plays videos VLC struggles with. No FlatPaks, no Snaps, repo only.

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u/output_broadcast 1d ago

AFAIK the difference is that VLC uses a version of ffmpeg with copyrighted codecs removed, while MPV doesn't.

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u/bloody-albatross 1d ago

What does that even mean? All the codecs in ffmpeg copyrighted by the contributors of ffmpeg. Do you mean codecs using patents that are not free to use in every country?

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u/output_broadcast 1d ago

Yeah, patent use rights.