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VLC 0.9.9, The Best Media Player Just Got Better
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.
I've never found any videos or audio files mplayer doesn't play. I can use command lines and not have to be burdened by some silly GUI with mplayer (but it has a GUI for people who are keyboard-impaired). It has that super-useful -dumpstream feature for saving audio files off of the net which streaming sites make difficult for people to save. It lets you convert files between different formats, separately rip out the audio or video parts of a movie, or replace the audio track to a movie (or add audio to a silent video). How much of this does VLC do?
mplayer plays almost everything I've thrown at it. It even handles corrupt files pretty well. VLC dies a horrible death if the file is corrupt, even with just a few bytes being messed up in a header.
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.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Sorry... though I appreciate VLC, I think its far from the best media player. My vote would go to the numerous incarnation of MPlayer. From Xbox Media Center to SMPlayer on Linux and Windows to MPlayer OSX Extended 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?
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.
moox. for a new generation.
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.
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.
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.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
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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.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Yes, VLC has a bad habit of only using its own codecs (even when "Use System Codecs" is selected), so if they don't cover what you need, or there are better ones out there, you're not taking advantage of that.
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).
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.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
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.
Mind the frickin' laser...
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player 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 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) 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 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 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 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 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 is also a complete alternative that now has hardware acceleration support for nVidia video cards with the latest SVN releases.
Ctrl-Up/Dn works fine for me.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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, you just needed to do a very small amount of research.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Not vxWorks. WxWidgets, the former WxWindows, a cross-platform GUI toolkit.
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.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
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
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.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
It's a capability that was in the DVD specification from the beginning, but historically it's rare enough that not everyone bothers to implement it. *decides to try his copy of Razor when he gets home*
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.
Well, I would want to use VLC if I want to skip that annoying FBI warning or the mandatory unskippable movie previews before the main feature.