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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.
Color me skeptical.
VLC is an OK media playback application. I, for one, never understood why someone would prefer it over using mplayer. It's got all the nice libavcodec improvements first, and is the perfect example of unintrusive UI design (note that I'm talking about the CLI-only `mplayer`, not `gmplayer` or any other graphical front-end).
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Using "your" for "you're" and accusing someone of bragging when a third party says it's the best also makes you look like a jerk.
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?
"VLC: Best media player for jerks!"
The enemies of Democracy are
in fedora I use mplayer. In vista/xp I use VLC. WMP and WMPC would crash occasionally no matter what, and never seemed to load all codecs properly. Arguing which one is better is like driving a car in reverse and blindfolded...it just doesn't make sense.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
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.
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
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
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.
Did they make a better desktop icon yet?
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. :(
This space is not for rent.
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
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 have a bad impression of VLC. Best to only use it if the other players can't play it.
p.s. if you are using Media Player Classic, avoid the haali media splitter crap. It causes crashes and instability[1], especially if you are using it with other stuff like windows movie maker (which someone found out the hard way - not me fortunately).
[1] http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/codecs_and_filters/haalimediasplitter.cfm
I'd love to use VLC legally in the US, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen any time soon.
VLC FAQ
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.
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):
All of this for really not that much cash. The PC was almost a grand a year ago when I bought it but of course you could get the same specs for much cheaper now. I wanted a dedicated machine because I knew I was much less likely to mess that up than my primary machine. SageTV was $80. I donated $20 to the LM Remote Keymap people because it was such a useful tool. I just wanted something that would work and could play blu-ray/hd-dvd (that was before BR won). And one that I wouldn't have to spend hours on due to quirky hardware problems because I'd built it myself.
I also needed something beefy enough to handle HD mkvs and whatever else might come out in the next few years. My old repurposed machine started to skip a bit on the HD.
So there you have if, whether you cared to know or not. Just posting this because it might help someone else who has gotten really sick and tired of trying to cobble together various apps and front-ends and wireless keyboards and mice and just want something that works reliably and smoothly while they're sitting on the couch with a remote.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
The only way to go Comrade!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
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.
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.
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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
You want the best media player? Go with the Frog. Ogg Frog, that is. vlc? They can't get their mutexes right, so who knows what else they got wrong. iTunes? Sure, if you don't mind the fact the stale buffer bugs when you're ripping CDs.
Ummm, excuse Mr. Crawford, errr...Ogg Frog, but, um, your website says that Ogg Frog hasn't been released yet. Furthermore, your website hasn't been updated since 2005. I think perhaps Duke Nukem Forever has a better chance of being released before Ogg Frog.
-- Just some guy who's been wondering when you'll release the damned thing
My blog
Not vxWorks. WxWidgets, the former WxWindows, a cross-platform GUI toolkit.
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
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.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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.
Bye!