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.

Comments

Better than mplayer?

[Murpster]

Color me skeptical.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Bashae]

I'm a Windows user. I prefer Media Player Classic to VLC. It just works better for me.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Murpster]

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?

Re:Better than mplayer?

[skinlayers]

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?

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Etrias]

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.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[queequeg1]

+1. Media Player Classic has been so good on difficult files that if it fails, I generally just give up (on the assumption that figuring out how to play such a difficult file will be more trouble than it's worth).

Re:Better than mplayer?

[eball]

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).

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Shark]

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.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[TheRealMindChild]

Its a bloody video player man. It goes without saying that the OUTPUT is GRAPHICAL. Why wouldn't you want to USE a GRAPHICAL user interface to it?

I can almost forgive elitism in some avenues, but this is just making your life more complicated for no good reason.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Khyber]

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.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Zerth]

Because I'm watching a movie, not the graphical interface.

I'd rather hit the volume up button on my keyboard instead of waggling the mouse until the overlay pops up and then wait while it blocks part of the movie until it fades again.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[clone53421]

Ctrl-Up/Dn works fine for me.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[ACMENEWSLLC]

Media Player Classic was great, but it's no longer updated and has several security flaws that are un patched. You can run a Secunia offline scan (download the scanner) and it will give you all the details about this.

VLC is far superior to Media Player Classic. It can play almost anything. It has a problem with WMV's that are encrypted or require a codec download (usually a virus if p2p.) On Mac, it can play encrypted DVDs too. Add the playlists for Shoutcast and you have tens of thousands of audio and video channels.

You can merge streams such as two axis video cameras into a single display. You can overlay things. You can record it to disk or re-stream it. You have many effects such as motion detection and motion blur which when set to max, is pretty nice for CCTV use.

And with VLC, you don't have to hunt for CODECs like you do with WMPlayer.

It's really worth trying out.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Andy Dodd]

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.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[UnrefinedLayman]

I experienced this with BSG Razor on DVD; it would not play properly in VLC or Media Player Classic on Windows, or VLC on Mac OS X. It played fine on Apple's DVD player. This is because of the way deleted scenes are included in some DVDs: rather than having two full copies of a film on the disc, they have the original copy and the deleted scenes, and if you choose to play the DVD in the unedited/director's-cut/whatever mode, then those scenes get spliced into the playback of the original. It's that splicing that causes the trouble. Whoever invented it should eat a back of dicks for breaking something that everyone believed worked just fine.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Rary]

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.

• Set VLC as default for selected file type in preferences, then double-click file.
• Open VLC, then drag file onto VLC window.
• Right-click file, select Open With, browse to VLC executable.

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.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[khellendros1984]

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*

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[Arthur Dent]

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.

Re:Better than mplayer?

[ShieldW0lf]

Whoever invented it should eat a back of dicks for breaking something that everyone believed worked just fine.

I'm curious... how many dicks are in a back, exactly?

VLC is OK.

[c0l0]

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).

Re:VLC is OK.

[MoonBuggy]

Admittedly a command line is pretty much the only thing that could be more minimal than the VLC interface, but you're probably in a fairly niche market if you find a CLI media player to be the most intuitive. Each to their own and all that, though.

Re:VLC is OK.

[MightyYar]

why someone would prefer it over using mplayer

On Mac machines. VLC is one of those rare applications that works best on Macintosh. My personal preference for it stems from the clean GUI, the working DVD support, and the fact that it will actually play full-screen on your second monitor while still letting you work on the first monitor in other applications.

It's also a fine player on Windows and Linux - though not as compelling as those platforms have other very good choices.

Re:VLC is OK.

[Quasar1999]

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.

Re:VLC is OK.

[Sj0]

I'm sort of surprised at the arguments.

Both VLC and mplayer are so insanely good, so much better than any alternatives, that it's kind of like arguing about whether you should drink belgian beer or german beer compared to drinking raw sewage.

Re:VLC is OK.

[YttriumOxide]

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.

Re:VLC is OK.

[PitaBred]

I still use the non-GUI mplayer to play videos, even if I click on them. The arrow keys and other controls are just easier to navigate the video than the clicky controls. And if I'm watching the video full-screen (which is usually) there's no room for the GUI controls anyway, so why even bother?

Fine we can just change it then.

[Chris Burke]

"VLC: Best media player for jerks!"

Re:Fine we can just change it then.

[AndrewNeo]

"Yeah, well, the jerk store called, and they're running out of copies of VLC!"

Revert interface to 0.8.6, or use OSX GUIfor win32

[Hadlock]

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.

The most important question is...

[CAFED00D]

Did they make a better desktop icon yet?

Re:Revert interface to 0.8.6, or use OSX GUIfor wi

[TypoNAM]

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. :(

VLC is illegal in the US

[Todrael]

I'd love to use VLC legally in the US, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen any time soon.

VLC FAQ

Media Player Classic Homecinema

[JakFrost]

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.

MPC Homecinema

[Knara]

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.

Re:MPC Homecinema

[Guspaz]

You really shouldn't need any codec downloaders or codec packs.

MPC-HC has integrated a good deal of libavcodec (same library used in mplayer, ffmpeg/ffdshow, VLC, xine, gstreamer/totem, etc.) Out of the box, MPC-HC should play back virtually anything you throw at it. It also has integrated subtitle support that is superior to directvobsub. After all, the author of MPC is the same guy who wrote directvobsub, and MPC can render the subs at native screen-res, which looks quite nice.

Personally, though, I install three things for media playback:

1) MPC-HC: eed a player, and this one is great.

2) Haali's Splitter: This Matroska (MKV) splitter is better than MPC's own, but I primarily use this to get Haali's Renderer. It does accurate two-pass bicubic scaling, and supports buffering of raw uncompressed data (good for handling CPU spikes). Supported by MPC.

3) ffdshow-tryouts: This fork of ffdshow is widely regarded as the successor to ffdshow. This will provide all the codec support that MPC-HC might be missing, since MPC-HC focuses on the mainstream codecs rather than the more esoteric ones. I tend to use ffdshow as the default codec in order to use some of the ffdshow filters. Primarily, deband, which I desperately wish somebody would port to mplayer, and the occasional other filter like yadif deinterlacing or perhaps an unsharp mask.

Of course, since I'm a Linux user, these days I just use smplayer. Unfortunately, smplayer is extremely buggy, and mplayer/smplayer have rather limited support for DVD menus via libdvdnav. And again, I'm flabberghasted that nobody has ported ffdshow's deband filter to mplayer; it's an enormous quality improvement on pretty much every video, and has absolutely no negative impact on level of detail.

Re:Until...

[Andy Dodd]

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.

Re:Eh...

[Facegarden]

Of course it does, but generally i keep my keyboard stowed when using my Media Center. The mouse is small so I keep it with the remotes

Well, http://wiki.videolan.org/Mouse_Gestures then...

From your link:

left : Short time skip backward (10sec by default)
right : Short time skip forward (10sec by default)
left-up : Faster
right-up : Slower
left-down : Go to previous entry in playlist
right-down : Go to next entry in playlist
left-right : Play/Pause
right-left : Play/Pause
up : Volume up
down : Volume down
up-down : Mute Volume
down-up : Mute Volume
up-right : Change Audio track
down-right : Change Subtitle track
up-left : Enter fullscreen mode
down-left : Quit VLC

Hmm... They do ALL that and they can't add
"Single click: Play/pause"? Lame. I mean, obviously not everyone cares but it works REALLY well being able to click to pause in MPC. Gestures? Gestures are like the red-headed stepchild of interface methods - they are weird and people don't like them. Meanwhile, *clicking* the mouse, the thing it was designed to do, does nothing. I find this highly irritating.

And even if there is some way to force it, or make it work, or open some config file and change a line, why the hell isn't it standard!? It works well and fits right in where there is currently NO interface feature. It seems dead obvious to me and its simple things like that that make me question a project. Forget about pausing, who uses VLC and doesn't wish the trackbar expanded when you went full screen? I have a nice 1920x1080 TV and the trackbar is only like 600px wide. WTF? Try scrolling back 60 seconds in the godfather on a 600px wide trackbar 'cause your friend distracted you on a good part. That's damn tough, 60 seconds is only 3 pixels! if it were 1920 wide it would be 10px - tough but 3 times easier! I mean if this were a beta that would be fine but VLC has been around forever! I know they're still not at v1.0 but gmail is still in beta, so that's not always in indicator.

And the fact that it's more processor intensive than MPC? How many people are working on VLC that they can't even match MPC? MPC even streams better over a LAN at my place, which is funny because VIDEO LAN CLIENT should be better!
-Taylor

Correction

[Futurepower(R)]

Not vxWorks. WxWidgets, the former WxWindows, a cross-platform GUI toolkit.

It's Video LAN Client

[Anonymous Coward]

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

NOW SEEKS IN FLV FILES!

[Philip K Dickhead]

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.