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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!
"VLC: Best media player for jerks!"
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
Did they make a better desktop icon yet?
I'd love to use VLC legally in the US, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen any time soon.
VLC FAQ
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.
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?
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
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
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.