Years ago I remember complaining on HN that VLC didn't support remembering the position of the video you've already partially watched, when multiple other video players supported it.
The only reply was someone saying you should contribute to the open source project yourself to fix it instead of complaining. I don't know anything about coding a multi-platform video player so I wasn't much use but not long after they released a version supporting it and I felt bad for complaining.
ngl: I was expecting a crazy success story where you started learning to code to add your feature and then you went on becoming a streaming expert at a FAANG
VLC was a big deal in the 2000s if you wanted to watch torrented anime. Operating systems didn't come with players with broad codec support and it was a legitimate nightmare to figure out what fly by night codec worked with whatever the bootleggers cobbled together to encode the video of the week.
These days, operating systems already have rock solid video players with far less clunky UI.
On Linux, video is already sublime thanks to ffmpeg and the dozens of available frontends.
It feels like wrestling with 1998 in trying to use VLC these days. It's got a real WinAmp feel to it.
But the real elephant in the room is that the lionshare of video is now being delivered by major media platforms like YouTube.
I remember having to install the K-Lite Codec Pack back in the day (college days) to be able to watch videos I would "acquire". When I eventually discovered VLC, it was like a breath of fresh air. I still use it to this day as my default video player, because nothing else comes close to the quality they have.
In the early 2000s the video field was flooded with fast paced releases of new codecs and new codecs versions, and there was codecs implementation to downloads right and left, and people were bundling them and releasing them with names sounding like a warez group. It was a little crazy to watch a video at the time.
This was mitigated by vlc and mplayer, two video players that integrated most codecs as fast as they could, and it was a breath of fresh air. You just started them and any video would play, no codec issue anymore.
MPlayer has not been updated for some times, and traction was lost, but VLC, although looking a bit old on the UI-side (and a little buggy on ARM Windows) is still here and is solid when someone just wants to watch a video on any platform.
That's... a very subjective take to be polite and can't agree much. I enjoy VLC very much, install it everywhere even on TV, and couldn't care less about some OS/bundled players, codecs and whatnot. UI is great, clean, easy to navigate. Couldn't ask more from video player.
People like VLC. Personally I am a mpv-user though. For
some reason the mental model by mpv (and before that mplayer)
works better for me.
On Windows, VLC is quite convenient though. While I also use
mpv there, for an elderly relative I have simply used and
installed VLC there, as the default GUI mode is more convenient
for elderly people.
I’ve been using it to listen to actual MP3s of the music I have. I can’t find any decent MP3 player on iOS (incredibly ironic given the iPod was one of the 3 devices the iPhone was supposed to be when Steve Jobs first introduced it) and VLC is pretty good.
I’m using VLC because it’s the only one that I know that can play opus. I chose the latter for lossy encoding because I have a few albums that are gapless and it’s hackish to get mp3 to support those (other than single mp3 file and cue file).
Even within people involved in the local market it is not a widespread thing, but for a year now he's been the CTO of Scaleway, one of the French cloud providers.
That's not what a sell out means in this context. He refused offers in millions of dollars to sell VLC to possibly shady parties, thereby keeping it safe for people like us. Kyber on the other hand, is a dual licensed AGPL - commercial software. That's an entirely acceptable and respected practice in the FOSS community. That doesn't make him a sell out.
Have used VLC for at least 20 years. Recently I upgraded an old Dell 9400 laptop that dates from around 2006 to Debian Bookworm (the end of the line for the 32-bit machines). It has a nice 1600x1200 display, but the Nvidia Graphics (Geforce Go 7900 GS) is poorly supported and mpv now requires --hwdec=no, making 720p videos barely playable. VLC now uses a fraction of the CPU as mpv does for video, which makes even 1080p videos playable. For some reason VLC chokes at the beginning of every video (tries to play before everything is ready), but by pausing the video and backing up to time zero it plays perfectly. All of this to say that VLC has saved the day as it frequently has over the years.
The award is well deserved, VLC was a godsend a few years ago but I’m not sure what VLC brings to the table nowadays. All other players play videos just fine on Linux now. I guess VLC is only a thing on Windows because the default software is crap. On Linux almost everyone now use whatever is the default player or MPV for the nerds.
I still use VLC to this day on Linux because it's still as great as it ever was. I'm gonna have to install something to play videos, why wouldn't it be VLC?
I used VLC until I looked for a backward frame step functionality. I then found this thread on the VLC forums where the maintainers explain (with bad attitude) why this functionality is technically impossible. Everyone points out that mpv supports it, but the maintainers double down and say they’re Doing It Wrong and it shouldn’t be possible.
On Windows at least VLC has had better alternatives for the past 20 years, both feature and UI wise. I had frame-stepping hotkeys back in the mid-00s with Korean video players. These days I use the currently maintained fork of MPC-HC which similarly has this.
On Mac it wasn't until the mid-10s that I found a decent player.
“I, like others, arrived here through a Google search looking for this feature. Reading this thread is one of the worst decisions I've made recently. I will never have this time back and I am worse for it.”
I don't know, I still have issues with the default media player in Ubuntu not working for either video or sound. I'm sure it's solvable, but it's easier to just install VLC, so that's what I do.
I use it on my Android phone. Is there a better FOSS media player (or better any media player?).
VLC also still (or at least recently?) provides APKs you can download to install on very old Android versions. I have it installed on a few old Android tablets (and by old I mean something like Android version 4).
As a Windows user, I never used VLC because I didn't like its UI and not having the "click to pause" was a big issue when you control a media center with a mouse.
So I used Media Player Classic without any issues for years.
When I moved to Linux Desktop, it came with VLC so I tried and forced me to use that damn "space to pause".
But half my videos had issues playing.
Being in KDE, I switched to Haruna.
It's ugly, but I can play anything without issues... and I can "click to pause"!
VLC was not important on Linux. Because we have ffmpeg as foundation, used by mplayer and nowadays mpv. The later is my recommendation. Whether on the tty (awesome!) or on Wayland. If you prefer a native Gtk an interface is available, named Celluloid. In all these cases mpv is mighty, reliable, fits into the environment with a frugal interface.
We’ve also players based on gstreamer but ffmpeg is more reliable.
But the need for a reliable player on Windows, Android, macOS, iOS and tvOS is big. Because their default players suck. VLC comes with an awkward UI and the weird built-in stuff for SMB. But from a 2001 point-of-view it makes sense, LAN-parties are nice and back then they were everywhere. And Windows doesn’t support WebDAV well.
My favorite is mpv. But I’m still tankful that I’ve one usable player in my iPhone.
I might be wrong but I think the guys at VLC are still very important contributors to ffmpeg, which is still a big deal.
They also (kinda recently) developed some really low latency tech for streaming called Kyber
So bottomline the player might not be used that much (although on mobile the app is very popular still) but the tech they develop for it, is
Wtf, mpv is extremely easy to build yourself, with or without the mpv-build scripts. You just need to install the dependencies first, which is table stakes for building almost anything.
Anyway, you should be able to install both VLC and mpv from your distro's repo, assuming your distro isn't weird. Building mpv is only something you'd do if you're hacking on it or need a bleeding edge build for some reason.
Jean-Baptiste is a hero! Just in case some of you don't know or remember, he has refused an offer to sell VLC for tens of millions of Euros because he didn't want enshittify it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048.
I vouched for this post because I have corresponded with him and he engaged in an in unnecessarily condescending way. What are you referring to by GSOC?
VLC is most beautiful software for me. They never spied on their users, never put any bloat. Thanks Jean-Baptiste Kempf and everyone involved bringing this beautiful piece of art to life!
Years ago I remember complaining on HN that VLC didn't support remembering the position of the video you've already partially watched, when multiple other video players supported it.
The only reply was someone saying you should contribute to the open source project yourself to fix it instead of complaining. I don't know anything about coding a multi-platform video player so I wasn't much use but not long after they released a version supporting it and I felt bad for complaining.
ngl: I was expecting a crazy success story where you started learning to code to add your feature and then you went on becoming a streaming expert at a FAANG
But glad you had your feature!
So many hours of fun watching videos over the years, without the constant fear that some odd codec would make the experience impossible. Thanks, VLC!
“If you insert a slice of bologna into the disc tray, VLC will play it.”
VLC was a big deal in the 2000s if you wanted to watch torrented anime. Operating systems didn't come with players with broad codec support and it was a legitimate nightmare to figure out what fly by night codec worked with whatever the bootleggers cobbled together to encode the video of the week.
These days, operating systems already have rock solid video players with far less clunky UI.
On Linux, video is already sublime thanks to ffmpeg and the dozens of available frontends.
It feels like wrestling with 1998 in trying to use VLC these days. It's got a real WinAmp feel to it.
But the real elephant in the room is that the lionshare of video is now being delivered by major media platforms like YouTube.
I remember having to install the K-Lite Codec Pack back in the day (college days) to be able to watch videos I would "acquire". When I eventually discovered VLC, it was like a breath of fresh air. I still use it to this day as my default video player, because nothing else comes close to the quality they have.
In the early 2000s the video field was flooded with fast paced releases of new codecs and new codecs versions, and there was codecs implementation to downloads right and left, and people were bundling them and releasing them with names sounding like a warez group. It was a little crazy to watch a video at the time.
This was mitigated by vlc and mplayer, two video players that integrated most codecs as fast as they could, and it was a breath of fresh air. You just started them and any video would play, no codec issue anymore. MPlayer has not been updated for some times, and traction was lost, but VLC, although looking a bit old on the UI-side (and a little buggy on ARM Windows) is still here and is solid when someone just wants to watch a video on any platform.
> These days, operating systems already have rock solid video players with far less clunky UI.
Not my experience at all. At least colleagues using Windows always run into video playing troubles in online meetings unless they use VLC.
> But the real elephant in the room is that the lionshare of video is now being delivered by major media platforms like YouTube.
Youtube is dubbing videos with AI for no reason whatsoever if you play the videos from the website these days.
I'm still curious how they thought that was remotely a thing anybody wanted.
The cynic in me says some PM rolled out it out because they had an internal metric to hit.
I know a lot of people who are bilingual (or trilingual) and they utterly loathe it.
The only explanation I can give myself is that Americans can't comprehend the idea that a single person might speak more than one language.
It's pretty funny considering how google claims that their hiring practices make them hire only the most intelligent people on the planet.
That's... a very subjective take to be polite and can't agree much. I enjoy VLC very much, install it everywhere even on TV, and couldn't care less about some OS/bundled players, codecs and whatnot. UI is great, clean, easy to navigate. Couldn't ask more from video player.
I remember using VLC and figuring out how to download subtitles and use them within it.
I suddenly became the computer person of my family at 11 because of that
People like VLC. Personally I am a mpv-user though. For some reason the mental model by mpv (and before that mplayer) works better for me.
On Windows, VLC is quite convenient though. While I also use mpv there, for an elderly relative I have simply used and installed VLC there, as the default GUI mode is more convenient for elderly people.
I use mpv but VLC is definitely better for people who prefer traditional GUIs, which is most people.
Public service announcement: VLC is on iPhone in the App Store, too. (Some people don't know this.)
I’ve been using it to listen to actual MP3s of the music I have. I can’t find any decent MP3 player on iOS (incredibly ironic given the iPod was one of the 3 devices the iPhone was supposed to be when Steve Jobs first introduced it) and VLC is pretty good.
I’m using VLC because it’s the only one that I know that can play opus. I chose the latter for lossy encoding because I have a few albums that are gapless and it’s hackish to get mp3 to support those (other than single mp3 file and cue file).
Foobar2000 is my go to on iOS. Works well just like the PCs version.
Also available on tvOS and you can watch video files from your home NAS or just send them from your iPhone/iPad!
I find it handy for streaming videos from my Jellyfin server with good subtitling support, then casting to a TV!
How do you manage this? Just copy the stream URL from Jellyfin Web or…?
Yup the Stream URL is a valid HTTP media!
One of the few honorable techies who didn't sell out
Even within people involved in the local market it is not a widespread thing, but for a year now he's been the CTO of Scaleway, one of the French cloud providers.
He’s pretty obsessed with making money off his Khyber thing afaict
That's not what a sell out means in this context. He refused offers in millions of dollars to sell VLC to possibly shady parties, thereby keeping it safe for people like us. Kyber on the other hand, is a dual licensed AGPL - commercial software. That's an entirely acceptable and respected practice in the FOSS community. That doesn't make him a sell out.
Seems like Kyber is dual-licensed AGPL and proprietary, seems like a pretty standard way to fund an open source project.
why is that a problem
Have used VLC for at least 20 years. Recently I upgraded an old Dell 9400 laptop that dates from around 2006 to Debian Bookworm (the end of the line for the 32-bit machines). It has a nice 1600x1200 display, but the Nvidia Graphics (Geforce Go 7900 GS) is poorly supported and mpv now requires --hwdec=no, making 720p videos barely playable. VLC now uses a fraction of the CPU as mpv does for video, which makes even 1080p videos playable. For some reason VLC chokes at the beginning of every video (tries to play before everything is ready), but by pausing the video and backing up to time zero it plays perfectly. All of this to say that VLC has saved the day as it frequently has over the years.
The award is well deserved, VLC was a godsend a few years ago but I’m not sure what VLC brings to the table nowadays. All other players play videos just fine on Linux now. I guess VLC is only a thing on Windows because the default software is crap. On Linux almost everyone now use whatever is the default player or MPV for the nerds.
I still use VLC to this day on Linux because it's still as great as it ever was. I'm gonna have to install something to play videos, why wouldn't it be VLC?
I used VLC until I looked for a backward frame step functionality. I then found this thread on the VLC forums where the maintainers explain (with bad attitude) why this functionality is technically impossible. Everyone points out that mpv supports it, but the maintainers double down and say they’re Doing It Wrong and it shouldn’t be possible.
So anyways, I switched to mpv.
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=120627
On Windows at least VLC has had better alternatives for the past 20 years, both feature and UI wise. I had frame-stepping hotkeys back in the mid-00s with Korean video players. These days I use the currently maintained fork of MPC-HC which similarly has this.
On Mac it wasn't until the mid-10s that I found a decent player.
“I, like others, arrived here through a Google search looking for this feature. Reading this thread is one of the worst decisions I've made recently. I will never have this time back and I am worse for it.”
I don't know, I still have issues with the default media player in Ubuntu not working for either video or sound. I'm sure it's solvable, but it's easier to just install VLC, so that's what I do.
I use it on my Android phone. Is there a better FOSS media player (or better any media player?).
VLC also still (or at least recently?) provides APKs you can download to install on very old Android versions. I have it installed on a few old Android tablets (and by old I mean something like Android version 4).
MPV everywhere else though.
MPV is on android too. But VLC is alright
As a Windows user, I never used VLC because I didn't like its UI and not having the "click to pause" was a big issue when you control a media center with a mouse.
So I used Media Player Classic without any issues for years.
When I moved to Linux Desktop, it came with VLC so I tried and forced me to use that damn "space to pause". But half my videos had issues playing. Being in KDE, I switched to Haruna. It's ugly, but I can play anything without issues... and I can "click to pause"!
Have you tried SMPlayer? It's a lot like MPC
Yep.
VLC was not important on Linux. Because we have ffmpeg as foundation, used by mplayer and nowadays mpv. The later is my recommendation. Whether on the tty (awesome!) or on Wayland. If you prefer a native Gtk an interface is available, named Celluloid. In all these cases mpv is mighty, reliable, fits into the environment with a frugal interface.
We’ve also players based on gstreamer but ffmpeg is more reliable.
But the need for a reliable player on Windows, Android, macOS, iOS and tvOS is big. Because their default players suck. VLC comes with an awkward UI and the weird built-in stuff for SMB. But from a 2001 point-of-view it makes sense, LAN-parties are nice and back then they were everywhere. And Windows doesn’t support WebDAV well.
My favorite is mpv. But I’m still tankful that I’ve one usable player in my iPhone.
PS: VLC also uses ffmpeg?
Yeah, ffmpeg's libav is responsible for its famed codec support.
I might be wrong but I think the guys at VLC are still very important contributors to ffmpeg, which is still a big deal. They also (kinda recently) developed some really low latency tech for streaming called Kyber So bottomline the player might not be used that much (although on mobile the app is very popular still) but the tech they develop for it, is
> I’m not sure what VLC brings to the table nowadays Lack of backdoors?
So, the same value-add as always!
Agreed except I have no idea what Jean-Baptiste actually does besides trying to run his little startup Khyber
Default player sucks and MPV is close to impossible to compile yourself. VLC is still a good solution on Linux.
Wtf, mpv is extremely easy to build yourself, with or without the mpv-build scripts. You just need to install the dependencies first, which is table stakes for building almost anything.
Anyway, you should be able to install both VLC and mpv from your distro's repo, assuming your distro isn't weird. Building mpv is only something you'd do if you're hacking on it or need a bleeding edge build for some reason.
If you wondered SFS comes from the SFSCon, which is the South Tyrol Free Software Conference, SFSCON
past winners: https://www.sfscon.it/awards/
VLC is definitely one of the best projects. Congrats!
well deserved
I've heard he was working on an extremely low latency gaming system: Kyber
Anyone has any recent news on that subject?
Jean-Baptiste is a hero! Just in case some of you don't know or remember, he has refused an offer to sell VLC for tens of millions of Euros because he didn't want enshittify it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048.
I have benefited so much from the versatility and reliability of VLC over the years. Congratulations, a very well deserved award!
I met that guy during a gsoc mentor summit and it inspired me, out of spite, to never install VLC on any device I own
I had a quick chat with him at a conference in Munich and I thought he was pretty chill, but I think it was 15y ago.
Thats funny, I met him during GSoC too over a decade ago, and he's been on top of the open source game.
He is French. Cut him some slack ;-)
/s obviously
I vouched for this post because I have corresponded with him and he engaged in an in unnecessarily condescending way. What are you referring to by GSOC?
Same. Maybe it's the open source ecosystem that forced him to be overly self confident, to fly above the cognitive noise.
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/
oook, but why?
Well deserved. Congrats jbk!
I’m old enough to remember crappiness before VLC. Such a useful piece of software. Well deserved. What a dude.
K Lite Codec Pack + Media Player Classic was great
He is a good guy for not selling out but let’s be honest, it’s just a thin wrapper around ffmpeg.
I think you mean libavcodec?
But that is incorrect. VLC has even more supported features, if you do not believe me, check the source code https://github.com/videolan/vlc/tree/a33f33ddb0a9e0d26d779eb...
VLC is most beautiful software for me. They never spied on their users, never put any bloat. Thanks Jean-Baptiste Kempf and everyone involved bringing this beautiful piece of art to life!
Still really hoping his game/app streaming system Kyber eventually materializes! https://kyber.media/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929602 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvosCplkCc
Incredibly accomplished already. What gravy this would be though.
Well deserved!