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Comment by dopeboy | Hacker News Reader

In the earlier days of mainstream desktop linux (~2005), video codecs were a complete shitshow. VLC was a godsend during those times - it just worked. Still the first thing I apt-get after a fresh install.

If you're reading this team VLC, thank you for your work. Ways to contribute to VLC: http://www.videolan.org/contribute.html

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Even until the last few years on Windows, codecs were a shit show. You could download codec packs, but it was pretty hit and miss. VLC was amazing - it would open everything, audio just worked, and subtitles just worked.

CCCP has worked great for me on Windows for the last 10+ years.

CCCP was amazing when it first came about. The last time I wanted to watch something, though, KCP was recommended over CCCP. Things are forever going to be a bit of a mess with playing anime since there's a long tradition of being on the bleeding edge of encoding.

Yeah. And ending up playing a game of "useful or malware"

That's true even today, maybe I'm getting old and I don't play much with other tools like I used to do, but VLC is the only one that always "just work".

Quicktime on Mac OS remains a shitshow to this day. I still have not figured out how to use third party srt files for subtitles.

You can use VLC on OSX as well. It works great!

When watching h.264 VLC consumes lots of CPU when QuickTime doesn't. I don't know why.

I assume that it is because QuickTime is using your GPU to decode the h.264 but VLC isn't.

There is support for hardware accelerated h.264 decoding in VLC; you just need to enable it. I think the option is in Input and Codecs tab in the preferences.

Maybe QuickTime knows how to leverage hardware decoding?

You might have hardware acceleration in the Input/Codecs menu disabled.

Try VLC 3.0.0 nightly builds using VideoToolbox or activate GPU decoding.

I think the srt file needs to have the same name as the main video file and they both need to be in the same folder.

Quicktime gives me a bunch of weird green artifacts in empty spaces with h.264 encoded video. Seems to struggle with sync as well.

Holy shit, people still use Quicktime? Apologies for my OS X / iOS ignorance, but I haven't seen that in years on Windows / Linux.

I've been using OS X on my macbooks for like 2 years now, until now I had no idea it even existed anymore.

It still comes bundled with Mac OS, of course, and receives regular updates from Apple. Every once in a while, usually after finally agreeing to an update that I've been putting off for years, I give it a try to see if it works yet. I am always disappointed.

That's the least of QT's problems. The idiotic way that modern QuickTime container files handle audio-visual sync has caused the entire format to fall out of favor within the professional video industry.

The video and audio streams within such files are, by design, out of sync, and requires playback within QuickTime to actually get the file to play back properly, as the content creator intended. Workarounds exist, and some playback software can handle the problem internally, but VLC in particular is not always able to.

VLC has been one of the best bets for a video player and I've used it for years. I've never contributed before though, so I'll gladly do it for their 15th year.

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