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Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

VLC. There have been so many times I thought "man it would be great if there were this crazy hypothetical feature in my media player" only to find out it's like a stable long-established feature that's a keypress away from activation after a quick google search or glance at a dropdown menu.

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VLC has the same problem as Chrome vs. Safari for me on OS X: It's not color correct, ignores monitor color profiles and colors look washed out in direct comparison to QuickTime. I'm guessing many people are not aware of that on their Macs.

At least Chromium seems finally to work on this after more than 5 years https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=44872

I wished I do not need to switch to QuickTime or Safari to have correct bright colors for enjoying videos & images :/

Chrome has color problems? I am curious about this. Can you point me to more specifics?

look at the linked chrome bug link. But you can also see it yourself. Open an image you know very well on both Chrome and Safari and compare side by side. I can even see it on opening http://imgur.com in Chrome and Safari and comparing the results. I recognize it the most on skin tones. Chrome is washed out a little and in Safari it looks nice. You can see it even more on videos. Go to the same minute/second and compare Chrome and Safari.

I don't find any difference.

Or for folks like me: I just want to play my video files no fuss, no muss. Something other major media players seem to have more trouble with than they should. But not VLC! 100% of the time it works every time!

Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like magic. I have never missed Windows Media Player for even a moment.

"Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like magic."

Does it play DVD ISO files ?

Can you use the menus, etc. ?

Just curious ... XBMC back in 2004 could do this (navigate and use DVD menus in a DVD ISO) but then that feature actually went away in the following years, never to return ...

> Does it play DVD ISO files ? Can you use the menus, etc. ?

Those are semi-loaded questions. It can and does play .vob files, which is enough if you actually just want to watch the video, which is VLC's primary use case.

It is not a full media manager with additional functionality.

It does play DVD ISO files. Just drag and drop them in, hit play.

antisthenes notwithstanding, VLC does play DVD .iso files and you can use the menus.

Wow - that's fantastic. Thanks.

Yes, with mouse, keyboard, or remote.

The question you should be asking is, "does it properly ignore DVD menus?"

The question you should be asking is "can it find its way around DRM?"

When I play some bought DVDs with VLC the DRM stops the DVD getting to the menu stage (on Linux especially) and I need the menu to change the language for my children who don't always want English[1]. Skipping the menu doesn't let me change the language, and not using the skip-menu option means the DVD won't play. Disney are not alone in this, but are the guilty party that comes to mind.

1. Even better when the nordic regional edition of a film has something crazy like Finnish as the default language, and English isn't there at all, but my children want the voices in Norwegian. So skipping menus goes straight to the film in language that doesn't even make sense to Finns. Thanks DVD producers, there isn't enough frustration in my life but with your help and my money we're reaching levels close to 100%.

I was usually able to switch the language by right-clicking, there's a submenu that lets you select which audio stream (i.e. which language) you want to listen to.

You are right. I found vlc in 2006 and never looked back.

On my low end machine VLC struggles with H265, where KMP doesn't. (But I still strongly prefer VLC for everything else.)

Have you tried MPC-HC? I haven't put it up to the test with KMP, but I do know it beats VLC for H265 playback.

All these players use the same code, you know. Here it is:

https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavcodec/hevc...

I'd be pretty surprised if there was a major difference between them. Maybe some bugs in the rendering path, or one player isn't doing threads properly?

not really. they have some particular demuxers, and renderers.

e.g. you can get better color output and better subtitle features on mpc-hc

They should run the same in theory - but they don't in practice. It is typically more noticeable on older hardware, on my current rig I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Maybe that's changed in more recent versions, but I no longer have my older rig to do comparison tests.

Also what gcb0 said is true as well - but not everyone needs subtitles for their videos. My 'expertise' in media player selection is based on getting the absolute best quality playback for my anime.

My primary reasons for switching from VLC were not due to efficiency - but due to shadow being washed out and the NVidia color issues. Both "fixable" in that you can "improve them" but not quite "remove them entirely". (Both issues are easily Google-able as well)

There are many, many, many image comparisons between VLC and MPC-HC (and sometimes MPV for Linux). The one thing in common is that MPC and MPV both look very similar while VLC always has a washed out look and occasionally faulty colors (by default). Unfortunately, many people are terrible at screenshotting the exact same frame but even from similar frames one can pretty easily spot the differences between VLC and MPC-HC.

Example of the shadow/color differences:

Side-by-side w/ CPU usage difference: http://i.imgur.com/xJnrS2f.jpg

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/176895 (excuse the distortion, I was 1px off on my cropping)

Some people prefer the washed-out look finding it more aesthetically pleasing. That's fine and I'm cool with that, long as I don't need to watch anything with them. Many people also "don't give a shit" because they'd never know the difference without seeing the side-by-side or comparison of the frame. That's fine too - but not something I personally agree with. :) I prefer better quality even if I have to looking for it.

This definitely falls under "bugs in the rendering path". In this case the question isn't which one looks better, but which one the media author intended.

Your two culprits are that someone's YUV->RGB math forgot that Y needs to be expanded from 16-235 to 0-255 - possible but really surprising! - or that one player implements gamma correction and the other doesn't.

Gamma correction might look nice, but it can't be called correct unless you've profiled your monitor, set the brightness level, not changed your ambient lighting levels, and turned off all the nonsense LCD options like "contrast".

BTW, the only rendering bug I ever expect to see is the difference between Rec.601 and Rec.709 colorspace, which just kind of makes green colors look different. So this is pretty extreme!

>In this case the question isn't which one looks better, but which one the media author intended.

That's typically my argument, but others simply "don't care" how the author intended, they want what looks better to them. Which is fine - as long as I'm not watching it with them. Because I actually do care how the author intended something to be seen.

Another mention for MPC, and I ended up switching to it for everything, after searching alternatives because VLC was stuttering with some h265. It displays everything I've ever thrown at it with no fuss and has some neat features like single keypress to search for subtitles for the current video.

I love VLC, but I had to switch to MPC-HC. It performs a lot better, it can play full HD MP4 videos on my weak laptop without any issues, whereas VLC struggles, skips frames, and is basically unusable.

I have the opposite experience. Font rendering in Chinese seldom work, and dragging the slider of a large MP4 or MKV video results in noticeable lag. I have since abandoned it.

Not to mention the color balance is noticeably off for Nvidia graphics cards - and no amount of trying to rebalance them ever quite gets it "right". I also prefer my video player to let me know if a video file is corrupted rather than attempt to play it anyways. I find that to be a bug, not a feature.

What do you use now?

mpv for OS X/Linux PotPlayer for Windows

I generally use VLC by default, but I've found that it frequently stutters in decoding files mounted via sshfs, particularly when I use the scrub bar. I'm guessing that's because sshfs introduces some latency on seeks that upsets the decoders, but other video players don't have the same problem.

So, just anecdotally, VLC isn't perfect, but I'd agree that it's generally quite close.

The file access module allows you to modify the buffer - change it to something very large and let it sit for a bit after hitting play.

I switched to SMPlayer because of the integration with OpenSubtitles.

http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/

In case you didn't know, there's an option in VLC to download subtitles based on the hash of the video.

That sounds amazing, from where are the subs sourced?

https://github.com/exebetche/vlsub downloads subs from opensubtitles.org.

I wanted to install this extension earlier this week, only to discover that it was already installed. This is with VLC 2.2.3 on OS X.

Search by hash has been working well for me so far.

I agree, except :s/VLC/mpv/

On the Mac I'm far happier with MPlayerX: http://mplayerx.org/

It's UI is optimised for playing video (example: if your window is not fullscreen, but playing it will stay in front). It has smoother playback than vlc, I can actually skip by seconds with my cursors etc.

How does it compare to mpv?

I like VLC, but I can't upgrade past version 2.1.5 because the 2.2.x release has broken WMV support (it stutters on many WMV files).

Lol, wmv? There's a name I have not heard in ages.

> There have been so many times I thought "man it would be great if there were this crazy hypothetical feature in my media player" only to find out it's like a stable long-established feature

I just want simultaneous display of multiple subtitle tracks. :(

I like having VLC around but as a day-to-day music player I find it uncomfortable. I have been looking for iTunes alternatives for normal mp3 listening and so far I really like the simplicity and purpose-built nature of qmmp and a bunch of playlist files.

Why would you use it as a music player? It can play the files but it's not a meant to be a music player.

for somethings mplayer just works out of box, where it doesn't for vlc, e.g. :

curl http://blah/blah/some/hidden/network/stream | mplayer -

which I've seen fails on vlc

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