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And the guy turned down some millions of Euros to keep it Free.[0]

[0]: https://np.reddit.com/r/france/comments/736ghk/ama_je_suis_l...

Dr Scott Atran on economic incentives and sacred values:

> Much more is know about economic decision making than moral decision making. Very little is known about sacred values. [In political negotiations] the standard view is to leave the hard questions of recognition and who you are for last, and you try to build things slowly through economic small steps, and person-to-person discussions. [I find that] when sacred values are in conflict, that is a formula for another hundred years of war.

> Now what do I mean by sacred values? Well, they are values that are very strongly tied to the emotions, to your sense of who you are within your community, and you are usually not even aware of them. It is a little bit like food: people usually are not aware of food until they are starving, [but then it becomes the one value people have]

> The same [is true for] sacred values: sacred values are the frame within which all social and economic transactions are possible, and again you usually are not even aware of them, until another society or group challenges them. Then they become dominant.

> In our [secular Western] society we do not have standard principles of sacred values any more, except for our children and perhaps our nation, everything is supposedly fungible. Of course, if I asked you if you would accept a million dollars to sell off your child, you would say I am crazy. If I insisted on it you would think I am a sociopath. But that is exactly the way people feel when one offers them a material incentive to exchange their sacred values.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ijmBd69878&t=6m3s

#4 really is amazing. vlc is probably the ONLY application that I took with me when switching from Windows to Mac/Linux 10+ years ago. It's as essential to my multimedia computing as vim is to my text editing.

If you are still on Mac, you should check out IINA(https://github.com/lhc70000/iina). I switched to it when I needed to watch 4k videos on my Macbook and it out-performs VLC. I think VLC's cross-platform compatibility hurts it here as IINA uses some Mac specific APIs.

Agreed. IINA is really good. Best Mac player I have seen so far.

Wow, thanks for the tip. I've been using mpv for years but IINA is great!

Read the VLC 3.0 release notes. Performance is no longer a problem on 4k & 8k videos.

True. Should have read the full changelog. Thank you for pointing it out. I'll give it a try.

The change is that VLC now supports H.265 hardware decoding on mac.

Great that VLC iterates so quickly!

My gripe with VLC on Mac is that the fullscreen mode is not a real Mac full-screen. It just maximizes. There is no way to put it besides another chrome tab for example (quicktime and any other program lets you do this)

VLC > Preferences > 'Use native fullscreen mode'

I believe this was originally done because Lion would black out all other monitors when fullscreening something.

> VLC now supports H.265 hardware decoding on mac.

Doesn't seem to work on last year ones with only dedicated GPU-hardware acceleration.

Contact me, with logs, please. :)

IINA is a gui on top of mpv, which is also cross platform.

I agree with everything although with #2, VLC really could use some UI/UX improvements on both desktop and iOS. Hard to complain though when it's been stable and efficient for all these years - I'd rather have a few odd/annoying UI issues than a bloated piece of garbage!

What UI/UX improvements would you like to see?

I agree with the grandparent post - it's simple, consistent and dependable :). Also, customizable!

It's missing keyboard shortcuts for some operations (slowdown and speedup) and missing some common shortcuts that other video apps have mostly converged on (unmodified left/right for short hops, up/down for volume).

Many of the auxiliary menus are inconsistently partitioned. For example, if you're looking for a color setting in Tools->Effects & Filters, it's unclear whether it'll be under Color or Essentials.

These are minor things, but that's what good UX is all about. Tragically, new style guides and frameworks often pitch themselves by explaining solid UX principles then claiming the way to achieve these is a total rewrite using their system.

The square brackets are shortcuts for slowing down and speeding up.

Well that's good to know.

I'll change that problem to "the playback speed menu items don't show their shortcuts" then.

You can always submit a small patch for the shortcut captioning. I would + it.

> unmodified left/right for short hops, up/down for volume

Fixed in 3.0

Here's a few that I remember most: 1.) Desktop - Volume "slider" (since it's really not on Windows) is difficult to adjust, especially to get back to 100% exactly or any other precise volume level (25%, 50%, etc.)

2.) Desktop - mouse slider affecting volume results in a lot of accidental volume changes, especially when using a Trackpad.

3.) iOS - When going back from playback to a list of media on your local server, the list refreshes to the top every time. Very annoying.

4.) iOS - connecting to a Local Server is awkward for pre-saved ones. You have to touch the saved setting and then it just pre-fills the login info without notice instead of connecting immediately. First few times it felt like it was doing nothing, until I realized what it actually did.

5.) iOS - Adjusting brightness/volume during playback by swiping is not precise and too sensitive. Very difficult to get the setting to desired level if it's not extreme and lifting your finger usually results in another change afterward.

You can set keyboard shortcuts for volume adjustment. that's precise and easy once setup.

1) use the keys, but I'll have a look to give a better way

2) disable this in preferences.

1) Volume can be set by using Ctrl+Up / Ctrl+Down and moves in 5% increments.

Mousewheel/scroll too!

* i can't edit my original comment

That was true on previous versions. In 3.0, you can just use Up/Down on the keyboard.

I remember I had trouble opening up the video window vs the playlist and not understanding how to switch between the two.

That being said, VLC has still been amazing for all my video needs

Vlc doesn’t have a simple stream to Apple TV mode

>No matter how many iterations it goes through, it's still intelligible to would-be time travelers from the past. I.e. didn't get caught up in the "must change the UX around for change's sake" epidemic that still seems rampant.

Well amen to that. If it works, why change it?

I remember the nightmare of downloading random codec packages trying to get video to work in the late 90s, early 2000s before I found VLC.

More than ever it's a shining example of high quality software driven by a desire to simply make things work.

It stands in stark contrast at a time when the tech industry seems hyper focused on business models that lock users into crippled platforms and extremely invasive tracking.

Thanks for your support!

> being born in a time of no goddamned Electron apps.

You and I would be great friends.

While I definitely agree with you that VLC is a gem I'd like to add that on Windows there's a - AFAIK - more feature-rich open source project called MPC-HC.

My main reason for using it over VLC is that it's comically easy to download (just press "D") and sync subtitles (pause in the beginning of a sentence -> CTRL+6 -> select sentence -> F5). Last time I checked this was a lot harder in VLC. It required a trial-and-error method to try and get the correct delay.

I love MPC-HC and still use it on a Win 7 box plugged into my TV but sadly it is no longer actively developed[1]. Because I strictly use it for local videos and don't run anything remote through it I don't worry too much about the lack of updates. But I imagine a day will come when it will no longer work on some new version of Windows.

[1] https://mpc-hc.org/2017/07/16/1.7.13-released-and-farewell/

MPC-HC v1.7.14 unofficial build

https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=175209 - https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/

One click for download will be done in next major release.

As for the sync subtitles, it's already possible in VLC.

I also first used VLC on BeOS!

> I used VLC to play videos on BeOS back in college in the late 90s

VLC was first released in 2001, as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player

Wow, was it really that late? perhaps it was. Maybe my memory is shot. I definitely remember using VLC on BeOS at one point, but it must have been a couple years later than I thought. Thanks for keeping me honest :-)

You could have used VLC in 1999 or 2000 on BeOS, before it was open source.

Because, indeed, VLC was out on BeOS before Linux and Windows.

No Apple TV or airplay support seems difficult to watch from vlc on tv how do you stream or cast to appletv from vlc

This will come for 4.0

Thanks that would be great

Maybe FLOSS abbreviates Free/Libre Open Source Software

That’s how I intended it.