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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

I used VLC for years, but more recently have found the Mac app IINA https://iina.io/ to be a (not perfect but) substantially nicer tool in the same niche (i.e. an open-source video player that handles whatever I throw at it). VLC is just too full of incidental complication.

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Mac OS only? VLC works on Windows/UWP/Phone, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, Chrome OS, Apple TV, and those are only the officially supported platforms.

IINA is a (macOS only) UI for the mpv (which is crossplatform).

Two things that convinced me to switch to IINA was integrated subtitle downloader and ability to position those subtitles onto lower matte in letterboxed videos.

VLC has a plugin called VLsub which works almost perfectly as subtitle downloader.

And yes this plugin is awesome.

And it is inside VLC by default.

smplayer which is a front-end to mplayer (or mpv?) has a great subtitle finder/downloder - I have used it with great success for years now.

Oh wow thank you for that referral this looks -amazing- and I have exactly the same use case as you.

Complication is not a world a would use to describe any vlc experience.

Isn't it? It's really clean for the basic stuff, but off the top of my head:

- Codec conversion has one of the most opaque interfaces of any program I know.

- Recording, while simple in interface, has a lot of gotchas, and you're likely not to get what you expect.

- Having a separate volume control I'm sure isn't complicated for anyone here, but it's come up several times as an issue with my parents/grandparents.

- There are so many settings, many in very technical language, that there are entire pages whose function is basically a mystery to me.

I love VLC, and I really think they've nailed the basics, but the program at large suffers from kitchen-sink syndrome, and many of the less common features have had very little thought put into making them simple.

>There are so many settings, many in very technical language, that there are entire pages whose function is basically a mystery to me.

Honestly, I love that about VLC. There are plenty of shell commands I have no idea how to use properly, for instance, but knowing that they are there if I ever do need to learn how to use them is great. The modern theme of stripping out functionality in favor of perceived simplicity undermines these great comprehensive tools like VLC. If you don't know what a setting does that shouldn't be a problem; you probably never have to touch it then. Sure, some of the functions seem pretty old school today, but I'd hate to see VLC dumbed down.

I don't at all object to the complexity of the settings. (Or, I do in a more limited way, but that's not the point of my comment.) I'm disagreeing only with the parent's suggestion that all experiences with VLC are very simple.

On your point: I think having many settings, including very technical ones, is great. I think putting no thought into how to present them clearly is not. Documentation does not to my mind excuse poor interface.

IINA is simply great. It's video player that just work. The same experience when I use PotPlayer on Windows.

My experience with VLC never good. Even the modern version. It somehow feels...clunky? Some random error randomly happened. As the matter of fact, I just download the latest version and test it about 5 minutes ago on my iMac, open some video, and BAM, some weird glitch happened on my screen (like graphic card error) It disappear when I quit it though.

Yet everyone, every tech author always recommended it. Maybe I'm just unlucky? :/

I have yet to find a single player in recent years that does not "just work".

If I want to have advanced settings for various things (mainly a/v decoders), I would choose carefully, but to "just work" I would say almost all actively developed media players can do that fine.

I don't know about Win10, but the default Win7 media player is still a steaming pile of poo. Can't play many formats, stupid and uncustomizable keyboard shortcuts, occasionally decides to display some videos as audio+visualization instead, insists on trying to default you to the worst possible settings after every update.

I'd say so, I've not used anything other than VLC for the last 5+ years on Linux and Windows and don't remember that it failed to play anything, even the stuff customers threw at us.

>" VLC is just too full of incidental complication."

That surprise me, how is VLC complicated?

I use it all the time and it just works.

My only problems:

-For some reason sometimes it hangs in Fedora and I have to kill the process manually.

-I wish that the progress bar allow more control of when to jump. Frequently, in a video, I don't understand what somebody just said but, when I try to go back, I finish jumping back too much.

Apart of that it works wonderfully.

> -For some reason sometimes it hangs in Fedora and I have to kill the process manually.

Check your hardware acceleration drivers (vaapi, vdpau) and try to disable it in VLC preferences.

> -I wish that the progress bar allow more control of when to jump. I finish jumping back too much.

You can customize the default jump (the one with the arrows) in the preferences.

>-I wish that the progress bar allow more control of when to jump.

Shift + Arrow - jump 5 seconds

For cases like yours this is what I use, and usually it gives enough control in the context of a movie.

https://wiki.videolan.org/QtHotkeys/

VLC has very short, short, medium, and long jumps. Go to the preferences to set your own hotkeys to whatever works (I have [ and ] for very short jumps, it's perfect for the use case you describe, when you just want to hear a phrase again).

(Note that apparently you need to restart VLC for the changes to take effect.)

Been using IINA on Mac for a while too. It's simple and stays out of your way. Just plays the video/file I want it to play and has sane keyboard shortcuts to skip ahead/back. No faffing around with playlists.

IINA has playlist support, FWIW.

VLC stays out of your way too. You don't need to faff with playlists at all if you don't want to.

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