Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kaiyou | Hacker News Reader

Did VLC ever lose it's reputation of being the worst video player of all time?

It never had it. It had, and probably still has, the reputation of being the best video player on Windows - it was bullshit-free, and the only one that worked OOTB with whatever you threw at it, without making you install these things called "codecs".

VLC being the worst thing ever was a meme back in 2007. Everyone saying that he used it got flamed into oblivion.

The Internet is a big place, we were probably hanging out in different circles cause I never heard that.

Indeed. In my circles around that time we were all switching to VLC.

I use VLC from at least 2006 (perhaps earlier, i remember the old icon) and i never remember hearing that "meme". Perhaps it was in some closed circle you were or something, but i remember VLC always having a top-notch reputation with mplayer being the only that could contest it in terms of codec support.

It was never the worst, and is among the best. It rose to prominence back in the days of codec packs, media player classic, and the numerous configuration headaches. VLC always just worked with pretty much any file, even a youtube url. It was also one of the first to handle container formats like mkv/matroska.

These days I would say MPV is a better player for simplicity and performance but I still keep VLC as the workhorse.

I want to like MPV, but whenever I try it VLC seems to handle playback problems like corrupted sections in files or performance problems more smoothly.

VLC is great: it's cross platform and handles basically anything you can throw at it, and works well in a pinch. And I say this as someone who works on another video player.

Uhm did it ever have it?

Yes, VLC being the worst was a meme back in 2007. To the point where people got involved in the project, just to fix it from being so bad.

Where was that a meme?

I'm using VLC since the codec pack times and it always did what it was supposed to do. Never had any relevant issues with that. I only knew it as THE go to program if you didn't want to bother with codecs anymore. I've never heard about this "meme" before.

4chan

It was notorious for crash bugs and poor implementations of "advanced" format features. A major fansub group got fed up of complaints to the point where they put out an episode that deliberately triggered bugs in VLC's ASS rendering to make their subtitles unreadable on VLC (I think this was gg with code geass episode... 16? 17?). That particular problem was solved when VLC abandoned their subtitle rendering code and switched to using mplayer's libass, but for a long time there were similar concerns about support for other formats (e.g. rendering 10-bit video correctly).

So it was actually a specific group that had a specific problem with it and it wasn't a wide spread and general opinion. Well...

GG were the most trollish about it (since I figured you'd want a specific documented incident to refer to), but it was a widespread and general opinion among anime video encoders (and to the best of my knowledge any video encoders who were pushing the boundaries at the time shared the same views, though I'm less familiar with the non-anime communities).

No, that's just one documented instance. VLC being bad was a meme outside the anime community, too. It affected anyone trying to utilise modern features for video playback.

Heh, I remember talking to Hocevar (one of the original authors) about how bad VLC had become and he told me that he knew and that he wasn't involved anymore.

It certainly is the worst audio player, clipping like no tomorrow. No plugins, audio level at 100% or below. I know it must clip if levels are above 100%, but in this case it must be just a decoder bug.

Can you share the files where you see that?

VLC 4.0 will get gapless audio and a different audio management, that will improve the quality.

I'll try to search for the clipping files. It's been some time, and I don't remember exactly what it was. They did play perfectly in other players.

I do remember the offending song had a deep sine wave bass. The issue sounded like non-saturated clipping, integer overflow.

It drove me crazy, because at first I suspected my bluetooth headphones, etc. I tried to reset VLC completely, reinstall, tried to reduce levels below 100%. But nothing helped.

Edit: Couldn't find the files for now. I'll make sure to send them to you once I find them.

No. Right now it's on the verge of being the worst audio player too. Takes forever to seek in a 2h+ audiofile.

Mp4 files? What format? What OS?

mp3, m4a, doesn't really matter. Win32

Edit: Ubuntu and VLC 3.0.4 has the same problem.

I made a short video: https://streamable.com/96v6n

this is the audiofile: https://meta.metaebene.me/media/mm/fs235-sechzehn-bar-blonde...

I will look at that, thanks.

This is fixed for VLC 4.0 then.

In the nightly build? Was it a new bug or old one?

Yes, the nightly build.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com