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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I don't have any questions directly, just wanna say that I love VLC, it's one of the first programs I install on any computer, and I will continue to use it as my primary media-viewer for the foreseeable future.

The number of features that the devs have packed into VLC is staggering; I've been using VLC for almost 15 years now, and I still find new things about it occasionally. Fun fact (though probably not as surprising to an HN crowd as it is to most people I tell this to), VLC can also be used to convert media to different formats, AND works as a quick ad-hoc media server if you want to display something on a TV. This can be really handy if you have a video file in a weird format and want a way to quickly watch it on a device that doesn't support weird formats.

I think I'm going to donate. Keep up the good work folks!

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I set up a Win10 box recently and was kind of stunned to find that the built-in Media Player is now b0rked to the extent that it can't play media. Practically any media. Even with codec packs installed it won't play any of my hundreds of h264 DVD rips, it won't play the few WMVs I still have kicking around, it won't even play bloody MP3s. I think I found one weird-codec MP4 and a couple of ancient AVIs it deigned to accept, but that was it.

Or I can spend 30 seconds installing VLC and be 100% confident that it'll handle anything I throw at it. If I could fit a Lascaux cave wall into a USB port it'd play it.

Congrats to everyone involved in making this software. The world would be a sadder and more frustrating place without it.

Software that lasts over 10 years should be celebrated. Software that is still just as relevant after 20 years is extraordinary. If VideoLAN were a startup, it'd be a unicorn.

VLC (and ffmpeg) are nearly singlehandedly keeping the world's media accessible. Otherwise, video would probably be a walled garden (subscribe to Adobe Cloud, share to Youtube, etc.).

>If VideoLAN were a startup, it'd be a unicorn.

Isn't VLC useful precisely because the interests of the devs and users are aligned? If it were a startup, they would have had to ruin it to continue

>If VideoLAN were a startup, it'd be a unicorn.

If it were a startup it would have been run in to the ground by VCs in the name of growth-or-die.

I built a win7 HTPC about 6 or 7 years ago after not having used windows in AGES, and it blew my mind how awful it was finding codecs. Learning to avoid spyware and viruses really does require practice, and when you haven't spent the past decade visiting sketchy download sites, you really lose an eye for what's what.

I still recoil at the thought of being told "no, that's a container, not a codec!"

TBH, I'm still surprised at how awful some video stuff is. I've actually had about 5 false starts trying to make Plex work, and I'm trying it again (yeah, I never learn). Now the codecs and transcoding and stuff works on modern hardware, but it simply refuses to index content that you don't rename to please the master. It's absolutely insane. Software designed to make your life harder, not easier. There's a reason I just point Kodi to a NAS share. (speaking of awful configs.... but at least it plays!)

Talking about codecs and splitters, LAV Filters covers pretty much everything. It packs libavcodec and libavformat as DirectShow filters.

https://github.com/Nevcairiel/LAVFilters

Before that, there was FFDShow. Things weren't as mature nor complete back then, though.

Huh. I find that interesting - for myself, Plex worked immediately, out of the box, was incredibly easy to use, and has held up like a tank. I’m watching a show off it right now at the moment; actually!

I just installed the Server on my MacBook or Windows laptop, installed the Plex channel on my Roku stick, added two folders, one for films and one for TV Shows, and I have never looked back.

Not saying your experience couldn’t have been the exact opposite - I’m just wondering what particular issues you ran into? Plex is solid af for me.

It's similar to this:

https://forums.plex.tv/t/need-help-for-organizing-naming-aut...

And the characteristic response from a Plex user:

>Well that is going to be a problem. Plex has a proper Naming Convention 2 that it expects you to follow. As This particular set of videos is not part of TheTVDB.com's database, Id recommend you reformat it to something plex is going to recognise.

That just doesn't make me happy. I get that the Plex use case is "indexing downloaded TV shows and movies", but I find it annoyingly prescriptive.

You can use "Fix Match" when Plex doesn't link up certain titles. I also find Plex incredibly easy and believe you have quite a big ask for identification in a free to use and very robust media management system. It's like complaining that self-checkout at the grocery store doesn't "just know" what groceries you are buying while refusing to scan any of the barcodes. Further, this is for an unlimited inventory of items and not limited by any boundary of supplier, shelf space, or category.

I've also added FileBot to my routine which improves organization of media, but Plex usually does well with unmodified naming.

So actually, my gripe is that Plex refuses to show the content at all. I'm looking at Fix Match and it looks it's for incorrect matches, not content it refuses to index.

I recognize the perils of asking for the moon and stars from free software. The issue is, they chose to make it insanely featureful at the expense of Just Working :)

I'm not afraid of work; I've spent days across local and containerized solutions for downloading, proxying, and outputting. It's possible to rename files in my download software, I estimate it at about 1h additional effort. However, the content I most often download is not yet available, so I'm not investing the time in generating those rules. So far I've been just playing with content that doesn't justify the time investment in creating rules. For example, often this content is uploaded by different people in different file formats. There's no one renaming catchall until you know specifically which sets you want to use.

I never asked for automatic categorization or metadata retrieval or album art or IMDB links, but it's forced on you by Plex :)

I'd tell you to check out Emby, but if ya can't figure out Plex...

Related: Sonarr, CouchPotato, etc

I would tell you both to check out Jellyfin, the Free Software continuation of Emby.

https://jellyfin.org/

Thanks for the insult.

I remember 'back in the day' anytime I would set up a friends PC I would go and download the latest version of "K-Lite Codec Pack Mega". And one day a friend told me about VLC and it changed my life (from a media-player standpoint).

Thank you VLC!!

But don't pick the latest Codec Mega Pack for there are bugs. Pick the version that you read on a forum works almost perfectly. It's the one prior to the one that's prior to the absolutely newest one. THAT one! Also download your preferred MKV codec, because it's not included in the mega pack. Because it's not a codec.

VLC, you saved most of my sanity. Whatever was left. Thank you.

Let's be honest here about our youths (or current lives): if we weren't consuming media compressed by hand tuned, artisanal release groups, things probably wouldn't be as hard.

To use a firearms metaphor -- when you're looking for the performance optimizations of wildcat rounds, don't expect to be able to buy at Walmart.

Have you tried playing a plain normal Blueray on windows without VLC?

VLC cannot play a majority of those because of DRM.

Though worth noting that VLC + AnyDVD HD just works there. Even if you don't have a Java installation you can still play the main feature, without menus. I was pleasantly surprised by that.

25 years ago, or so, Microsoft introduced the Windows Media Player, and it was impressive, because before that you needed a different player for every format. WMP went through a number of mutations, some better, some worse, but for the last 10 years or so, I've found it to be pretty useless. It fails on the most common formats, like you've described. Sometimes it's hard to find something it _will_ play.

VLC is my media player of choice. It. Just. Works.

I have not run Windows in any serious capacity in about 12 years, but I don't remember Windows Media Player being that bad, and I thought that Windows now had a license to H264 built in, so I'm actually a bit surprised that a rip wouldn't work. Any idea what the issue was?

No idea. I'd been using Win 7 before that where Media Player mostly managed fine (probably with codec packs). VLC had audio glitching issues on that box but doesn't on the new one, so I quickly lost patience with trying to debug MP. Diagostics and codec help links are utterly useless.

Are you sure you didn't tried Windows 10 N? It's a specific version for Europe, it comes without codecs.

Good question, but pretty sure. Settings > System > About > Windows Specifications just shows generic "Windows 10 Pro" as the edition.

Also, AFAICT the N edition doesn't have Media Player at all, it doesn't just gut the codecs.

Yeah, just found it weird because Windows does have x264 codec, and obviously mp3 since ages.

Went to play a mkv file and it wanted me to pay $1.99 for a codec. I had and prefer vlc but I'm also lazy. Unless given a reason I was not gonna switch my default program. That was reason enough.

I gave up using anything other than VLC long before you did. [I'm not trying to play a trump card here, I'm saying you had a lot more patience on this than I did].

What did me in was realizing the insanity of installing the "Gordian Knot Codec Pack" (or whatever it was called back then) every time I refreshed my OS ... and hoping it would work. That did work for a little while until the traffic cone finally opened my eyes and I never looked back.

set up a Win10 box recently and was kind of stunned to find that the built-in Media Player is now b0rked to the extent that it can't play media.

Weird. I've basically ended up only using the Win10 default media player since it handles basically everything I throw at it with at least as good performance as VLC, even on a pretty low power Surface Pro.

> Or I can spend 30 seconds installing VLC and be 100% confident that it'll handle anything I throw at it.

I have a bunch of video files that VLC used to play with no problems. But it can't anymore.

I use mpv now.

Really? What format were they in?

Awful story without that detail.

Why? What would knowing the format contribute?

Well, for one there may be VLC people on this thread who'd know whether this was an unintentional regression.

Knowing whether it's the format or your setup.

And the slew of obvious reasons.

Same -- it's one of the first programs I install.

I wish the video conversion was simpler, more intuitive, and provided better feedback. My impression is you have to "stream" to convert a file, and then it just sort of happens without you knowing when it's done. And the settings are...odd. Selecting a framerate/resolution is still old school - provide some common defaults, or % choices to match the video's ratio. Very clunky. --- I just tried it and it keeps repeating itself trying to overwrite a file, had to force close it, though it did convert!

Yeah, admittedly typically when I do video conversion, I use ffmpeg nowadays, just because I am comfortable enough with the command line and it's easier to script.

That said, whenever my dad needs my help with any video stuff, trying to talk him through ffmpeg command line args is tricky, and while VLC's interface is a bit weird, I've managed to talk him through how to use it. It's not ideal, but considering that it's free, works, and supports basically every format imaginable, we forgive it...certainly better than when I was using AutoGordianKnot as a teenager :).

handbrake is also pretty great from a user-friendly point of view :)

Handbrake is great, though IIRC it doesn't encode into any weird formats. For reasons too annoying to go into here, we needed to convert some weird Intel Indeo file into a WMV/ASF, due to some weirdness of a program that he needed to use for work only supporting WMV stuff.

Handbreak is just a ffmpeg gui right?

not anymore, it also uses x264, x265, libdav1d, etc.. and it's probably one of the most used net5.0-windows wpf project. (the gui is written in wpf) (Full Lib List: https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/tree/master/contrib)

Reminds my of a program called Super that did video transcoding back in the day. It worked decent but the download site was the worst I have ever used even to this day.

Oh man, i remember that. What a weird site. As if they didn't want you to download their program

I used to always use VirtualDub to convert video. It was my goto video editor. It was created and maintained by a solo dev. Whatever happened to them?

It doesn't seem to work with mp4 or mkv containers out of the box. I tried it recently to deshake a video and it was quite frustrating to use, although I managed to do it in the end.

VirtualDub was awesome, and I used it a _lot_, but it seems like it's been pretty dead for about 8 years or more.

If you do a lot of conversions - you might want to look up Handbrake - it has a more intuitive interface, but uses FFMpeg under the hood (another project managed by VLC folk that is world-changing by itself. It's almost impossible to find a video-related software system that doesn't have ffmpeg at its core, commercial or open source)

The FFmpeg repo is hosted by VLC but isn't managed by them.

I only found out fairly recently that it can stream youtube videos (mostly, it does fail sometimes for seemingly no reason), which is great for those of us who end up clicking too frequently (read, all the time) on the related videos tab.

It also mean that you don't see the ads, but there are extensions that can do that too.

Yes, it can play YouTube videos. And it can even show you the link to the video in ints info no, so you can download it. That's what I used before youtube-dl appeared on the scene.

I didn't know that! That's so awesome!

See, my point stands...there's still a ton of cool features that are available in there if you dig around.

There are extensions that add youtube ads to vlc?

I assume tomjen3 was referring to browser extensions that block ads on the YouTube website.

Will a pi-hole stop the YouTube ads?

No YouTubes video Ads comes from the same servers that delivers normal content so dns blocking can’t stop video ads.

This actually works for a number of popular websites. Twitch will work, for instance.

I found out it will work with karaoke files!

CDG files? yes :)

Same here, I have it literally everywhere, TV, mobile, laptop at home, at work... Thumbs-up guys

I learned vlc makes it really easy to get videos onto my ipad over wifi. Truly a lifesaver. Donated to them straight away. Extremely useful and effective.

I have never had the media server support in VLC work for me.

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