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Comment by kdjfjf7d7 | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder why people go gaga googoo over VLC, when there's Media Player Classic with K-lite which does a lot of the same things better.

I remember watching 1080p blurry rips in MPC without any problems in 2008 while VLC would spend 1 year doing some sort of buffering upon opening then struggling to play the video correctly.

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It might come down to difference of experiences. As soon as software bites you once, I think most people feel differently towards it. I think the reason VLC gets (and in my opinion, deserves) a lot of praise is that a large part of the user base has never felt bitten.

Personally, I have never once had trouble getting VLC to run a media file, and I can't say that for any other media player. Granted, I don't know any other media players, and I don't know if it's hard to make a good one -- but that's kind of the point. I want a limited range of features from a media player: ability to make sound really loud, adjust timing of subtitles, speed up / slow down. All of those "just work" for VLC and have very basic navigation (that's good). VLC has allowed me to be comfortably oblivious to all the codec crap I remember dealing with over a decade ago.

You're arguing that MPC is better than VLC because of an issue you encountered 13 - almost 14 - years ago?

No, I'm pointing out that a better player already existed since the inception of VLC.

MPC is better? Maybe if you run windows. But if you don't then MPC isn't only not better, it's completely irrelevant. VLC on the other hand supports pretty much everything under the sun, so you can safely recommend it without playing the "what kind of computer do you have?" game.

Lots of better players existed at the inception of VLC. Most existing players that worked at all were probably better. That's how most projects start off.

Well, I've personally always wondered why people advocate MPC. During like 15+ years of use I can't recall having a single issue with VLC. And that's from consuming basically everything from the VCD era and onwards. In my experience VLC has been as close to flawless software as one can get.

It is[1] popular to recommend MPC over VLC in the anime fansub community, especially on /a/. When H. 264/10bit was newish and had just started to come into regular use in the scene[2], I distinctly remember a lot of people shitting on VLC because at the time it didn't handle it very well right out of the box, and there were tons of guides floating around on how to download/setup MPC-HC with CCCP or k-lite and haali media splitter for a supposedly better viewing experience.

[1] Or at least was, my recollections regarding this are nearly 10-15 years old at this point.

[2] There was one specific person, Daiz from the Underwater/UTW fansub group, that was one of the first people to start encoding his releases in H.264/10bit, and he would get a lot of hate because they tended not to play very well on improper setups, vanilla VLC being among those. "Dammit Daiz", they would say. He eventually bruteforced a tripcode to have H.264 in it just to mess back at them for all the hate. Fun memories.

edit: here we go, a contemporary HN rant from the man himself regarding MPC vs VLC. Looks like summoning Daiz works here too

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6449420

VLC had no styled subtitle support at the time, and often didn't seek to keyframes so clicking around would corrupt the video. It was also pretty inefficient on macOS.

I dont think VLC is bad by any means or that anyone shouldn't use it, I just don't understand the comments I often see on HN acting like it's some unprecedented software that's unlike anything else.

VLC is unique in its support for every codec under the sun. If it refuses to play a video file, it's probably because it's damaged beyond recovery, or not a video file at all. The default Windows and smartphone video players choke on all kinds of files, so you can't really expect that any given file is supported.

>VLC is unique in its support for every codec under the sun. If it refuses to play a video file, it's probably because it's damaged beyond recovery, or not a video file at all.

Last I checked the recommended method to play h.265 files in VLC was to re-encode them.

Realtime 265 decoding requires hardware support. There's not much they can be done by software it your driver/OS/graphics card combination cannot support that.

MPC manages stutter free playback provided the resolution isn't too high.

Isn’t it just a wrapper for ffmpeg?

It plays any media file you throw at it out of the box and doesn't require any codec packs installed. On top of that, it has a ton of other features including network support. Simple as that.

> It plays any media file

I also believed this until I got a family support case a couple of weeks ago.

I learned that if the bitrate is too high for the PC to handle vlc badly fails. (This was a fanless Intel PC, so the CPU is very much low end despite not being particularly old.) Of course I would not expect vlc to do any miracles here, but at least I would expect an error message explaining the problem. ffmpeg gives me warnings all the time if buffers are too small etc. In vlc I'd expect it a bit less cryptic...

Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know. Just decoding I-frames would be the most naive approach, but probably also a not lead to very much usable results.

Actually the family member found one solution themselves: Play it at reduced speed. VLC could have figured out that automatically. (And of course give a clear message to the user why it does that.)

> Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know.

It isn't really. It's possible if the video has B-frames but it's hard to predict how much dropping will cause how much recovery, and if you drop almost anything else the possible error is unbounded.

Used to do the same with klite codec pack and a patch to play HD videos on windows. It wasn't "better" though, it was just what tutorials suggested you installed to play more videos.

VLC just works now, its on every platform, and I used it to run any video that MPC couldn't play. Then I just used it to play everything, and I can do that on every platform I use, they all have VLC.

Can you tell me why MPC + K-Lite is better?

I've been gone from the Internet for 8 years. Before I left I used VLC for everything. When I just got a laptop I was convinced to install PotPlayer as "being better". Having been gone for such a long time I assumed there was a tectonic shift in the media player space. Perhaps I was wrong?

MPC-HC is just as good as VLC and maybe a little less cluttered. It's Windows only of course, but if that isn't a limiting factor, then it's a very good alternative to VLC in my opinion.

From the home page:

"MPC-HC is not under development since 2017. Please switch to something else."

It's still actively being developed, the author just created a new project page for it for some reason. You can find it at https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc

The version packaged with K-lite is frequently updated to this day, last release today.

I never like vlc approach. It did everything but there was always 7 fingercuts in the process. Or it was slower, less ergonomic. MPC, MPV were more my daily drivers.

VLC is an excellent media player. It is actively developed and runs on many platforms.

In my case, because VLC opens and plays flawlessly any video file you throw at it and that other players struggle with. That and it's FOSS and available in every OS I ever used.

What else is there to think about?

VLC works on other operating systems for a start.

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