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Comment by efilife | Hacker News Reader

VLC is pretty bad and it shows the more you use it.

It doesn't let the audio clip/exceed safe volumes and always applies some sort of a limiter, even if it's disabled everywhere in the settings. Try using an EQ on a bass-heavy track and see that it's limited.

Try jumping back multiple times in a song at its beginning, and it will play in lower pitch.

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That strikes me as such a strange statement, I’ve always considered it to be among the most impressive OSS projects out there. It tackles enormous complexity, works everywhere, and has a trove of a million hidden features. For example, I use it to headless play streams from CLI.

If you enter video-related enthusiast scenes, such as fansubbed anime releases, mpv is recommended over anything else across the board. There are releases that break in VLC, and mpv is usually first to support new features. It also has particularly good defaults in terms of good and accurate playback, so where you might see some people say "install mpc-hc and these scripts and change these settings", with mpv it's just "use mpv". mpv is extremely configurable on top of great defaults also. Setting default audio and sub languages in order of your preference (such as enm before eng and en if you prefer honorifics tracks) is a common tweak.

I thought VLC was awesome while growing up, and at the time it probably was compared to Windows Media Player and such. I remember a common bit of praise was that it supported more types of video files. I haven't really run into anything mpv won't play (I even use it when an image I saved ends up as .html for some reason and then use the info screen to determine the real extension it should be so I can rename it), but also I'm guessing we've standardized more on codecs and containers these days which doesn't hurt.

> I even use it when an image I saved ends up as .html for some reason and then use the info screen to determine the real extension it should be so I can rename it

If you’re on Linux on macOS, you’ll have access to the `file` command-line tool which can do it effectively. In a couple of lines of shell scripting you can even have it auto-change the extension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_(command)

I had someone try to tell me this or some similar alternative method once, but for this particular use-case my method seemed faster. Usually I'm viewing the dir with the file in ranger, hit r (shortcut for :open_with ), type mpv, enter, I in mpv for info, q to quit, a in ranger to rename the file with old name pretyped in. It's a pretty smooth workflow. Assuming I start from the same place in ranger I have to press colon and type `shell -w file %s` and hit enter which may or may not be faster but I think is more keystrokes. I could bind it to a key in ranger if I found an open one and then that might be better. It's sometimes weeks between instances of the mis-saved images or else I might've tried harder to optimize this. The shell script idea is neat.

> The shell script idea is neat.

Could be something as simple as:

  file_path="${1}"
  mime="$(file --mime-type --brief "${file_path}")"
  ext="${mime#image/}"
  mv "${file_path}" "${file_path%.*}.${ext}"

That does no checks (e.g. is the file an image) and may not work on something on something like a video, but it’ll do for common image types such as png, jpeg, webp, heic, gif…

Personally I use a shell script to do it automatically for me... with "file":

    #!/bin/bash
    # Usage: fix-extensions <media file(s)>
    # Renames the files to consistent file extensions based on content

    for file in "$@"; do
        [ -f "$file" ] || continue
        dir=$(dirname "$file")
        name=$(basename "$file")
        prefix="${name%.*}"
        ext="${name##*.}"

        magic=$(file -b "$file")
        newext=""
        case "$magic" in
        *"Apple QuickTime movie"*)        newext=mov;;
        "ISO Media, Apple iTunes Video"*) newext=mp4;;
        "ISO Media, MP4"*)                newext=mp4;;
        "ISO Media, MPEG-4 (.MP4)"*)      newext=mp4;;
        "Macromedia Flash data"*)         newext=swf;;
        "Macromedia Flash Video")         newext=flv;;
        "Matroska data")                  newext=mkv;;
        "Microsoft ASF"*)                 newext=wmv;;
        "MPEG sequence"*)                 newext=mpeg;;
        "Ogg data, OGM video"*)           newext=ogm;;
        "RealMedia file")                 newext=rm;;
        "RIFF "*" data, AVI,"*)           newext=avi;;
        "WebM")                           newext=webm;;
        esac

        if [ -z "$newext" ]; then
            echo >&2 "$file: not renaming, unknown extension for type '$magic'"
        elif [ "$ext" != "$newext" ]; then
            mv -v "$file" "$dir/$prefix.$newext"
        fi
    done

As someone who went MPC-HC + MadVR + ReClock -> mpv years ago (well, I also switched to Gentoo, to be fair). This is completely right.

BUT mpv still isn't perfect. The script in https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/8463 is really needed to handle some stuff (mainly clandestine anime) and the libplacebo/gpu-next transition wasn't exactly the smoothest (my config still has hotfixes for https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/10716 and https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/14474).

Nitpicking aside, it really is the new gold standard these days, and for good reasons.

VLC makes video choppy on my low-end Debian machine. MPV plays them perfectly.

> works everywhere

No, it doesn’t. I had problems with it, which was tackled by basically every other players easily (e.g. seeking or simply playing anything).

VLC is only praised in "normie" places. It is hated in places like anime forums, 4chan, etc.

TIL I'm a normie. And I thought I was a hotshot tech guy.

Maybe not hated but yeah I think the memes about the first memes I've seen about artifacts/stuttering in VLC are basically as old as VLC itself. And new ones keep getting made

> has a trove of a million hidden features

No software person would find this praiseworthy. A million features = two million bugs, and indeed it shows.

Speak for yourself. I would much rather have a buggy feature than no feature at all.

I guess I don't want my video player to let audio exceed safe volumes...

> VLC is pretty bad and it shows the more you use it.

Compared to what? Such a statement is meaningless without comparison.

Compared to mpv. Some would also say compared to mpc-hc.

The first sentence on https://mpc-hc.org/ is, "MPC-HC is not under development since 2017. Please switch to something else."

search engines and wikipedia point to actively maintained versions

Instead of MPC-HC v1.7.13 (2017) maybe try MPC-HC v2.3.4 (2024)

https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc

In many ways it's a display wrapper about codec components, the display part is in active maintainance and bug fix mode (last update two weeks ago) and the codecs are constantly being improved (and expanded as new ones emerge).

https://www.codecguide.com/

There are two or three MPC-HC spin offs that are tweaking the core to do new things.

it's annoying that the clsid fork isn't associated with the website- it adds a lot of confusion to what is probably the video player that compromises between user friendliness and customizability. It's usually the video player that I recommend to people because it seems beter than vlc and has a GUI for settings as opposed to mpv.

This is one of the many reasons why forks should use a distinctive name to differentiate themselves. Just realeasing new versions with the same name as the upstream project is generally a dick move.

I am pretty sure the dev (clsid2) worked on mpc-hc originally as well before.

I don't think the target audience are the same. Not so sure about this. Just my impression.

> mpv

can you please explain what you mean with this acronym?

EDIT: this seems to correspond to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPlayer

mpv is the name of the actual program, I'm not aware of it standing for anything. MPlayer is an older project.

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