Exactly, very hard to take the rest of it seriously after the VLC bit. VLC has literally never left me hanging, across I don't know how many decades. It's gonna take more than a trust me bro to challenge that.
VLC ignores a lot for it's outstanding video playback support, which is great if you want the playback too just work... But that's the player perspective, not the editing/encoding
- Transfer functions are just generally a mess but are close enough that most people don't notice they're wrong. Changing the render engine option will often change how the video looks.
- Some DV profiles cause videos to turn purple or green.
- h.264 left and right crops are both applied as left crops that are summed together which completely breaks many videos. They could just ignore this metadata but from what I've heard their attitude is that a broken implementation is better than no implementation.
> single best media player out there ... VLC is not recommended.
> Hanging out in subtitling and video re-editing communities, I see my fair share of novice video editors and video encoders, and see plenty of them make the classic beginner mistakes when it comes to working with videos.
Seriously, you quoted pretty much the only sentence in the whole article that's about plain playback, and even in that bullet point, the following sentence mentions hardcoding subtitles.
> It turns out that reading the (f.) manual actually helps a lot!
The non-recommendation of VLC vs mpc/mpv is literally for playback as I quoted! MPC also doesn't do any encoding, yet it's recommended
> the following sentence mentions hardcoding subtitles.
And that sentence starts with "Apart from simply watching the video" to tell you the same thing the previous sentence told you - that comparison where VLC was not receommended was about playback, not editing
The point was that the rest of the article wasn't and if you unironically can't tell that, then you should seriously train your reading comprehension.
There's a reason why VLC isn't used in broadcast stuff and ffmpeg is.
Seeking is surprisingly difficult. Many container formats don't support it at all, because they don't have indexes, and so it's easy to mess up playback or lose A/V sync by trying it. Constructing the index is about as hard as decoding the entire file too.
[1] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/libavformat-mkv-check...
Source?
There's also https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/25651 but that's an off by one error so likely not really relevant to video playback for the average user.