???
I thought the meme was that it played basically everything? At least compared to windows media player or whatever.
The other items I can't say I've noticed, but then again I only play the most common of files (eg. h.264/h.265 with english subtitles in a mkv) so maybe it's something that only happens with unusual formats/encodes.
edit: based on other comments (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465349), it looks like it might indeed be caused by uncommon files that I haven't encountered.
Yes, that was in the 2000s though. During the 2010 VLC started falling behind because its shortcomings overweighted its capabilities.
So at least from those times
I've also encountered the odd "this video is corrupted" error that persists even after re-encoding. But I've never thought to troubleshoot to see if it's a VLC, and instead just get a different version.
I don't doubt that there's some obscure, elite videophile hate towards it, but I'm hardly going to stop using it because a few random internet strangers hate on it.
My own anecdotal experience with VLC was that while every update fixed something, they also broke something in return - and these updates were common. This got annoying enough at some point for me to hop ships, and so I switched to mpc-hc and never looked back.
I've since also tried (and keep trying) the to-me still newfangled mpv, but I'm not a fan of the GUI or the keybinds. I know it can be customized, but that's not something I'm interested in doing. I know there are alternative frontends as well, but I checked and they're not to my liking either. So I mostly just use it for when mpc-hc gives out, such as really badly broken media files, or anything HDR.
I'll make up my own mind on it.
Let's be kind. Clearly not what either of us were thinking or intended to convey.
[0] Doesn't mean there weren't any, but then I was not doing anything special. Just watched anime, listened to music, streamed YouTube. Hardly an extraordinary workload for VLC, or indeed any media player in general.
[1] I remember them changing around the volume slider widget back and forth ad nauseam for example, and that becoming in some particular way defective that I cannot recall.
It seems there’s a lot of open-source lovers that haven’t also accepted that bugs can get fixed, projects can improve, etc. They’d rather treat a project as though it was stuck at version 0 from 20 something years ago. Deeply ironic.
Havent used it in ages, but a decade ago it felt a joke for all the video artifacts and subtitle glitches.
The one part that does get me some about people who blindly still praise it as THE video player at least outside of more technically inclined spaces like this, is so many people assume it exists as some monolith. Clearly library free, entirely the original work of VideoLAN, gracious they be that they give it all away for free.
It's not, but the Linux weenies won't hear of it. Maybe it's a great choice on Linux, but on Windows, it often renders things much worse than stock WMP (both legacy and modern). Videos with a lot of motion play especially poorly.
But, yeah, it opens everything.
(Lots of corner cases apply and VLC developers do assist ffmpeg, host a conference, etc.)