VLC has been able to handle pretty much anything you throw at it for many years and always been available across diverse platforms. It's an awesome product.
Why so negative?
Why so negative?
For people who want to spend hours to configure their system, MPC-HC with madVR can give better upscaling and foobar gives better audio fidelity. Most of the rest is usual rants from issues that VLC had in the past, but that 1337 video people like to bring up to explain how their setup is soooo much better.
Anyway, giving VLC 2.0.4 on Windows a spin, the audio glitch on pause is certainly still there. I guess I'll take your word on it being fixed in "development versions", but I don't think MPC-HC has had an issue like this, like, ever. H.264 seeking and ordered chapters certainly seem to work without any notable issues these days, though. Subtitle rendering still has some issues with complex typesetting, though libass is at fault there.
So there isn't that much of a difference anymore between say, a vanilla installation of CCCP and VLC. I'd still recommend the former for Windows users, though. Why? Because the former is a DirectShow playback solution, you can actually extend and swap its components at ease. Want to install madVR for high quality rendering? Sure, just download and install it and you can instantly use it in MPC-HC (which ships with CCCP) right afterwards. Being stand-alone has its benefits, but it certainly also has its disadvantages. Not to mention that with VSFilter you don't have to ever see that "Building font cache" (which will certainly not take "less than a minute" if you have lots of fonts) window!
VLC has ongoing minor problems (e.g. colorspaces) and a history of more major ones (e.g. buffer overflows in subtitle parsing). Unless you prefer the VLC interface (which would be perfectly reasonable, but I don't see people giving this as a rationale for using VLC), it's worse than either of the two alternatives I mentioned. And yet it's far more popular. This can be frustrating.
I certainly understand it's appeal, but there's certainly better yet equally simple solutions out there as well (eg. CCCP for Windows, various MPlayer2 bundles for OS X like MPlayer.app). Of course, the "downside" of DirectShow-based playback solutions on Windows is that if a user has managed to fuck up their DirectShow beyond recognition, it's going to need a lot of unfucking before you can do anything about it, whereas VLC in its stand-alone nature can play stuff even in a situation like this. Though you could also always get a SMPlayer2 & mplayer2 bundle in such a situation too...
I'm not at home right now so I can't reliably confirm if certain long-time issues still remain in the latest version (2.0.4), but VLC has also for the longest time had issues with pause not being completely instant (despite claiming so), the audio glitching slightly when pausing/unpausing, and seeking in H.264 video producing a garbled mess (this at least has gotten better with over time). Matroska ordered chapters support has also been shoddy for a very long time. Subtitle rendering was also absolutely hideous before they started using libass in version 1.0 (IIRC), at which point softsubs had already been in use for quite a long while. As I mentioned, VLC's development in terms of high quality playback has mostly been about playing catch-up with the better players, at worst being years behind them.
Audio pausing is fixed since a long time on all platforms and on development version for Windows.
Seeking on H.264 and MKV ordered chapters issues have been solved since quite some time too.
Subtitles quality has nothing to do with libass, but the video output rendering, and this was fixed in 2.0.
madVR is very CPU heavy, and is EVR only, so not usable for cross-platform.
It most certainly does when we're talking about complex ASS subtitles.
>madVR is very CPU heavy
Actually, it's more GPU-heavy. And while it's only available for Windows, it doesn't change the fact that it's basically the best video renderer out there.
Anyway, I'm certainly going to give VLC 2.0.4 a spin with some of my files when I get home in a couple hours. If some of these issues have finally been fixed, then good for VLC, but again, it sure took them a while to do so in comparison to other players.
If you run Windows, using Media Player Classic - Home Cinema with madVR[1] will give you much, much better quality.
VLC handles some large video files - or file types - very poorly in my experience, too.
VLC is great, because it has an excellent standard of video quality, and it's easy as heck to use and set up for others, but for people who really care about optimal playback, it isn't really the best choice.
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I think the main allure of VLC used to be that the tortuous labour of finding and installing codecs was suddenly moot. Using MPC-HC requires a lot of painstaking effort, especially once a codec stops working all of a sudden for some reason.
VLC is very Apple-esque in how it does everything for me and gives me an ease of mind, but with no guarantee that I will get the highest quality. And MPC-HC is very Windows-esque in how it requires a bunch of tweaking and pulling out hairs, which will eventually result in superior quality, but all in all perhaps an inferior experience and enjoyment, because it takes jumping through so many hoops to just get there.
Moving on from VLC to MPC-HC is very much like moving on from using primes in typography to curly quotes; it might be more aesthetically pleasing, but most of all, you kinda wish you could just unsee the difference and quit pursuing the folly of proper typography. These days, I can hardly stand reading books with justification, which unfortunately is quite a large majority of them.
It's a blessing and a curse, and I'd properly just recommend most people to find a video player similar to VLC in how easy it is to use, all while providing superior video quality and performance.
If you're watching a movie or TV show, I recommend that you watch it on Netflix or Blu-ray, if the option is available to you. That's what I do. :)
Some random examples: Thor, The Dictator, The Avengers Assemble, (essentially everything published by "Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment", and many things published by "Paramount Home Entertainment")
Now one might say to "just disable menus!" but unfortunately that is ineffective as they have put a bunch of fake tracks on the disc which cause you to bounce around the movie out-of-order.
Playback works fine on Windows Media Player, PowerDVD, and most hardware players. Only VLC and the DVD extraction software seem to crash. Unfortunately there are likely things in the spec' which allow this.
EDIT: wow, checking now, PowerDVD 'Standard' edition is AU$55 - you can get actual hardware DVD players for less than that!
1) I don't care about sound quality on Skype
2) mplayer2 handles everything perfectly
3) My hardware is a crap on-board chip that's 5 years old and not made any more
I haven't been interested in pursuing a fix for this.
Also, mplayer2 does better upscaling with -vo gl:yuv=4:lscale=5:cscale=5
"master of one" = inferior product
see also: Worse Is Better, Innovator's Dilemma
I guess the keyword is "similarly" here? VLC is the only player that plays all video clips from crappy digital cameras I owned over the years; out of the box, or with a million codec packs, neither VirtualDub nor Premiere nor other video players can parse them. I don't really care about those clips, and they sure are shoddy quality; but it always impressed me, VLC is quite the omnivore. It plays stuff even GSpot can't make heads or tail of. This might not matter for videophiles, who by definition would want their movies to be in a good and modern format, but still, yay VLC :)
I maintain this kind of test suite since I do video production using open source software and I have to make sure it works in all the major video players.
VLC is useful and important but it is no where near perfect.