VLC sucks ass when you want to do any type of live transcoding or remuxing without setting up a video stream. Especially with multichannel audio:

This has been an issue ever since feature added, the maximum bitrate you can set is 512 kb/s on every codec, despite codecs that support more.
The bug thread for this was basically “stop complaining about our shit UI and use the CLI”
Much prefer Kodi for this purpose, and an ffmpeg based player for lightweight stuff.
My experience with VLC in Linux is subpar. In Windows it was always a good tool to have. Granted for me it was just, does this shit have working codecs, phew, it plays
Developed by the French and funded by the EU. I’ll download it.
Despite that I still like it
If you’re telling us you found Lemmy before vlc that’s honestly remarkable.
Me, upon installing Debian KDE distro, and having Dragon Player pop up: I ALREADY INSTALLED VLC, WHAT THE HELL DUDES
It’s so bizarre that KDE “makes” its “own” videoplayer when libVLC is literally a dependency of KDE.
The real question is why they make two! Did a fresh install of Fedora KDE the other day and had to remove dragon and installed haruna.
Two? Don’t forget Kaffeine!
They’ve been trying to replace all of their software with
Qt4Qt5Qt6 versions for like 7 centuries now.
Shame it’s shit on Android tv
Is it? What’s wrong with it? What do you use instead?
It seems to fail with some files. I think 4k and/or .mkv ones. I’ve had to use Kodi during those times instead. I’ve not going a great simple media player to use on Android tv yet. They all have their caveats. Unless there’s a better one I’ve not found yet.
sad ffmpeg noises
Dont you mean sad libavcodec noises?
VLC, IPlayer, and FFMpeg are interfaces for libavcodec 😀
it’s repo is part of the ffmpeg one
https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/tree/HEAD:/libavcodec
Ah yes, I guess if that was interpreted as sad ffmpeg team it would hold true 😀
sad mpv noises
Blu-rays.
Don’t ‘but’ me. I literally spent the weekend getting aggravated at VLC chucking errors at me no matter how many extensions or libraries or whathaveyou I threw at it to make blu-rays work. And this isn’t even the first time.
4k’s are their own special thing, but for regular Blu-ray’s I’ve had good luck using the MakeMKV integration for VLC (and Handbrake).
Technically there’s also libbluray from the same folks that make VLC, but in order to use it you have to have a list of disk IDs and their decryption keys which are annoying to get ahold of (I think I remember running across a community generated list or a methodology to break the key on avsforum, but it’s been years since I mucked with it- makemkv is significantly easier)
Also, if you want disk menus, you’ll need to have some version of the java 8 runtime installed and configured for VLC to use.
Don’t get mad at the software trying to do it’s best to overcome intentionally malicious coding.
Some of my 4k videos, especially drone footage refuses to play smoothly in vlc, I couldn’t be arsed to find out why, it’s just annoying.
On high quality video files with 7.1 and 5.1 surround the audio in box is cutting in and out for me constantly.
As of this morning it no longer plays video. Just outputs black.
I’m tired.
Blu-rays are purposely made to be combersome to read and use without explicit permission from the Blu-Ray commission.
Blu-rays aren’t DVDs, each release has a unique encryption on it that you either break, or use a program to scan and break for you with public listings of known keys.
VLC would need to ask the Blu-Ray Group to open up their software on how encoding and decoding works, and they never will.
Sony gets a cut for every single Blu-ray, it’s why you need to install the app for Xbox when the gaming console can naturally play Blu-ray discs for games. Microsoft doesn’t want to fork over more money to it’s main competitor, and part of why they backed HD DVD.
Is it VLCs fault? Not really. If they had a lot of money and man hours they could maybe work something out. But DVDs are child’s play to figure out compared to Blu-Rays. That’s on purpose.
Yeah. The are not going to make blu rays as simple as
[09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0]
Somehow I’m unable to let VLC play any kind of video on my Arch (actually cachyos) laptop. Whatever the format it says codec is missing even if I installed everything (mpv, totem and others can play them).
(I tried to install vlc-git from aur but then gave up when after 30 minutes was still compiling, I don’t have enough patience to wait all that time every time I run
yay)I’m forced to run the flatpak version of VLC for some reason, the only way to make it work
You should read the wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VLC_media_player
Likely you just want vlc-plugins-all
Eventually, after I stop using my steam deck I’m going to turn it into a VLC machine. With emulators on it too
Isn’t a tablet gonna offer a larger screen for less weight if all you wanna do is watch videos
Music
Then a small dedicated music player like an ipod is even better, you wanna lug around a steam deck just to listen to music?
Idk who knows what I’ll use it for down the road.
I rarely take a laptop on trips anymore (unless its my work one), bt kb+mouse, plug in 4tb ssd (that has built in hdmi out). shitty plywood stand that i made. It’s cool.
frankly the shitty cheap used laptops that i get, its probably better performance than any of them if i do need to do anything serious.
Back in the day Media Player Classic was this for me. I didn’t know enough about codecs but I knew that player seemed to have all of them.
Of course it’s now superceded by vlc (and maybe even was at the time) but it’s still a fond memory of working out why the video I downloaded only played audio.
Nah. mpv.
Until you want to add external subtitles
When the file is called
video.mkvname themvideo.srt. MPV will pick it up automatically.I know, but what about when I have several subtitle files? Different languages, or maybe several subtitle files I downloaded and want to check which one matches my video? mpv has zero flexibility.
With VLC I can just “Subtitle / Add subtitle track” or add the language code after the filename (
video.en.srt,video.fr.srt,video.spa.srt), with mpv: just one file at a time: rename, launch, retry.
I don’t know what it is about mpv that makes it my favourite. Gstreamer is performative enough. FFplay is also pretty clean. Cvlc is fine.
I think I just like that it has sensible controls, and ultimately gets out of the way
I really like the configuration aspect of it. You can customize how it works internally and how it even looks. For example, I use a big 1m diagonal TV as my main screen and I sit about 45cm in front of it. So with bidirectional integer scaling, Full HD looks kind of blurry and bad, but with lanczos scaling it looks great! And that’s why I like MPV.
If I want a program that calls a video player seemlessly for the end user mpv is great.
If I want an actual app that is human useable and doesn’t require arcane bullshit. I’ll use VLC.
Different use cases really.
VLC… my choice since 2007.
I did a CTF once where one of the challenges was forensics on a video file. It had the header ripped off, the entension removed, and was split into chunks that had to be ripped out of a pcap and reassmebled
VLC just played the mangled chunks as-is. It was an unintended cheat code for the challenge
VLC: “I am 4 Parallel Universes ahead of you”
I had it once play a video recorded on an old Motorola razr circa 2004. It was this super obscure file format, that basically only this one phone used, and was never used on any other phone.
VLC didn’t care, played it right out of the box without any problems.
It supports an obscure single use, 2004 video format. If aliens come to earth, VLC will be able to play their files too.
There are other media players?
I get the sense that VLC doesn’t really care if something is a valid video file, it’s just gonna start playing and see what happens.
I’m pretty sure it can still do that. Like if you can trick it into playing something that isn’t even video, it’ll shit out whatever it can interpret as video. Which of course will be garbled nonsense, but it did exactly what you asked.
I wish every program was this way. Fuck off with your file format restrictions, I know what Im doing
Audacity does as well and I use it to edit pictures sometimes.
Yes pictures.
You can get some interesting effects from it.
Interesting…
Which of course will be garbled nonsense, but it did exactly what you asked.
Is it possible that someone took a copy of hitlers book, shoved it into VLC, took the video it spit out, and somehow we got a president from that process? Garbled nonsense. Highly racist. But it did what you asked!
Wait…does this explain Mark Zuckerberg? They put a piece of cellery, mixed with dog shit, and out comes Mark Zuckerberg who’s almost a real boy?
My camera shat out an MP4 without a moov atom and VLC nor anything else could play it :( Not even when inserted in the middle of a valid file of the same format.
Yes, ffplay can interpret it as rawvideo when asked but so can it /dev/random
Some files are more particular than others about being closed properly.
MP4 is decent at this, it’s the camera’s fault for writing critical information at the end and not retrying on SD write errors. A bad couple of frames is still preferrable to losing up to 20 minutes (yes, that’s the split size, and it loses 5 seconds in between).
I recall a few AVIs from the long ago that VLC would throw an error on, something about a format error, and it gave the option to try converting it or try playing as-is. Attempting to convert took forever, and playback was mostly fine, though IIRC you couldn’t scrub through the file.
Yeah it absolutely can fix broken avi files! Was a lifesaver back in high-school for me, during that era, avi was every camcorder format (at least that I had).
I always stored it on this 128gb external drive and I swear that drive was cursed, always corrupted my files. Vlc was an easy way to fix them for class.
IIRC that’s AVI files that aren’t indexed properly. VLC could either build its own index for the file or it could just start playing the file one frame at a time and hope for the best.
That’s it! Thanks for the assist lol.
MacOS was telling me “Open this openSUSE ISO in: Balena Etcher, VLC”
what
VLC be like: “it’s a disk image is it not???”
You can shove French fries into a CD drive and vlc will still make it a video
Rallys/Checkers fries? Or Burger King? Because there is a HUGE difference!
Or Wendys?
Or McDonalds?
WHOSE FRIES ARE WE TALKING ABOUT??? I WANT TO WATCH VIDEOS ON FRENCH FRIES!!!
deleted by creator
White castle fries show Robin Hood: Men in Tights
reminds me of Oats Jenkins on YT designing “Money 2” and the biggest coin (1000 “grain”) was a playable CD
the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MqfGO81Lus
Eww, that’s a kitschy video
The bill could be a playable CD too if you don’t care about folding, or add bends around the central square. The widest rectangle that can be cut out of a CD and still retain a bit of the data area is about 108×51 mm, as opposed to approx. 156×66 mm of a $1 bill.
But yeah, NFC or just printing the data is more viable.
Extract the eyes of murder victims and VLC will show their final moments.
But really isn’t that just libavcodec behaving like that? VLC itself doesn’t actually read your video file, it just takes what FFMPEG gives it and blindly trusts it.
Cisco coming up with ARF and WRF to make that false.
















