Is VLC Video Player good or bad?

[Akotan]

VLC is great indeed but you might want to try this one: http://lifehacker.com/5822672/the-best-video-player-for-windows

 

[Rydian]

So it's a fork of KMPlayer, which is a GUI/fork for MPlayer?

 

[Deleted-236924]

Those damn FLV files that barely play on anything but your browser.

MPC-HC runs FLV.

 

[the_randomizer]

VLC is one of the first things I install on a new computer. It's definitely the recommended video-player.

Doesn't it also disable DVD region locking?

 

[Rydian]

Not just by being installed, but when actively played it does ignore the region flag.

 

[Hells Malice]

The -ONLY- time I had issues with VLC was watching C3. It'd freeze every...I dunno what they're called, section? change. Like going from part 1 to part 2...it'd freeze. It was really annoying, but it was the only anime (or video, period) to ever screw up on VLC for me.
The glitchy/pixelated screen prowler posted a screenie for in page 1 stopped happening after I updated to whatever the hell version i'm on now.

I have issues with a lot of other media players. I used Media Player Classic for ages, but it couldn't run 10-bit anime, so I ditched it.

Windows Media Player is just plain unreliable, even with codec packs and the like.

 

[alphamule]

Those damn FLV files that barely play on anything but your browser.

MPC-HC runs FLV.

Hmm, yeah. Back when I tried that last, FLV Player was the only one that didn't barf all over my desktop. Once I got it working, I saw no reason to retry the other players. I'll have to try it again on MPC. Well OK, to be fair, VLC played it but slow and buggy. FLV at the time must have been one of the most proprietary formats in existence!

 

[Rydian]

Well FLV's existed for a while, it's just nobody really cared about it until all the "DOWNLOAD FROM YOUTUBE" sites started cropping up. It's a format for streaming low-bitrate stuff online so it wasn't really a concern until them.

 

[alphamule]

VLC is one of the first things I install on a new computer. It's definitely the recommended video-player.

Doesn't it also disable DVD region locking?

Wow, it must be nice to live in the 1990's. j/k
The region coding is done at the software level, not with some magical physically incompatible format like how some game systems used a different number of pins. Or how TVs used a different number of frame lines/rows and color encoding which was a time variation instead of spacial.

VLC doesn't need to tell the DVD drive on RPC-1 drives to authenticate and thus report the region, extract keys, and so on. If you tried to read a region 1 disc in a drive set to region 3, the drive would refuse to give you the keys. It turns out that the keys aren't needed. Thus, VLC just reads the data directly and decrypts it without that authentication step. RPC-2 drives are royal bastards and don't read raw data without permission if they detect encryption/region flags. There's a firmware for that, though. If you use DVD Decryptor and select authenticate or use something like this to free your drive of these insane restrictions automatically (even if there's no fixed firmware).
Sorry, I was mixing up the RCE and RPC acronyms for the DVD standard. RCE is the protection against region-free players that makes them play in a loop instead of the main movie and RPC-1/2 is the 'feature' that I mention in this paragraph.
TL;DR version: VLC only works if you bypass RPC-2. Firmware/driver/DVD decryptor do that.

And yes, FLV's still a POS format. But hey, if you want to play Adobe Flash videos on Youtube downloaded by DownloadHelper, well, you have no damn choice. A lot of videos are MP4 now, though.

 

[Archenyte]

VLC is not very good. Its only draw IMO is that it can be used right away and that the interface is user-friendly and much neater than the good players. VLC cannot take proper screenshots and can't handle softsubs properly. It's pretty much a nightmare to use if you're planning to play .mkvs and still bad for everything else. There's also the "Building font cache" problem and it's bad at seeking through videos without that glitchy green screen.

I suggest MPC-HC with CCCP if you're lazy and LAV filters if you're not (there are some good guides to setting those up). Also xy-VSFilter if you want better subtitle loading but that probably doesn't matter to you. You could also use mplayer2 instead right after installing.

MadVR is pretty much the best video renderer that you can get for MPC-HC, but it uses a lot of your CPU so it won't work on slightly old computers.

@[member='Hells Malice']
That's probably because you haven't updated your codecs or filters. 10-bit is supported by the latest CCCP and LAV filters (check the guide at Haruhi-chan).

 

[alphamule]

Screenshots - yes it can and if you like a different way to take them, it has source code. It's one freaking line of code to change/replace and most Linux users install the needed compilers eventually, anyways. If you're on Windows and you hate VLC so much, just use the other popular free program called "Windows Media Player". You get it free with the OS.

Edit: Sorry to be so snarky but it's annoying to see people pouring on the hate on a program that works. I've used mplayer2 as well. Heck, I've probably tried almost all of them from 2005 back and at least half since then.

 

[Rydian]

This varies a little according to your system nowadays, but... VLC does screenshots fine with it's built-in function. If you've tried screenshotting normally and found just a black rectangle, it's not VLC. That's hardware acceleration, and you'll encounter it on any video player using it (which is the majority nowadays). It's only players that don't offload the rendering of the image that allow it to be screenshotted (since a screenshot happens at the CPU level and not the GPU level, so at that point the image isn't in the screen), but this is often the case when you use things like codec packs to force something like WMP to accept filters it normally doesn't (since it has to do that through software).

As for softsubs, never messed with them.

I've only seen VLC build the font cache during the initial install. If yours is hanging, then one of your font files is fucked up. Other programs like GIMP can have the same issue in dealing with corrupt fonts.

 

[Archenyte]

Well, if it's not VLC's problem with screenshots, then I guess I gave the player too much credit. Take a look at http://screenshotcom...parison/123877.
The subtitles are blurry; the F and r are cut out. There are artifacts everywhere.

EDIT: The font cache thing is a bit more relevant when you use softsubs with fonts added in I guess.

 

[Rydian]

I'm not seeing any subtitles?

And by "artifacting" do you mean the color banding for the white on the sign?

Also could you get me the Tools - Codec Info for that video?

 

[updowners]

The -ONLY- time I had issues with VLC was watching C3. It'd freeze every...I dunno what they're called, section? change. Like going from part 1 to part 2...it'd freeze. It was really annoying, but it was the only anime (or video, period) to ever screw up on VLC for me.
The glitchy/pixelated screen prowler posted a screenie for in page 1 stopped happening after I updated to whatever the hell version i'm on now.

I have issues with a lot of other media players. I used Media Player Classic for ages, but it couldn't run 10-bit anime, so I ditched it.

Windows Media Player is just plain unreliable, even with codec packs and the like.

It was probably freezing on ordered chapters. Also MPC-HC can play hi10p video fine with ffdshow while VLC did not get hi10p support till version 2.0.

 

[Archenyte]

The artifacts are everywhere, look at the background and stuff. Random blocks of gray where there shouldn't be any, the video looking as if it's bleeding into those black bars, some more covering the subtitles, etc.

I can't give the codec info because I have not taken these screenshots myself (I took them from a thread I was in a while ago, but it got deleted by a janitor), but I could take some new ones tomorrow for a new video.

 

[Rydian]

Yeah I'm going to have to prefer non-anecdotal evidence. XD

(And of course stuff being taken from a recent version is always a plus towards the discussion of whether to use it or not since the people will be using the current version at the time of writing.)

 

[wafflestick]

its amazing! and if you enable GPU acceleration (if you have a decent card of course) that baby roars

 

[Sicklyboy]

Spoiler

VLC looks pretty okay to me.

Edit - gotta love jpeg compression. The PNG source pic is fine.

 

[IchigoK2031]

I pretty much only use Media Player Classic- Home Cinema, with mainly CCCP codecs (I have other codecs, but its only so I can play 10-bit anime) ~