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A funny story (among many other) related to the traffic cone chosen as the VLC icon.
When some student was spotted consuming most of the bandwidth by downloading 'Linux distros' on P2P networks, such traffic cone would be placed in front of his room door, to designate the culprit. It might be one of the reason of the VLC icon choice.
Told by my brother in law, who was president of the VIA[0] student association of the Ecole Centrale de Paris.
[0]:
https://viarezo.fr/en/a_propos
I had never heard this story but this could definitely have happened at some point.
My personal memory that this happened because the people there were collecting cones at a high rate to play in the corridor of the floor (the 2H) of the student residence most of the VideoLAN / Via people were occupying at that time. This trend was certainly started by someone who became Debian Project Leader at some point and who was also enjoying eating regularly at a fast food restaurant in town. On their way back, these young and stupid boys were stealing the cones from a nearby gas station and bringing them back.
This lead to various uses such as the creation of an unofficial acrobatic cone launch federation (« la federation internationale de cone ball » I tried to find a picture of a now prominent Google SRE in action but my google-fu escaped me) and various costumes[1].
The cone used as an icon was also illustrating the fact that most of the code was heavily in progress at that time and so definitely not usable.
We were young!
1:
http://sam.zoy.org/photos/20001011%20-%202H/016%20-%20la%20d...
The story I heard is that the association has a collection of traffic cones that were stolen under the influence of alcohol [0].
[0]:
http://nanocrew.net/2005/06/23/vlc-cone/
VLC is by far the best media player in existence, and I'm extremely thankful for the team behind it. Gives me hope that this whole Foss thing is actually very good for the world.
I very much prefer mpv.
I also greatly prefer mpv, but I wouldn't recommend it to most people for the same reason I wouldn't recommend emacs to most people. To get the most out of it, you need to be able and inclined towards extending it. But if you are, it really kicks ass.
Like how? What can it do that vlc can't?
It has the JSON-IPC interface, which is much better than vlc's telnet interface (which is barely documented at all.) The pseudo-gui is written as a lua script and can be swapped out with your own to suit your personal whims. It comes with builtin support for youtube-dl/yt-dlp (which work on a wider range of sites than vlc's equivalent feature), which can be modified to allow changing the format/quality on the fly. Relating to that, scripts can add new protocol support for things like torrent files, magnet links, etc. With the right scripts and configuration, you can turn it into a capable image viewer suitable for reading comic books (cbz files).
I have a gallery view (for the playlist) and a contact sheet view (for the current file) that both have thumbnails. For the life of me I can't figure out how to get this in VLC (surely there must be a way, right? But the documentation is crap and I can't find it anywhere in the menus or preferences window. All I can find is the playlist view that doesn't have thumbnails.)
But the big differences which enable everything else is better documentation, particularly for the scripting and IPC interfaces. If you can find the documentation for VLC's Lua interface please let me know, because as far as I can tell that documentation is nonexistent. It's certainly not in the manpage, nor the worthless F1 window, nor can I find it on the VLC wiki). It's difficult to figure out what VLC's Lua interface is even capable of, but if you go by the addons listed on VLC's website the sole advantage of VLC's Lua scripting seems to be the ability to create basic GUIs.
loads instantaneously, simple config, fully-keyboard driven, vim-like bindings, great to use from the command line or terminal-based file managers like ranger.
> loads instantaneously
I've never encountered a case where VLC did not load "instantaneously". Unless you're using a baked potato this should always be the case. If you have proper benchmarks for different video files and different hardware, cite them. "Instantaneously" doesn't mean a thing.
Your other points are equally subjective and meaningless. Especially vim bindings, really? That is now considered a feature? And I don't get how directly changing the configuration from the GUI where each option is explained in detail is simpler than a error-prone process of modifying a text configuration.
My comment was not meant as a slight on VLC. If I was incorrect about load time that does not invalidate the other points. The concept of a "feature" is subjective and if someone finds them valuable, then they are valuable features by definition.
Why? The GUI is simple, MPV needs learning CLI to play videos.
https://www.migaku.io/tools-guides/migaku-mpv/guide/
and has drama like this.
https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/cdaa496314f90412963...
I just want to play videos, what is the benefit of MPV? I used it for a while, because it was "better" but now I wonder "better how"?
> _MPV needs learning CLI to play videos._
It certainly does not. You can launch mpv by clicking/doubleclicking on any media file in your file manager, the same as any other. You can also drag media files to your mpv icon, or drag media files to a running mpv instance.
Edit: Also I don't know where you found that "migaku" guide, but it's crap. Why is guide written in english telling people to download a config file that sets Japanese as the default audio and subtitle language? Why the hell is it turning hardware decoding off by default? Also, sudo to curl into usr/local/bin/youtube-dl when you could just put yt-dlp/youtube-dl in the regular mpv configuration directory? Fucking... why?
Do yourself a favor and read the official documentation if you really want to give mpv a try.
If I want to change the speed in VLC, I can find the menu easily. There is a minimal GUI on MPV that doesn't show me anything for changing speed, it changes A-V delay when I try a -/+ command with CTRL, there is no right click menu, there is accessibility to helpful shortcuts that I shouldn't need to memorize keys for. Its minimalist for no good reason, has poor accessibility, and if I can't even find the help menu, what is the benefit of the design?
> _There is a minimal GUI on MPV that doesn't show me anything for changing speed, it changes A-V delay when I try a -/+ command with CTRL, there is no right click menu, there is accessibility to helpful shortcuts that I shouldn't need to memorize keys for._
It is true that mpv usually doesn't have a GUI menu for this (I believe it does on MacOS, but lets ignore that.) However it's not true that doing so requires using a command line. Speed is changed using the [ and ] keys, which is documented in the manual. Obviously this is not friendly to novices, but it certainly does not require using the command line.
> _Its minimalist for no good reason_
It's minimal for a _very good_ reason: because some people like it that way. Obviously it's not for everybody, and there is nothing wrong with that. I would never consider recommending it for everybody, but I object to the implicit assertion that all software must aspire to be good for everybody.
> _what is the benefit of the design?_
To you? Probably none. So I don't recommend it to you.
>However it's not true that doing so requires using a command line.
Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player.
>It's minimal for a very good reason: because some people like it that way. Obviously it's not for everybody, and there is nothing wrong with that. I would never consider recommending it for everybody, but I object to the implicit assertion that all software must aspire to be good for everybody.
Its minimalist enough to not have a help menu or list of commands, where is the manual for it even? Even in shells I can type man. What is the benefit of not having a right click menu or something like F1 not bringing up help. I am not against learning how to use tools, but who do you recommend this player to? People who want to memorize keys for their media player? Is that not like a CLI user?
> _Its very much like learning CLI, except you need to memorize the keys on a GUI medial player._
It's very much like learning to play a piano by the same twisted logic.
> _where is the manual for it even?_
Here:
Linked from straight from the mpv homepage. Also linked from the github page. You can also read it here:
https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/man/mpv.r...
Or you can read the local manpage on your computer using the manpage reader of your choice (I prefer KHelpCenter, but you can use `man` if you like that more...) If you have trouble finding the manpage, then you've definitely taken a wrong turn somewhere and should
> _What is the benefit of not having a right click menu_
The mpv psuedo-gui is drawn using the libass subtitle rendering library. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. It's cross platform, so the same psuedo-gui code works the same on every platform (unlike the MacOS specific menu code.) It can be modified, extended, replaced or supplemented using Lua or JS user-scripts using the same libass techniques (the psuedo-gui mpv ships with is implemented as a builtin Lua script.) The biggest downsides to this are being limited to doing things subtitles can do (which doesn't include right-click menus) and the fundamental weirdness of using a subtitle library to render a GUI in the first place (personally I think it's endearing, but I acknowledge that it's weird.)
> _People who want to memorize keys for their media player? Is that not like a CLI user?_
No? Shortcut-focused GUIs and command line interfaces are not the same thing. Incidentally, mpv does have a embedded REPL if you _do_ want to control it using a commandline interface. You can access it by pressing `. It is useful in some scenarios but you'll soon find it's a hell of a lot more convenient to use keyboard shortcuts instead. I virtually never use it except for testing when I'm writing mpv user-scripts.
> _but who do you recommend this player to?_
Only to people who are able and eager to hack on their media player. Suppose you want to control your media player from another application; vlc can support this with the telnet interface, but it's very limited and poorly documented. mpv's IPC interface is extremely powerful and well documented.
>
Linked from straight from the mpv homepage
That's just the manpage in html format, are you kidding? We're not in the era of text terminals, there are so many tools for writing good documentation that this is just inexcusable. Take a look at VLC documentation (
https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:User_Guide/
), that's a proper documentation with screenshots that looks like someone actually put some effort into writing that so that it is understandable to new users instead of plugging words into a troff file.
Except for the edge case of controlling a media player from another application you've put no convincing use case for using mpv over vlc. So it's a personal preference not that mpv is superior to vlc in anyway (actually far inferior for most use cases).
> _Take a look at VLC documentation (
https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:User_Guide/
)_
Trust me, I have. _Extensively_. The mpv manpage (which is actually written in the reStructuredText markup lanugage) is comprehensive and easy to read. Era of text terminals? Give me a break, I just gave you a link for reading it in your browser, just like the VLC wiki, except the mpv manual is very comprehensive and up to date, while the VLC manual is scattered, sparse, and frequently out of date. I practice terminal emulator avoidance; I don't edit text in a terminal emulator, I don't read manpages in a terminal emulator, and I almost never start mpv from a terminal emulator either.
> _So it's a personal preference not that mpv is superior to vlc_ [...] _most use cases_ [...]
I have been upfront about that. I recommend VLC to the vast majority of users, including all of my family and most of my friends.
You completely missed the point about man pages. It doesn't matter what the man page was written in, it's still a man page, optimized for viewing in text terminal. It makes no sense to use this format for web browser. Vlc also had a man page, but the developers know the difference between a man page and proper documentation. It's completely unsuitable for new users using any sufficiently complex application like a video player.
What it was "optimized for" is irrelevant if it's legible and has good information. The mpv manual read in a web browser is both of those. The VLC manual is a mediawiki (if we're talking about subjective appearances, mediawiki has always been fugly) that's both sparse and out of date. Changes to mpv make it into the manual because they're both in the same repo and people making changes to the code are expected by community convention to have the corresponding updates to the manual in their pull request. This doesn't happen with VLC.
The only upside of the VLC manual is that only one in a thousand VLC users will ever need to look at it in the first place. mpv's manual is necessary but high quality, while VLC's manual is low quality but extraneous.
> What it was "optimized for" is irrelevant if it's legible and has good information.
It's not having good information that is important, what's critical is finding _relevant_ information quickly, tagging and linking it to other parts of the document and external sources. Also information does not have to be limited to text format, especially for manuals a graphic or a small video can be worth more than thousand written words. Welcome to 21st century. All information you'll ever need is present in the source code, then why even bother creating a documentation? Manpage is limited for even text terminals, texinfo is so much better.
I agree regarding the need to keep the documentation updated. However, it's quite easy to get support from the community and putting a request to update an outdated article or section.
I asked not because I can't google them, but to open it from the player, is that at all possible or do I have to go online to the homepage, github, and open my terminal to find out how to change settings in MPV?
>There are advantages and disadvantages to this. It's cross platform, so the same psuedo-gui code works the same on every platform
I can't find it on iOS anyway but VLC is there, I don't know the benefit of having the same UI on mobile and desktop so its probably lost on me. Having a manual in the program or it bringing up a text file in the program can't be that against MPV sensibilities can it?
>No? Shortcut-focused GUIs and command line interfaces are not the same thing.
I agree, I can use shortcuts on VLC as well, but it has a GUI and help file, but MPV is like starting a program in your shell with no man files.
>Suppose you want to control your media player from another application
I can control through d-bus and control VLC with SSH with ncurses.
https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Modules/ncurses/
> _but MPV is like starting a program in your shell with no man files._
I can start virtually any program in a shell if I want to, VLC included. And I can't imagine what you mean by "with no man files" since mpv has a superb manpage.
> _I can control through d-bus_
Extremely limited. As far as I've been able to tell it doesn't allow you to run arbitrary commands or observe arbitrary properties, making it barely more capable than an old IR remote control. If my VLC lua scripts can send arbitrary messages across that interface, I haven't been able to find it documented anywhere.
> _ncurses_
I've controlled ncurses interfaces before using Tcl/Expect. It's a world of hurt. Besides, I thought you hated terminal emulators (frankly, _I do..._)
I'm just curious, why do you hate terminal emulators ? I read you saying this statement twice in this discussion.
>I can start virtually any program in a shell if I want to, VLC included. And I can't imagine what you mean by "with no man files" since mpv has a superb manpage.
Can I open help from the program's GUI? Is it done on purpose to make it hard to learn from the application, and if not, what practical use is it?
>Extremely limited. As far as I've been able to tell it doesn't allow you to run arbitrary commands or observe arbitrary properties, making it barely more capable than an old IR remote control.
>I've controlled ncurses interfaces before using Tcl/Expect. It's a world of hurt. Besides, I thought you hated terminal emulators (frankly, I do...)
What problems does that have? What arbitrary commands do you have? I have a BT keyboard I can use too, so I don't even use app remote control, just saying that you can if you wanted to. Maybe I don't appreciate it because I don't know about how to use it properly, what does it do that VLC can't?
I don't hate CLI, I hate having a GUI that is more complex than a GUI for playing videos. I can map CLI controls to a GUI on my phone, I don't like how MPV is like a a CLI because it has poor accessibility as a feature, is there a practical reason to not have F1 invoke the shortcuts or it can't display them without an external application?
I guess the F1 screen is really important to you, but I'm looking at VLC's F1 screen right now and it looks worthless to me. It's just some links to online materials. Could mpv have that? In principle, yes. Is it worth the development effort and technical debt? I doubt it. If you're the sort of user who balks at this, it will be the least of your worries anyway and you should almost certainly use VLC instead. I think VLC is a very good program (albeit with very poor documentation) and I recommend VLC to almost everybody who asks me for a recommendation. The reason VLC's poor documentation doesn't stop me from recommending VLC is because I think most users will never need to consult the documentation in the first place.
But, if somebody is the sort of user who might find themselves wanting to consult the VLC documentation, say because they are trying to write their own extension to VLC, recommending mpv instead is a no brainer for me. mpv doesn't give you an F1 window with a clickable URL to the manual, but anybody who's capable and inclined to write scripts to extend their video editor will not be hung up by such a minor omission. And when they do manage to land on the documentation for either editor, mpv's documentation has a much better chance of actually having the information they're looking for.
> _What problems does that have? What arbitrary commands do you have?_
Concrete example: I control mpv from a media library application on my desktop. I can load a playlist of files from that media library into mpv. When mpv starts playing the next file, it can send a message to the media library notifying it of this. VLC can do all of that too; so far so good. In addition to playing the playlist, from within mpv I can also select files (without playing them), tag them, or delete them. When my mpv scripts do these things, they send events to the library application over the same interface that the library application is using to control mpv. As far as I've been able to determine, there is no VLC equivalent so I would need to open another communication channel between the two (instead of doing this, I decided to drop VLC support entirely.)
> _I don't hate CLI, I hate having a GUI that is more complex than a GUI for playing videos_
I'm starting to think we're having a fundamental communication breakdown here, because this seems completely backwards to me. VLC is the one with a complex GUI, not mpv. mpv has a very simple GUI; too simple _to a fault_ [from the perspective of most users, who are better served by VLC.] If your needs are _solely_ to play a file, just drag and drop the file into mpv and it will play just fine. It only gets more unfriendly when you want to change parameters and configuration, which VLC has very complicated GUIs for while mpv does not.
> _Is there a practical reason to not have F1 invoke the shortcuts_
In principle it could display shortcuts in the psuedo-GUI. Displaying the shortcuts in another window or in another application would require platform-specific code to be maintained for this, and I'm guessing that none of the mpv developers think that is worth their effort.
CLI and keyboard-driven are not the same thing.
Manual is the same as everything else on the system; `man mpv`.
âThere are some [silly] features in VLCâsome filters that everyone finds weird and asks [us], âWhy do you have that?â The answer is someone sent a good patch, so there was no reason to refuse it,â says Kempf.
Fun for VLC, a series of sharp edges for openssl
> While anyone can submit new ideas, whether theyâre accepted or not largely depends on the quality of the code, rather than the utility of the feature. âWe have a very difficult process,â Kempf admits. âPeople donât understand why we do that. But the reason is we need good code, because Iâm the one thatâs going to maintain it. If I donât understand it now, this is going to be a problem.â
That's the difference to OpenSSL!
A "not so silly" option is that you can just cast any video to a Chromecast.
Which is quite handy for videos that don't belong in eg. Plex.
After several false starts, I finally figured out how to configure the DLNA server in my router to serve files from USB-attached storage to the smart TVs on my LAN. Then I installed the VLC app on my iPhone and it discovered the DLNA server immediately as a UPnP File Server in the Network tab. It works pretty well, except it doesn't show the cover art for music files. The MacOS app also discovers the server, but the interface is completely different. Overall, I'm impressed, though I did have to do some online searching to figure out how to do some basic things like random play (you have to start playing a song to access the shuffle icon).
Any particular links that were helpful for this?
Honestly, no. The whole process felt like a scavenger hunt. In theory, it should be simple: 1) Connect a drive containing media to a USB port. 2) Enable DLNA server. 3) Select the server in a DLNA client and play the media. It sounds like something that should be a standard feature in any smart TV or networked media device. It's surprising how many bugs and bad interfaces I encountered along the way.
Once I got it working, I liked the built-in DLNA media server in my particular ASUS router enough that I retired my Jellyfin server.
VLC hasn't fixed the many-years-old bug where seeking causes pitch to randomly shift (
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/14287
, previously
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/10056
). And IIRC when VLC plays network streams (eg. Youtube) and they get disconnected, VLC often aborts playback instead of reconnecting (don't know if this bug is tracked or not, or fixed, since I use mpv for Youtube now).
TIL: before you click on 'View>Minimal interface', be sure to note the shortcut you need to restore it. Because minimal means _minimal_.
You can right-click anywhere in the VLC window to bring up the context menu, which has a 'View' tab which let's you toggle it back.
Anyone know if itâs possible to run shaders in VLC like you can with mpv? e.g.
https://github.com/igv/FSRCNN-TensorFlow/releases
Discussed at the time:
_The team that powers VLC_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620300
- Nov 2019 (49 comments)
There is also IINA that somehow seems more snappy/better-integrated on macOS.
IINA is basically a front-end for mpv. I use it. It's got nice features like force-touch support, but in my experience it's a memory hogâway worse than base mpv somehow.
I always wonder why people go gaga googoo over VLC, when there's Media Player Classic with K-lite which does a lot of the same things better.
I remember watching 1080p blurry rips in MPC without any problems in 2008 while VLC would spend 1 year doing some sort of buffering upon opening then struggling to play the video correctly.
It might come down to difference of experiences. As soon as software bites you once, I think most people feel differently towards it. I think the reason VLC gets (and in my opinion, deserves) a lot of praise is that a large part of the user base has never felt bitten.
Personally, I have never once had trouble getting VLC to run a media file, and I can't say that for any other media player. Granted, I don't know any other media players, and I don't know if it's hard to make a good one -- but that's kind of the point. I want a limited range of features from a media player: ability to make sound really loud, adjust timing of subtitles, speed up / slow down. All of those "just work" for VLC and have very basic navigation (that's good). VLC has allowed me to be comfortably oblivious to all the codec crap I remember dealing with over a decade ago.
You're arguing that MPC is better than VLC because of an issue you encountered 13 - almost 14 - years ago?
No, I'm pointing out that a better player already existed since the inception of VLC.
MPC is better? _Maybe_ if you run windows. But if you don't then MPC isn't only not better, it's _completely irrelevant_. VLC on the other hand supports pretty much everything under the sun, so you can safely recommend it without playing the _"what kind of computer do you have?"_ game.
Lots of better players existed at the inception of VLC. Most existing players that worked at all were probably better. That's how most projects start off.
Well, I've personally always wondered why people advocate MPC. During like 15+ years of use I can't recall having a single issue with VLC. And that's from consuming basically everything from the VCD era and onwards. In my experience VLC has been as close to flawless software as one can get.
It is[1] popular to recommend MPC over VLC in the anime fansub community, especially on /a/. When H. 264/10bit was newish and had just started to come into regular use in the scene[2], I distinctly remember a lot of people shitting on VLC because at the time it didn't handle it very well right out of the box, and there were tons of guides floating around on how to download/setup MPC-HC with CCCP or k-lite and haali media splitter for a supposedly better viewing experience.
[1] Or at least was, my recollections regarding this are nearly 10-15 years old at this point.
[2] There was one specific person, Daiz from the Underwater/UTW fansub group, that was one of the first people to start encoding his releases in H.264/10bit, and he would get a lot of hate because they tended not to play very well on improper setups, vanilla VLC being among those. "Dammit Daiz", they would say. He eventually bruteforced a tripcode to have H.264 in it just to mess back at them for all the hate. Fun memories.
edit: here we go, a contemporary HN rant from the man himself regarding MPC vs VLC. Looks like summoning Daiz works here too
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6449420
VLC had no styled subtitle support at the time, and often didn't seek to keyframes so clicking around would corrupt the video. It was also pretty inefficient on macOS.
I dont think VLC is bad by any means or that anyone shouldn't use it, I just don't understand the comments I often see on HN acting like it's some unprecedented software that's unlike anything else.
VLC is unique in its support for every codec under the sun. If it refuses to play a video file, it's probably because it's damaged beyond recovery, or not a video file at all. The default Windows and smartphone video players choke on all kinds of files, so you can't really expect that any given file is supported.
>VLC is unique in its support for every codec under the sun. If it refuses to play a video file, it's probably because it's damaged beyond recovery, or not a video file at all.
Last I checked the recommended method to play h.265 files in VLC was to re-encode them.
Isnât it just a wrapper for ffmpeg?
MPC with K-lite can play anything and has done it before VLC, calling it unique for that reason alone is a stretch.
It plays any media file you throw at it out of the box and doesn't require any codec packs installed. On top of that, it has a ton of other features including network support. Simple as that.
> It plays any media file
I also believed this until I got a family support case a couple of weeks ago.
I learned that if the bitrate is too high for the PC to handle vlc badly fails. (This was a fanless Intel PC, so the CPU is very much low end despite not being particularly old.) Of course I would not expect vlc to do any miracles here, but at least I would expect an error message explaining the problem. ffmpeg gives me warnings all the time if buffers are too small etc. In vlc I'd expect it a bit less cryptic...
Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know. Just decoding I-frames would be the most naive approach, but probably also a not lead to very much usable results.
Actually the family member found one solution themselves: Play it at reduced speed. VLC could have figured out that automatically. (And of course give a clear message to the user why it does that.)
> Ideally it would still play the video with reduced quality. Whether that's at all doable I don't know.
It isn't really. It's possible if the video has B-frames but it's hard to predict how much dropping will cause how much recovery, and if you drop almost anything else the possible error is unbounded.
Used to do the same with klite codec pack and a patch to play HD videos on windows. It wasn't "better" though, it was just what tutorials suggested you installed to play more videos.
VLC just works now, its on every platform, and I used it to run any video that MPC couldn't play. Then I just used it to play everything, and I can do that on every platform I use, they all have VLC.
In my case, because VLC opens and plays flawlessly any video file you throw at it and that other players struggle with. That and it's FOSS and available in every OS I ever used.
What else is there to think about?
VLC works on other operating systems for a start.
Can you tell me why MPC + K-Lite is better?
I've been gone from the Internet for 8 years. Before I left I used VLC for everything. When I just got a laptop I was convinced to install PotPlayer as "being better". Having been gone for such a long time I assumed there was a tectonic shift in the media player space. Perhaps I was wrong?
MPC-HC is just as good as VLC and maybe a little less cluttered. It's Windows only of course, but if that isn't a limiting factor, then it's a very good alternative to VLC in my opinion.
From the home page:
"MPC-HC is not under development since 2017. Please switch to something else."
It's still actively being developed, the author just created a new project page for it for some reason. You can find it at
https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc
The version packaged with K-lite is frequently updated to this day, last release today.
I never like vlc approach. It did everything but there was always 7 fingercuts in the process. Or it was slower, less ergonomic. MPC, MPV were more my daily drivers.
VLC is an excellent media player. It is actively developed and runs on many platforms.
