So many hours of fun watching videos over the years, without the constant fear that some odd codec would make the experience impossible. Thanks, VLC!
echelon 3 hours ago [-]
VLC was a big deal in the 2000s if you wanted to watch torrented anime. Operating systems didn't come with players with broad codec support and it was a legitimate nightmare to figure out what fly by night codec worked with whatever the bootleggers cobbled together to encode the video of the week.
These days, operating systems already have rock solid video players with far less clunky UI.
On Linux, video is already sublime thanks to ffmpeg and the dozens of available frontends.
It feels like wrestling with 1998 in trying to use VLC these days. It's got a real WinAmp feel to it.
But the real elephant in the room is that the lionshare of video is now being delivered by major media platforms like YouTube.
bigstrat2003 1 hours ago [-]
I remember having to install the K-Lite Codec Pack back in the day (college days) to be able to watch videos I would "acquire". When I eventually discovered VLC, it was like a breath of fresh air. I still use it to this day as my default video player, because nothing else comes close to the quality they have.
DANmode 10 hours ago [-]
“If you insert a slice of bologna into the disc tray, VLC will play it.”
wara23arish 10 hours ago [-]
I remember using VLC and figuring out how to download subtitles and use them within it.
I suddenly became the computer person of my family at 11 because of that
dmix 3 hours ago [-]
Years ago I remember complaining on HN that VLC didn't support remembering the position of the video you've already partially watched, when multiple other video players supported it.
The only reply was someone saying you should contribute to the open source project yourself to fix it instead of complaining. I don't know anything about coding a multi-platform video player so I wasn't much use but not long after they released a version supporting it and I felt bad for complaining.
wiether 35 minutes ago [-]
ngl: I was expecting a crazy success story where you started learning to code to add your feature and then you went on becoming a streaming expert at a FAANG
But glad you had your feature!
entrepy123 10 hours ago [-]
Public service announcement: VLC is on iPhone in the App Store, too. (Some people don't know this.)
hshdhdhj4444 8 hours ago [-]
I’ve been using it to listen to actual MP3s of the music I have. I can’t find any decent MP3 player on iOS (incredibly ironic given the iPod was one of the 3 devices the iPhone was supposed to be when Steve Jobs first introduced it) and VLC is pretty good.
skydhash 7 hours ago [-]
I’m using VLC because it’s the only one that I know that can play opus. I chose the latter for lossy encoding because I have a few albums that are gapless and it’s hackish to get mp3 to support those (other than single mp3 file and cue file).
doublerabbit 8 hours ago [-]
Foobar2000 is my go to on iOS. Works well just like the PCs version.
isodev 1 hours ago [-]
Also available on tvOS and you can watch video files from your home NAS or just send them from your iPhone/iPad!
trenchpilgrim 9 hours ago [-]
I find it handy for streaming videos from my Jellyfin server with good subtitling support, then casting to a TV!
ebb_earl_co 9 hours ago [-]
How do you manage this? Just copy the stream URL from Jellyfin Web or…?
trenchpilgrim 4 hours ago [-]
Yup the Stream URL is a valid HTTP media!
cocoto 10 hours ago [-]
The award is well deserved, VLC was a godsend a few years ago but I’m not sure what VLC brings to the table nowadays. All other players play videos just fine on Linux now. I guess VLC is only a thing on Windows because the default software is crap. On Linux almost everyone now use whatever is the default player or MPV for the nerds.
wiether 28 minutes ago [-]
As a Windows user, I never used VLC because I didn't like its UI and not having the "click to pause" was a big issue when you control a media center with a mouse.
So I used Media Player Classic without any issues for years.
When I moved to Linux Desktop, it came with VLC so I tried and forced me to use that damn "space to pause".
But half my videos had issues playing.
Being in KDE, I switched to Haruna.
It's ugly, but I can play anything without issues... and I can "click to pause"!
bigstrat2003 1 hours ago [-]
I still use VLC to this day on Linux because it's still as great as it ever was. I'm gonna have to install something to play videos, why wouldn't it be VLC?
gyomu 9 hours ago [-]
I used VLC until I looked for a backward frame step functionality. I then found this thread on the VLC forums where the maintainers explain (with bad attitude) why this functionality is technically impossible. Everyone points out that mpv supports it, but the maintainers double down and say they’re Doing It Wrong and it shouldn’t be possible.
On Windows at least VLC has had better alternatives for the past 20 years, both feature and UI wise. I had frame-stepping hotkeys back in the mid-00s with Korean video players. These days I use the currently maintained fork of MPC-HC which similarly has this.
On Mac it wasn't until the mid-10s that I found a decent player.
Barbing 8 hours ago [-]
“I, like others, arrived here through a Google search looking for this feature. Reading this thread is one of the worst decisions I've made recently. I will never have this time back and I am worse for it.”
1313ed01 10 hours ago [-]
I use it on my Android phone. Is there a better FOSS media player (or better any media player?).
VLC also still (or at least recently?) provides APKs you can download to install on very old Android versions. I have it installed on a few old Android tablets (and by old I mean something like Android version 4).
MPV everywhere else though.
spookie 9 hours ago [-]
MPV is on android too. But VLC is alright
ho_schi 10 hours ago [-]
Yep.
VLC was not important on Linux. Because we have ffmpeg as foundation, used by mplayer and nowadays mpv. The later is my recommendation. Whether on the tty (awesome!) or on Wayland. If you prefer a native Gtk an interface is available, named Celluloid. In all these cases mpv is mighty, reliable, fits into the environment with a frugal interface.
We’ve also players based on gstreamer but ffmpeg is more reliable.
But the need for a reliable player on Windows, Android, macOS, iOS and tvOS is big. Because their default players suck. VLC comes with an awkward UI and the weird built-in stuff for SMB. But from a 2001 point-of-view it makes sense, LAN-parties are nice and back then they were everywhere. And Windows doesn’t support WebDAV well.
My favorite is mpv. But I’m still tankful that I’ve one usable player in my iPhone.
PS: VLC also uses ffmpeg?
1bpp 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, ffmpeg's libav is responsible for its famed codec support.
K3UL 10 hours ago [-]
I might be wrong but I think the guys at VLC are still very important contributors to ffmpeg, which is still a big deal.
They also (kinda recently) developed some really low latency tech for streaming called Kyber
So bottomline the player might not be used that much (although on mobile the app is very popular still) but the tech they develop for it, is
rnewme 10 hours ago [-]
> I’m not sure what VLC brings to the table nowadays
Lack of backdoors?
DANmode 10 hours ago [-]
So, the same value-add as always!
leoh 9 hours ago [-]
Agreed except I have no idea what Jean-Baptiste actually does besides trying to run his little startup Khyber
Thaxll 9 hours ago [-]
Default player sucks and MPV is close to impossible to compile yourself. VLC is still a good solution on Linux.
fcksilvalment 10 hours ago [-]
One of the few honorable techies who didn't sell out
wiether 15 minutes ago [-]
Even within people involved in the local market it is not a widespread thing, but for a year now he's been the CTO of Scaleway, one of the French cloud providers.
leoh 9 hours ago [-]
He’s pretty obsessed with making money off his Khyber thing afaict
goku12 3 hours ago [-]
That's not what a sell out means in this context. He refused offers in millions of dollars to sell VLC to possibly shady parties, thereby keeping it safe for people like us. Kyber on the other hand, is a dual licensed AGPL - commercial software. That's an entirely acceptable and respected practice in the FOSS community. That doesn't make him a sell out.
khamidou 4 hours ago [-]
Seems like Kyber is dual-licensed AGPL and proprietary, seems like a pretty standard way to fund an open source project.
lofaszvanitt 7 hours ago [-]
why is that a problem
dcassett 6 hours ago [-]
Have used VLC for at least 20 years. Recently I upgraded an old Dell 9400 laptop that dates from around 2006 to Debian Bookworm (the end of the line for the 32-bit machines). It has a nice 1600x1200 display, but the Nvidia Graphics (Geforce Go 7900 GS) is poorly supported and mpv now requires --hwdec=no, making 720p videos barely playable. VLC now uses a fraction of the CPU as mpv does for video, which makes even 1080p videos playable. For some reason VLC chokes at the beginning of every video (tries to play before everything is ready), but by pausing the video and backing up to time zero it plays perfectly. All of this to say that VLC has saved the day as it frequently has over the years.
lucketone 10 hours ago [-]
VLC is definitely one of the best projects. Congrats!
cornhole 11 hours ago [-]
I met that guy during a gsoc mentor summit and it inspired me, out of spite, to never install VLC on any device I own
jetru 11 hours ago [-]
Thats funny, I met him during GSoC too over a decade ago, and he's been on top of the open source game.
leoh 9 hours ago [-]
I vouched for this post because I have corresponded with him and he engaged in an in unnecessarily condescending way. What are you referring to by GSOC?
dest 4 hours ago [-]
Same. Maybe it's the open source ecosystem that forced him to be overly self confident, to fly above the cognitive noise.
I've heard he was working on an extremely low latency gaming system: Kyber
Anyone has any recent news on that subject?
spacechild1 8 hours ago [-]
Jean-Baptiste is a hero! Just in case some of you don't know or remember, he has refused an offer to sell VLC for tens of millions of Euros because he didn't want enshittify it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048.
jonplackett 10 hours ago [-]
I’m old enough to remember crappiness before VLC. Such a useful piece of software. Well deserved. What a dude.
ttoinou 10 hours ago [-]
K Lite Codec Pack + Media Player Classic was great
9 hours ago [-]
nalekberov 9 hours ago [-]
VLC is most beautiful software for me. They never spied on their users, never put any bloat. Thanks Jean-Baptiste Kempf and everyone involved bringing this beautiful piece of art to life!
These days, operating systems already have rock solid video players with far less clunky UI.
On Linux, video is already sublime thanks to ffmpeg and the dozens of available frontends.
It feels like wrestling with 1998 in trying to use VLC these days. It's got a real WinAmp feel to it.
But the real elephant in the room is that the lionshare of video is now being delivered by major media platforms like YouTube.
I suddenly became the computer person of my family at 11 because of that
The only reply was someone saying you should contribute to the open source project yourself to fix it instead of complaining. I don't know anything about coding a multi-platform video player so I wasn't much use but not long after they released a version supporting it and I felt bad for complaining.
But glad you had your feature!
So I used Media Player Classic without any issues for years.
When I moved to Linux Desktop, it came with VLC so I tried and forced me to use that damn "space to pause". But half my videos had issues playing. Being in KDE, I switched to Haruna. It's ugly, but I can play anything without issues... and I can "click to pause"!
So anyways, I switched to mpv.
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=120627
On Mac it wasn't until the mid-10s that I found a decent player.
VLC also still (or at least recently?) provides APKs you can download to install on very old Android versions. I have it installed on a few old Android tablets (and by old I mean something like Android version 4).
MPV everywhere else though.
VLC was not important on Linux. Because we have ffmpeg as foundation, used by mplayer and nowadays mpv. The later is my recommendation. Whether on the tty (awesome!) or on Wayland. If you prefer a native Gtk an interface is available, named Celluloid. In all these cases mpv is mighty, reliable, fits into the environment with a frugal interface.
We’ve also players based on gstreamer but ffmpeg is more reliable.
But the need for a reliable player on Windows, Android, macOS, iOS and tvOS is big. Because their default players suck. VLC comes with an awkward UI and the weird built-in stuff for SMB. But from a 2001 point-of-view it makes sense, LAN-parties are nice and back then they were everywhere. And Windows doesn’t support WebDAV well.
My favorite is mpv. But I’m still tankful that I’ve one usable player in my iPhone.
PS: VLC also uses ffmpeg?
past winners: https://www.sfscon.it/awards/
But that is incorrect. VLC has even more supported features, if you do not believe me, check the source code https://github.com/videolan/vlc/tree/a33f33ddb0a9e0d26d779eb...
I've heard he was working on an extremely low latency gaming system: Kyber
Anyone has any recent news on that subject?
Incredibly accomplished already. What gravy this would be though.