Linux

As a friend of mine said some years ago "VLC will play a slice of cucumber" that pretty much sums it up.

The supreme of all open source projects would be something like Linux, curl, or SQLite.

I sometimes got performance issues or corrupted frames, so I mostly use mpv. It sometimes fails for some files so I need to switch to VLC to handle them.

I used to use it, but then I switched to MPV, as it works a lot better with hardware acceleration. MPV supports more methods for hardware decoding (e.g. nvdec), and also MPV will keep the frames in VRAM when doing hardware decoding, and do additional processing and presentation using the GPU, while VLC copies everything back to system RAM and processes the frame on the CPU.

At the time I switched hardware decoding with copy-back would actually result in twice the CPU usage compared to software decoding, but that was a long time ago. Also, I would get tearing in VLC and not in MPV.

VLC is the best media player, but the Linux kernel is the “supreme of all open source projects”.

Only some truly superior software can afford a GUI that's >10 years outdated :)

Is has no Wayland support, doesnt support the very well packaged Flatpak officially, and it is kinda big.

I prefer MPV now, using Celluloid and tried Haruna.

My only comment is I was surprised my work - which uses Windows and has closed source software exclusively - has VLC installed on all workstations and even as the default media player as well. It's a testament to how ubiquitous and approachable VLC is to be included in such a fashion over just Windows Media Player or some other form.

Fully agree. Don't forget to support our open source heros every know and then (if you can ofc).

VLC ships their own codecs which is great on Windows, but a bit suboptimal on a typical Linux desktop installation since you're probably going to have GStreamer or ffmpeg available too for the rest of the software like video editors, web browsers, etc

I mostly use mpv nowadays, but I used VLC a lot years ago. Played pretty much everything.

I tried using it years ago but I didn't like the interface so I ended up switch back to media player classic

It's a great player, but I prefer smplayer on the desktop and the default player on android. Somehow the interface is a bit clunky

VLC is one of the greatest achievements of the modern era imho (along with Linux, Wikipedia, etc).

A good dev who didn't sell out, fully FOSS, always ~~up-to-date~~ before-the-date, no nonsense or bloatware, no UI changes every month to get more engagement, etc.

This is how all products of humanity with our level of tech should be like (even non-software).

Let's face it, if you install Linux (or even Windows!) for your mom, you put VLC in there.

Yes, some other tools are better at some things, but VLC is the perfect choice for the "standard" user.

We don't deserve our open source heroes, so grateful for the incredible free software ecosystem

Gimp, 7zip, blender, vlc, open office, the kernel, thousands of others, I feel like our lives have been universally improved by these inverted charity projects. The few taking care of the undeserving many.

Never liked vlc. Only used mpv and mplayer before that. A few times I had some problems with mpv and forumposts have insisted "just use vlc", and it never helped. First time I installed it for such troubleshooting I noticed there was no manual, just a mile long help print. I just uninstalled it right there, that time.

I've actually moved away from vlc. It's had some weird issues with videos that MPV doesn't have. Plus, MPV has a much simpler interface which I like. I've also learned how to use ffmpeg to convert media so I don't need that functionality from vlc anymore.

It's still a great program though, especially for windows where there's not many better options.

I feel like it was great 10 years ago but now it's just... kind of bloated and super buggy, and not even that compatible anymore? It's like its only quality was it would play just about anything you throw at it, but even then there's stuff I have to open in MPV because VLC just doesn't play them.

VLC's file format support is amazing for a project that rolls its own codecs, etc, but it's missing some important features for me on the music front, primarily gapless playback and library management. I generally prefer to use software tailored to my DE. I've yet to find a better video player anywhere though; GNOME Videos and Kaffeine come closest and are a little easier to use, but are still far away from VLC's capabilities.

There's been a bug with .flac files for quite a while now. They haven't fixed it. Audio just stops very briefly then continues.