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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I think the best player is mpv because it supports real-time anime upscaling with plugins

VLC for the everyday person, all the way until you get to enthusiast class, then you use MPV.

Shortcuts, lightweight, CLI etc…

VLC has pretty mediocre rendering, it stutters a lot even on a fast PC, or renders with grey artifacts. MPV is open source, renders much clearer and faster and can be used as the backend for any simple or advanced GUI video player.

That said, VLC was great back in the early 2000’s, when it and it alone could open basically any media file and file containing media including mkv. Nowadays every video player does that.

We all have Jean-Baptiste Kempf, and many other brilliant volunteer developers to thank for it

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.

It very much needs to update its interface.

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

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.

I didn’t expect to click on a VLC appreciation thread agreeing that it’s awesome only to end up maybe switching to MPV based on the comments, but such is life I guess.

I will remember it just like I will remember winamp, as one of the greats of its time.