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.
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
Another way to donate is to proof read documentation and report on typos, spelling errors, etc. Some projects have documentation in multiple languages - helping out in a language you know is another excellent way to contribute.
Many projects have great communities, making it all fun and engaging.
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.
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.
I'm the opposite. I started out using VLC, but once I found the codec packs (K-Lite being one of the last) I immediately started using other, more user friendly media players.
The problem with VLC is that the interface consistently feels... both imprecise and ridiculously granular. Everything just behaves weird. It felt weird in 2002 and it still feels weird in 2025. Like they cribbed the design from a DivX player, and haven't thought about it since.
VLC seems bound and determined to not let you interact with a video without pausing it, then opening the menu and hunting for option you need. Yes, I could set up my own interface, but that's not an excuse for not having a bare minimum of functionality that matches modern user expectations. Besides, configuring VLC to have the interface you want is itself not an easy task. Like, they have interface presets. Why isn't there a preset interface for "make this match YouTube"?
Just looking at what they chose to make be default key bindings is just bizarre to me. Half the things they have bound to single key presses are things that have never come up for me ever, while several things I want to use frequently are double or triple key combinations or not available for binding at all. All the default adjustments like skipping ahead or adjusting speed are all so granular that you have to hit them 10 or more times to actually accomplish anything. Just a completely alien interface to me. This software feels like it was built to solve media problems that I have not encountered since the late 90s when video tracks and audio tracks were more frequently out of sync from the producer.
What using VLC has taught me over 20 years is that the best way to play media with VLC is to open the software, begin playback of the media, and then under no circumstances attempt to interact with the software again.
In the early 2000s the video field was flooded with fast paced releases of new codecs and new codecs versions, and there was codecs implementation to downloads right and left, and people were bundling them and releasing them with names sounding like a warez group. It was a little crazy to watch a video at the time.
This was mitigated by vlc and mplayer, two video players that integrated most codecs as fast as they could, and it was a breath of fresh air. You just started them and any video would play, no codec issue anymore.
MPlayer has not been updated for some times, and traction was lost, but VLC, although looking a bit old on the UI-side (and a little buggy on ARM Windows) is still here and is solid when someone just wants to watch a video on any platform.
I never experienced subs I could not deactivate. And why they activated it? Well, because they own their plattform and do what they want with it. (I think they have done worse)
Yep, with a robotic sounding voice. They decided I don't speak english so I either download the video externally or I must every single time select english as audio track.
> It feels like wrestling with 1998 in trying to use VLC these days. It's got a real WinAmp feel to it.
What do you mean by that? To me, it's like any other application - you double-click the file (or run `vlc file.mp4`), and it plays. That the UI is not oversimplified is a cultural thing, VLC decided to cater to those that prefer to have the extra controls.
That's... a very subjective take to be polite and can't agree much. I enjoy VLC very much, install it everywhere even on TV, and couldn't care less about some OS/bundled players, codecs and whatnot. UI is great, clean, easy to navigate. Couldn't ask more from video player.
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.
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.
You are being a jerk. I don’t know what year you were born but the phrase “sell out” in the 90s would align perfectly with what I’m talking about here. I think he’s a sellout because he’s quite a jerk and going around making money on Khyber without properly releasing the source code per GPL.
So in my view he IS a sellout. You’re entitled to your view but don’t go around telling me or others they’re wrong, thank you.
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.
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).
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.
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.
“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.”
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).
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?
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.
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"!
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
I don't know, I still have issues with the default media player in Ubuntu not working for either video or sound. I'm sure it's solvable, but it's easier to just install VLC, so that's what I do.
Wtf, mpv is extremely easy to build yourself, with or without the mpv-build scripts. You just need to install the dependencies first, which is table stakes for building almost anything.
Anyway, you should be able to install both VLC and mpv from your distro's repo, assuming your distro isn't weird. Building mpv is only something you'd do if you're hacking on it or need a bleeding edge build for some reason.
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.
I tried to implement video playback into one of my apps, successfully using VLC. before that I did benchmark which of available players that are supported in .NET is the best, from perspective of cpu/gpu usage. also how easy it is to implement, if too many problems I stray away from it, unless it's really good.
After successfully implementing VLC I realized that VLC uses 0.5% GPU usage when video is idle/paused, after video is loaded in player, even when user presses stop to "eject" media, the VLC uses 0.5% of GPU on my system.. I decided to use SuspendThread() from kernel.dll on Windows to suspend all VLC threads, then RestoreThread() to unsuspend them when I need the player, but after some time decided it had too many problems with that approach and it felt janky.. Then I read online why VLC would use 0.5% GPU when it's not rendering anything, and the answer was found on some VLC thread (forum) is that is a good thing, and it should be like that, and.. so it felt "like everything else in the world that's successfull", a superior product with detrimental flaw, in VLC case that is video player with least GPU/CPU usage, with the penalty that the window itself uses 0.5% GPU, so if user likes to leave apps running, like a VLC player with Seinfeld episodes running and minimized for when one wants to watch it, and another VLC with X-Files, and another 1 or 2 with porn, and 1 that is playing song in background, that all will use 2-3% GPU in the background, at all times. After that I had reason to use K-Lite codec pack, which has detrimental flaw of hideous installation process (custom installation, not "install typical", or "full installation" which installs bloat, and adds bunch of registry junk and assigns all known video and other media formats when I want just the codecs)
People like VLC. Personally I am a mpv-user though. For
some reason the mental model by mpv (and before that mplayer)
works better for me.
On Windows, VLC is quite convenient though. While I also use
mpv there, for an elderly relative I have simply used and
installed VLC there, as the default GUI mode is more convenient
for elderly people.
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?
Same experience here and upvoted accordingly. I stopped using/recommending VLC all the way back in 2012 due to Mr. Kempf's appallingly dismissive/aggressive attitude to carefully-expressed constructive feedback from multiple users after a regressive UI change (my handle here was "sillyrat" and then "silly-rat"):
TL;DR: they decided to force the playlist to stay open all the time, thus killing "mini-player" mode; reaction to this was, unsurprisingly, uniformly negative (but expressed politely); Mr. Kempf's response was to attack VLC users; I did an end-run around him by opening a bug ticket so other developers would be made aware of the problem, and Mr. Kempf banned me for doing so; my ticket was approved and addressed by other developers, fixing the issue; Mr. Kempf tried to back-pedal pitifully.
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!
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.
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.