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You had that screenshot locked and loaded 😂
There are other media players?
Nah. mpv.
Until you want to add external subtitles
When the file is called
video.mkvname themvideo.srt. MPV will pick it up automatically.I know, but what about when I have several subtitle files? Different languages, or maybe several subtitle files I downloaded and want to check which one matches my video? mpv has zero flexibility.
With VLC I can just “Subtitle / Add subtitle track” or add the language code after the filename (
video.en.srt,video.fr.srt,video.spa.srt), with mpv: just one file at a time: rename, launch, retry.
I don’t know what it is about mpv that makes it my favourite. Gstreamer is performative enough. FFplay is also pretty clean. Cvlc is fine.
I think I just like that it has sensible controls, and ultimately gets out of the way
If I want a program that calls a video player seemlessly for the end user mpv is great.
If I want an actual app that is human useable and doesn’t require arcane bullshit. I’ll use VLC.
Different use cases really.
I really like the configuration aspect of it. You can customize how it works internally and how it even looks. For example, I use a big 1m diagonal TV as my main screen and I sit about 45cm in front of it. So with bidirectional integer scaling, Full HD looks kind of blurry and bad, but with lanczos scaling it looks great! And that’s why I like MPV.
The creator of VLC just won the European SFS Award “in recognition of his outstanding and lasting contributions to the Free Software movement and his long-term dedication to the VLC project.”
Til vlc is older than me
TIL I’m older than you.
Somehow I’m unable to let VLC play any kind of video on my Arch (actually cachyos) laptop. Whatever the format it says codec is missing even if I installed everything (mpv, totem and others can play them).
(I tried to install vlc-git from aur but then gave up when after 30 minutes was still compiling, I don’t have enough patience to wait all that time every time I run
yay)I’m forced to run the flatpak version of VLC for some reason, the only way to make it work
You should read the wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VLC_media_player
Likely you just want vlc-plugins-all
Developed by the French and funded by the EU. I’ll download it.
If you’re telling us you found Lemmy before vlc that’s honestly remarkable.
Despite that I still like it
I did a CTF once where one of the challenges was forensics on a video file. It had the header ripped off, the entension removed, and was split into chunks that had to be ripped out of a pcap and reassmebled
VLC just played the mangled chunks as-is. It was an unintended cheat code for the challenge
I had it once play a video recorded on an old Motorola razr circa 2004. It was this super obscure file format, that basically only this one phone used, and was never used on any other phone.
VLC didn’t care, played it right out of the box without any problems.
It supports an obscure single use, 2004 video format. If aliens come to earth, VLC will be able to play their files too.
VLC: “I am 4 Parallel Universes ahead of you”
sad ffmpeg noises
Dont you mean sad libavcodec noises?
VLC, IPlayer, and FFMpeg are interfaces for libavcodec 😀
sad mpv noises
VLC sucks ass when you want to do any type of live transcoding or remuxing without setting up a video stream. Especially with multichannel audio:
This has been an issue ever since feature added, the maximum bitrate you can set is 512 kb/s on every codec, despite codecs that support more.
The bug thread for this was basically “stop complaining about our shit UI and use the CLI”
Much prefer Kodi for this purpose, and an ffmpeg based player for lightweight stuff.
My experience with VLC in Linux is subpar. In Windows it was always a good tool to have. Granted for me it was just, does this shit have working codecs, phew, it plays
And it still supports devices with Android version 4.2 (released on November 13, 2012) and newer. That’s a 13 year old release.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.videolan.vlc/
Perfect use of old devices as a media player. It struggles with modern file formats but having modern UI and support this long is epic.
Long ago; a non-tech friend saying to another non-tech friend. “you should try it on VLC; it’ll play a slice of cucumber” when referring to some obscure video file they had.
mpv is better
Yep, to me, simply because it can be color managed. Just because VLC will play anything, doesn’t mean it’ll play it well.
… go on
Faster, simpler but not user friendly.
What’s the point of simplicity if it’s not for user-friendliness?
Measuring epeen mostly.
Depends on your usecase. It’s user friendly if all you care about is playing a video, but not if you want to push it further.
I mean, it is user-friendly in some ways, depending how you define that.
Double-click a video and it opens. You get a visually appealing, sleek and minimalistic UI that helpfully appears only when your mouse is over the video, and otherwise gets out of the way. You can seek, adjust volume, select audio language and subtitles, and that’s it. Very uncluttered, obvious and easy in the way that modern applications try to be.
For most usage, that’s enough. It’s when you find yourself needing to pan/scan, or change subtitle offset, or enable looping etc you discover there are no buttons or menus for those things and you have to go hit the docs to discover what the keybinds are.
Minimalism rarely is ever user friendly is the problem.
Minimalism has the assumption the user preknows how to do everything.
User friendlyness is how you end up with button gore. It’s why UI/UX is so hard to do well.
We can’t simply say minimalism is bad, though, because the truth is “it depends”.
The iPod Shuffle music player from the mid 2000s could be considered a minimalistic design. It had no screen, with only buttons for next, previous, play, pause, volume and (as the name suggests) shuffle. The player had far less functionality than its big brother iPods, but because it had less functions, the interface didn’t need many buttons.
It was, perhaps, “truly” minimal.
In software we do sometimes have true minimalism, but more often than not we actually have a lot of features, but have to choose to hide some amount of it and have a simpler interface, and the amount we choose to show or hide may determine how “minimalist” or not it appears.
So you can have minimalism via simply /not having/ functions, or you can have minimalism via hiding.
When you open a CAD program for the first time, you are likely immediately intimidated by the sheer number of buttons and toolbars, with no idea what to press. But a minimalist CAD program would be a nightmare because it ruins any discoverability of features. Showing the complexity is necessary.
On the other hand, an image viewer which is secretly also a featureful image editor - but hides all the edit controls behind an ‘edit’ button until you ask for them - is perhaps an appropriate time to hide it.
To look at mpv specifically, my personal opinion is that the lack of any option toolbars is ‘bad’ minimalism because it forces you to the wiki to find out how to do things with keybinds, but the main interface is ‘good’ minimalism because it shows you the controls you need probably 95% of the time, and nothing extra beyond that.
Both are good tools for the job. I use mpv but VLC just works for 99% of use cases. mpv is best for working with terminals, vlc is best for GUI and is consistently easy on any operating system, even android.
Don’t they both use ffmpeg so their codecs support is exactly the same?
Arch split out the h264 decoders from vlc, and its not installed by default, so last time I needed to use it, it didn’t work. No idea why they did that.
Most likely patents and licensing.
The packages still exist, you can install them, its just not by default. Their argument for splitting is that they can be updated independently, but that doesnt explain why the h264 plugins aren’t just included by default.
Logic: Ok, you installed a video player. Fine. It has a GUI, settings and all. Oh, you want to play any videos with it? Go search for their dependencies.
useful things are bloat apparently
Yep, and lately it stopped working altogether. I have since switched to mpv.
Shame it’s shit on Android tv
Is it? What’s wrong with it? What do you use instead?
It seems to fail with some files. I think 4k and/or .mkv ones. I’ve had to use Kodi during those times instead. I’ve not going a great simple media player to use on Android tv yet. They all have their caveats. Unless there’s a better one I’ve not found yet.
Eventually, after I stop using my steam deck I’m going to turn it into a VLC machine. With emulators on it too
Isn’t a tablet gonna offer a larger screen for less weight if all you wanna do is watch videos
Music
Then a small dedicated music player like an ipod is even better, you wanna lug around a steam deck just to listen to music?
Idk who knows what I’ll use it for down the road.
I rarely take a laptop on trips anymore (unless its my work one), bt kb+mouse, plug in 4tb ssd (that has built in hdmi out). shitty plywood stand that i made. It’s cool.
frankly the shitty cheap used laptops that i get, its probably better performance than any of them if i do need to do anything serious.
