
@venus_ziegenfalle@feddit.org
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
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.
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
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
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.
TIL I still need to schedule that colonoscopy
Get checked everyone! If you listened to the album “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory” in HS, it’s time for a mammogram and/or colonoscopy.
Hey now I’m not that ancient, I was listening to Amish Paradice in high school, but I am getting to the age where I need to schedule a colonoscopy…
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
I get the sense that VLC doesn’t really care if something is a valid video file, it’s just gonna start playing and see what happens.
You can shove French fries into a CD drive and vlc will still make it a video
Extract the eyes of murder victims and VLC will show their final moments.
Rallys/Checkers fries? Or Burger King? Because there is a HUGE difference!
Or Wendys?
Or McDonalds?
WHOSE FRIES ARE WE TALKING ABOUT??? I WANT TO WATCH VIDEOS ON FRENCH FRIES!!!
White castle fries show Robin Hood: Men in Tights
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reminds me of Oats Jenkins on YT designing “Money 2” and the biggest coin (1000 “grain”) was a playable CD
the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MqfGO81Lus
Eww, that’s a kitschy video
The bill could be a playable CD too if you don’t care about folding, or add bends around the central square. The widest rectangle that can be cut out of a CD and still retain a bit of the data area is about 108×51 mm, as opposed to approx. 156×66 mm of a $1 bill.
But yeah, NFC or just printing the data is more viable.
I’m pretty sure it can still do that. Like if you can trick it into playing something that isn’t even video, it’ll shit out whatever it can interpret as video. Which of course will be garbled nonsense, but it did exactly what you asked.
I wish every program was this way. Fuck off with your file format restrictions, I know what Im doing
Audacity does as well and I use it to edit pictures sometimes.
Yes pictures.
You can get some interesting effects from it.
Interesting…
Which of course will be garbled nonsense, but it did exactly what you asked.
Is it possible that someone took a copy of hitlers book, shoved it into VLC, took the video it spit out, and somehow we got a president from that process? Garbled nonsense. Highly racist. But it did what you asked!
Wait…does this explain Mark Zuckerberg? They put a piece of cellery, mixed with dog shit, and out comes Mark Zuckerberg who’s almost a real boy?
My camera shat out an MP4 without a moov atom and VLC nor anything else could play it :( Not even when inserted in the middle of a valid file of the same format.
Yes, ffplay can interpret it as rawvideo when asked but so can it /dev/random
Some files are more particular than others about being closed properly.
MP4 is decent at this, it’s the camera’s fault for writing critical information at the end and not retrying on SD write errors. A bad couple of frames is still preferrable to losing up to 20 minutes (yes, that’s the split size, and it loses 5 seconds in between).
MacOS was telling me “Open this openSUSE ISO in: Balena Etcher, VLC”
what
VLC be like: “it’s a disk image is it not???”
I recall a few AVIs from the long ago that VLC would throw an error on, something about a format error, and it gave the option to try converting it or try playing as-is. Attempting to convert took forever, and playback was mostly fine, though IIRC you couldn’t scrub through the file.
Yeah it absolutely can fix broken avi files! Was a lifesaver back in high-school for me, during that era, avi was every camcorder format (at least that I had).
I always stored it on this 128gb external drive and I swear that drive was cursed, always corrupted my files. Vlc was an easy way to fix them for class.
IIRC that’s AVI files that aren’t indexed properly. VLC could either build its own index for the file or it could just start playing the file one frame at a time and hope for the best.
That’s it! Thanks for the assist lol.
But really isn’t that just libavcodec behaving like that? VLC itself doesn’t actually read your video file, it just takes what FFMPEG gives it and blindly trusts 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”
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.
Which is what I did. Had an old 2nd gen Nexus 7 from 2013 which I used as an occasional media player. Finally died back in January, had VLC running on it until its last day!
I have a 2013 phone running Android 13. Sony Xperia Z, found in e-waste in 2023 in great condition (except for dust in the camera). I used it a lot and even replaced the battery, although that didn’t make much difference, it just kept overheating and discharging like crazy on modern websites. The notification LED broke in a peculiar way (likely shorted driving transistor, burning it out within hours) and so did the vibrator. Recently, I dropped it and the back shattered but I still carry it every day, although now it’s a secondary phone (can’t get some apps running on my primary one although both are degoogled). It has a 32-bit processor, noisy camera and no fingerprint reader, but a 5" 1080p LCD, MHL (HDMI over microUSB), NFC and headphone jack. And a mediocre FM transmitter that can be enabled with custom drivers for the Qualcomm chip. It was covered in Janus Cycle’s video on monoliths.
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sad ffmpeg noises
Dont you mean sad libavcodec noises?
VLC, IPlayer, and FFMpeg are interfaces for libavcodec 😀
it’s repo is part of the ffmpeg one
https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/tree/HEAD:/libavcodec
Ah yes, I guess if that was interpreted as sad ffmpeg team it would hold true 😀
sad mpv noises
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.
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.
VLC… my choice since 2007.
Only on windows (or mac?), but not on linux. Which was a unexpected realisation.
Yeah, this was a surprise to me as well. Although, its the only video player I can get to play Blu-ray discs. I can even play 4K discs to a certain extent (my processor and video card just aren’t up to that particular task).

















