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VLC… my choice since 2007.
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
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!
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.”
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.
MacOS was telling me “Open this openSUSE ISO in: Balena Etcher, VLC”
what
VLC be like: “it’s a disk image is it not???”
You can shove French fries into a CD drive and vlc will still make it a video
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!!!
deleted by creator
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
sad ffmpeg noises
Dont you mean sad libavcodec noises?
VLC, IPlayer, and FFMpeg are interfaces for libavcodec 😀
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.
mpv is better
Don’t they both use ffmpeg so their codecs support is exactly the same?
… go on
Faster, simpler but not user friendly.
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.
What’s the point of simplicity if it’s not for user-friendliness?
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.
Measuring epeen mostly.
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.
Blu-rays.
Don’t ‘but’ me. I literally spent the weekend getting aggravated at VLC chucking errors at me no matter how many extensions or libraries or whathaveyou I threw at it to make blu-rays work. And this isn’t even the first time.
Blu-rays are purposely made to be combersome to read and use without explicit permission from the Blu-Ray commission.
Blu-rays aren’t DVDs, each release has a unique encryption on it that you either break, or use a program to scan and break for you with public listings of known keys.
VLC would need to ask the Blu-Ray Group to open up their software on how encoding and decoding works, and they never will.
Sony gets a cut for every single Blu-ray, it’s why you need to install the app for Xbox when the gaming console can naturally play Blu-ray discs for games. Microsoft doesn’t want to fork over more money to it’s main competitor, and part of why they backed HD DVD.
Is it VLCs fault? Not really. If they had a lot of money and man hours they could maybe work something out. But DVDs are child’s play to figure out compared to Blu-Rays. That’s on purpose.
Yeah. The are not going to make blu rays as simple as
[09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0]
Don’t get mad at the software trying to do it’s best to overcome intentionally malicious coding.
On high quality video files with 7.1 and 5.1 surround the audio in box is cutting in and out for me constantly.
As of this morning it no longer plays video. Just outputs black.
I’m tired.
4k’s are their own special thing, but for regular Blu-ray’s I’ve had good luck using the MakeMKV integration for VLC (and Handbrake).
Technically there’s also libbluray from the same folks that make VLC, but in order to use it you have to have a list of disk IDs and their decryption keys which are annoying to get ahold of (I think I remember running across a community generated list or a methodology to break the key on avsforum, but it’s been years since I mucked with it- makemkv is significantly easier)
Also, if you want disk menus, you’ll need to have some version of the java 8 runtime installed and configured for VLC to use.
Some of my 4k videos, especially drone footage refuses to play smoothly in vlc, I couldn’t be arsed to find out why, it’s just annoying.
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.
useful things are bloat apparently
Yep, and lately it stopped working altogether. I have since switched to mpv.
Me, upon installing Debian KDE distro, and having Dragon Player pop up: I ALREADY INSTALLED VLC, WHAT THE HELL DUDES
It’s so bizarre that KDE “makes” its “own” videoplayer when libVLC is literally a dependency of KDE.
The real question is why they make two! Did a fresh install of Fedora KDE the other day and had to remove dragon and installed haruna.
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.
Back in the day Media Player Classic was this for me. I didn’t know enough about codecs but I knew that player seemed to have all of them.
Of course it’s now superceded by vlc (and maybe even was at the time) but it’s still a fond memory of working out why the video I downloaded only played audio.
VLC is good but I like MPC-HC best. Open source and has a shit load of nerdy ass technical options and great upscaling through madVR.
the only one that could play the videos i recorded on my BlackBerry 2008-2012
