AVPlayer runs circles around VLC or any other player on the App Store...
Yup, now that I've finished testing, I agree: VLC is WAAAY worse than AVPlayer or nPlayer. Unfortunately, it's just a bit better than the initial (and very bad) 2010 version. Apart from DTS / AC3 playback, I in no way recommend it.
Let me present you all with a quick pros / cons list (I'll make this into a full article soon):
Pros
- DTS and AC3 support!!!
- Video filters, playback speed manipulation, and fine seeking.
- Acceptable SSA subtitle support. Note that it can't decode some kinds of subtitles. An example:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33448355@N07/9318494941/sizes/o/in/set-72157634699663151/
Pay special attention to the area, annotated by a red rectangle, in the upper right corner!
The same vertical subtitle is properly rendered by the desktop VLC:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33448355@N07/9321287756/sizes/o/in/set-72157634699663151/
Cons
- no hardware acceleration support for native formats
- furthermore, to make things even worse, the H.264 decoder is far slower than in top players. For example, the Monsters test video (
http://www.auby.no/files/video_tests/h264_1080p_hp_4.1_10mbps_dts_unstyled_subs_monsters.mkv ) can't be properly played back on even the currently fastest iDevices (iPhone 5/ iPad 4) it's absolutely useless.
- no MKV remuxing (after all, it doesn't play any kind of video hardware accelerated)
- definitely worse MPEG2 1080i60 decoding support than in several other players
- incompatible with several audio formats; for example, MP3 (see the harry Potter test video
http://www.auby.no/files/video_tests/h264_720p_hp_3.1_600kbps_aac_mp3_dual_audio_harry_potter.mkv ) and MP2 (European SD DVB audio track an example is at )
- no Apple CC support (which was easy to predict as it doesn't use HW acceleration / decoding at all)
- very unstable freezes / crashes VERY frequently
- no metadata displaying support
- no support for displaying more than one subtitle at a time
- when audio-only files are concerned, only OGG Audio (OGA) is supported there's absolutely no support for WMA / WAV / FLAC / WV / APE files.
- impossible to resize / relocate / restyle textual subtitles
- no playlists, camera roll / iPod library access, filelist sorting, folders, file renaming
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AVplayerHD / nPlayer don't cost much and, now that I've finished testing, I need to say you do yourself (if not anything else, then, your battery life - software decoding, even if one doesn't immediately realizes, consumes a LOT of power) a big favor by not bothering with VLC for iOS, at least as of the current (2.0.1) version.
It's only slightly better than the initial version released (and, then, removed from AppStore) in 2010. The latter was absolutely rubbish.