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SeaFox

macrumors 68030
Jul 22, 2003
2,619
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Somewhere Else
Eh? While I wouldn't call VLC the prettiest player in the world, it's hardly what I'd call lousy. It's the one program that plays everything, and does a good job of it. It's fast, sound's good, and it produces a nice picture. The UI is about the only bad thing about it.

The 2.x series has been a BIG step up on the image quality department, but performance-wise, it's still more resource-intensive than MPC-HC.


  • Until version 2.0 VLC didn't play ordered chapter MKVs, or Hi10P video. And they still haven't gotten that perfected yet. I just tried a segmented file on the current release 2.0.6 and there is still a slight pause on the exiting file before the next segment picks up. It's short now-- kinda like the pause from a layer change on a DVD -- but it's still there and shouldn't be. But then, I remember when the feature first came out in 2.0.0 and VLC would stop and spend several seconds refreshing its font cache between segments.

  • Until version 0.9 VLC it didn't understand how to render styled subtitle coding. On that same file I just played a subtitle line was never displayed on VLC. I think the alpha-blending was what threw it. These are subs that worked fine on other players five years ago.

  • VLC only supports a single picture renderer instead of letting you choose from the usual defaults (Overlay, VMR7, VMR9, EVR). And there's no way to use an external splitter, decoder, or renderer on VLC. You have to use the built-in ones. So you can't add support for formats it doesn't support (or does so poorly), and you can't choose a picture renderer that's more forgiving for your system setup if it's underpowered or gives you better quality if you have a decent graphics card (like a chroma upscaler like MadVR for example).

  • VLC supports using a SPDIF output for audio, but it doesn't seem to support bit-streaming the audio in it's native format for your stereo to decode if you wish.

It's a lot better now, I will say that much. I used to have trouble playing 720p MKV's in VLC snoothly, and now I just tried a 1080p and it seemed to do okay. But keep in mind these were things people wanted to do, and were, years ago in other players. It's just a case of too little, too late. People have moved on to other free players or more feature extravagant ones and don't see a big reason to come back to VLC at this point.
 
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