In general, it seems like FOSS multimedia software blows proprietary software out of the water with regards to format support, and that proprietary software works at a disadvantage, because for them, adding support for a new format means navigating a patent minefield and paying licence fees, but for FOSS, supporting every format is as simple as including FFmpeg.

I have a theory that I call "just one small fix". I think FOSS media players can handle more video files (not just formats) because most of the times the errors that makes them unplayable are just small mistakes in the way things are encoded.

Does a certain camera produces only even timestamps? Let's check for that fix it, it is "just one small fix: one if and a division". Is that MPEG encoded with swapped croma? Let's detect it and fix it, it is "just ome small fix: one if and a swap".

Over the time FOSS projects accumulate all these fixes and one day you realize that they can read practically everything as if a single person sat down and wrote that super-robust code in one go. Proprietary software cannot benefit from this kind of drive-by contributions.

Your theory definitely has some weight to it. You should peruse the FFmpeg git server and see what the commits consist of. Most of the time, the changes comprise no more than one line, and involve the changing of an operator or adding on to an if statement.

Media codecs take a really long time to disrupt the continuum, and often times, decoders can play back other kinds of media by just changing some header information in the file.

One "if" here a "dirty bool flag" there and sooner or later your code is unmaintainable, I think OpenSource + Review prevents this kind of code.

If you figure out early enough that you need this kind of feature, you can architecture your code in such a way that those "drive-by fixes" are actually pluggable and maintainable.

Indeed - at my last job, we built a js widget that would go on customers websites, and we learned pretty quickly that we would need pluggable, sometimes customers-specific hacks. Things like old versions of Prototype.js that broke JSON.stringify or forcing Internet Explorer 8+ into IE7 emulation mode. One customer overwrote Array.prototype.forEach with a broken version that lost the scope. Fun times.

> It plays literally everything

In the ten or so years I've used it, I've only come across one file that VLC wouldn't play (excluded DRMed files) - a (possibly malformed) 24hr long MP4 I recorded a few years ago. Pretty much everything chokes on it (VLC crashes straight away), though oddly enough Windows Media Player handles it fine until you try to seek to a different time.

I've dabbled with other media players/codecs in the past, but usually end up back at VLC not long after due to its versatility. Impressive stuff.

I recently used this amazing little utility: http://slydiman.me/eng/mmedia/recover_mp4.htm

It helped me recover some GoPro footage that went corrupt. You feed it a known good video from the same camera/same settings and then it basically uses the structure of the good footage to rebuild the bad footage. It worked a treat after I found a good file for it.

Have a look at it, you may find it helps you out.

I don't currently have access to the drives it is stored on, but I'll give it a go next time I do. Thanks for the suggestion.

My dad's friend is a lawyer in Boston and I remember he had a big case and needed to review some of the evidence urgently - it was security cam footage. However he had no idea how to play the video file, it was in some obscure format. Nothing but VLC worked. I'm pretty sure he ended up winning the case.

What bothers me are the crashes. A crash probably translates into an arbitrary code execution when a malicious file exploits it.

I've seen files that mplayer won't play that VLC will (though I've seen more of the opposite), but when mplayer can't parse a file it tends to simply not play it rather than crashing. So I'm not going to use VLC on files from the untrusted internet.

I have quite a few files VLC doesn't play that MPlayer does. I use VLC as my main viewer but I get a file that doesn't work I try MPlayer.

Please share them with us :)

Lots of modern anime rips have had corruption issues with VLC in the past[0]. It's actually become a meme in those communities[1]. As x264 and 10bit encodings became ubiquitous, I think VLC's support also became fairly sufficient. However, the anime community is known for being early adopters of new encoding strategies. I believe it would benefit the development of VLC if some developers could check out what those encoders are doing every so often. It seems like they're always a few years ahead of how everyone else is encoding.

[0]: http://i38.tinypic.com/34gkavn.jpg [1]: http://i.imgur.com/RWIAe.jpg

One big change was VLC switching to use mplayer's libass rather than their own (buggy, quite likely to the extent of allowing remote code execution) ass parser. These days VLC mostly seems alright, though it'll take a while for it to gain my trust.

I was going to say: an example that's fairly reproducible, any video recorded with Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is playable in WMP but not VLC.

However, I just tried it is fixed already, I love VLC.

I had the same problem, and the fix was quite obvious once you read it: if you have 64bits OBS and 32bits VLC, VLC crashes when you open the video. Use both 64bits or 32 bits software, and you're fine.

But that obviously doesn't solve the actual problem.

Codec not supported: VLC could not decode the format "CFHD" (No description for this codec)

This codec was RE'd 2 weeks ago and was merged in FFmpeg and libavcodec this weekend, by a member of the VideoLAN non-profit organization. Expect it in VLC soon.

(Guy who Reverse Engineered CFHD here) If you could upload a sample of your file somewhere that would be appreciated.

you might be able to reindex or remux this file (save to a new file in the process) to fix it, by the way.

I tried that at the time, but all of the tools I tried either crashed or only recognised the audio track (tried ffmpeg, QuickTime in OS X and Windows, Handbrake, VirtualDub, MKVToolnix, and mpegstreamclip plus a few others; mostly ffmpeg-based stuff crashed AFAICT - most of the others either errored out or just listed the audio track).

I ended up recovering most of the footage by re-recording the screen whilst it was playing in Windows Media Player. Not ideal, but it was a low-ish quality capture of a webstream anyway, so any quality loss wasn't particularly important.

The DVD and BluRay not working on secondary monitors is probably due to the ridiculous DRM stuff that prevents you from playing on an 'unauthorized' display.

As a VJ, that's what I love about VLC too. Even now, I cringe when I go to professional film screenings, and between each film the screen reverts to a Mac desktop wallpaper and some person in the projection booth is frantically twiddling with their mouse to click the play button in QuickTime.

We did a job where they insisted on us playing the show off of their Mac running, I think, iTunes. It was a whole bunch of shorts for a festival type event. These were video/photography pros. It was an utter shit show. Videos starting halfway through, videos being skipped without warning, etc. We spent a significant amount of time with the projector blanked, while setting up the next video or fixed fucked up start times. The level of stress caused by Apple's fuckery was enough to where we, as a company, instituted a rule that clients either provided video to us in advance of the show so we could put it into a VLC playlist, or they were explicitly responsible for all the shit that would follow (including running the computer that was being projected...and whatever ended up on the screen was their responsibility).

QuickTime doesn't even have a damned playlist function which is why they were using iTunes. But, iTunes has some of the most bizarre behaviors I've ever dealt with, and awful playlist functionality, in general.

One thing that I'm having trouble with is HTTP/HTTPS streaming with VLC on Android. Almost every time it's unable to open the stream after trying to load it for a number of seconds. Does anyone else have this, or is it just me with some weird configurations?

For example, I wasn't able to stream any of the 32C3 streams, they only worked via the in-browser player.