I think PipeWire does something similar to synchronize multiple audio devices without a shared word clock, but I haven't tested how much its rate analyzer drifts when starting/stopping playback or in steady state.

So I'm not alone in hating this! How come this was never fixed?

I didn't want to switch from MX Player (Android), which worked quite well, for ages, but finally gave up because with MX Player you have to go look for some codecs.zip every (major?) update. (must be related to the licenses)

On top of VLC not being able to reconnect to the source, it also doesn't show the title of the video. So every time the stream dies I have to remember which episode I was on.

Holy shit, I had no idea about this (that mpv could load OpenGL shaders nor that there is shaders that do RT neural upscaling), literally blowing my mind.

Or if you don't want noise reduction, try "FSRCNNX_x2_8-0-4-1_LineArt.glsl": https://github.com/igv/FSRCNN-TensorFlow/releases (in checkpoints_params.7z)

Both are IMO sharper and more accurate than ACNet.

When I first experienced it, it made me realize how terrible VLC is; VLC can't play back video at a consistent framerate, and this is particularly noticeable in panning scenes in videos, especially anime.

People talk about VLC like it's a poster-child of open source, but really, I just see a bloated, crash-prone program that doesn't even do its primary function particularly well or efficiently.

Also, I find VLC is a safe recommendation for someone who just wants to casually play some video files. It's fairly user friendly, it runs on literally everything, and it supports most multimedia formats anyone could ever care about. I like and use MPV, but I use VLC on some Android TV devices because it's readily available and runs buttery smooth on crappy hardware.

It's true that VLC requires arcane knowledge of its architecture to configure all of its options, but basic operation still assumes you've read the fine manual.

VLC does the behavior described (jerky playback) on both a Mac with 60hz display that is several years old, and on a cutting edge PC that has a refresh rate more than five times the framerate of anime and supports variable refresh rate.

mpv plays anime butter-smooth on both systems.

I love it when I get a supremely condescending explanation that is also wrong.

The ones that are 60hz are 60hz, and that's not the reason monitors aren't TVs. They aren't TVs because they don't have one of 1. black frame insertion 2. 60->120fps motion interpolation, so you have persistence of vision issues. (aka motion blur, jerkiness, or both at once)

Movies are also 24fps, though of course they're different from animation because they have built in motion blur (same as if you recorded with 1/24 exposure time vs 1/1000).

mpv's video retiming works some of the time, but means it changes the pitch of audio which is sometimes unacceptable, same as old NTSC->PAL transfers.

…if your monitor has variable refresh rate why are you using retiming?

Most older LCD TVs do not have either black frame insertion or motion interpolation. BFI causes motion artifacts (trailing ghost images) if the frame rate of the video is less than the refresh rate. Motion interpolation also adds its own artifacts.

>mpv's video retiming works some of the time, but means it changes the pitch of audio

The best way to use it is to set custom monitor timings (e.g. with xrandr) so that the adjustment needed is too small to detect. There are various scripts to automate this, although I haven't personally tried any (I just change mode manually).

>if your monitor has variable refresh rate why are you using retiming?

I have a VRR monitor, but I still use retiming because it only has a 6 bit panel, and VRR makes temporal dithering artifacts ("frame rate control") visible.

Does that mean video in 23.976 frames per second will be sped up and play at 30?

Thank you for the answering the question I didn’t manage to pose!

But Yeah, I am in LOVE with this feature, even for 30fps footage on a 60fps screen. The more stable frame times make a huge difference.

https://github.com/libretro/docs/blob/master/archive/ratecon...

Also, wasn't there some new VESA standard specifically for video (as an addition to regular adaptive sync)?

MediaSync? https://www.adaptivesync.org

Not sure what it's supposed to mean though.

  interpolation
  tscale=oversample

It is best described by MPV's documentation at https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/Interpolation

https://www.svp-team.com/

The final icing on the cake is I use a small LUA hook to set the refresh rate of the projector to match the source material.