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A comment on mpv a free, open-source, and cross-platform media player. Parent comment

Re:mpv a free, open-source, and cross-platform media player by maeln on Sunday August 18, 2024 @09:08AM (#41282149)
VLC is *amazing* at its design purpose: being a rock solid video player. The GUI, the UX, and other things can be criticized, but I dare you to find another video player that will play just about *anything*, and without having to install external codec separately with weird licence.

You can throw at it a broken mp4 file, a https url with basic auth, a weirdly encoded video, a DVD full of scratches, etc, chances are VLC will manage to play it (at least what is playable). There is just no other video player in the world that achieve that.

A lot of other video player might beat it at other features, but just straight video playing, VLC is just the best.

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Re:mpv a free, open-source, and cross-platform media player by eviks on Sunday August 18, 2024 @09:44AM (#41282351)
> without having to install external codec separately with weird licence.

What's up with this artificial limitation? I'd take frame back function over not having to install some codec pack once any time

And 99.99% of the time you don't play "everything, with scratches", so UX issues are much more consequential than that

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Re:mpv a free, open-source, and cross-platform media player by hiptobecubic on Sunday August 18, 2024 @11:00AM (#41282776)
It's not artificial at all. It's a real limitation that was so outrageously annoying for the reasons mentioned above that VLC was able to "win" by tackling this one issue alone.

The success of vlc is all the proof you need. As you say, why else would it be so popular?

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Re:mpv a free, open-source, and cross-platform media player by sangnoir on Sunday August 18, 2024 @08:15PM (#41286641)
> What's up with this artificial limitation? I'd take frame back function over not having to install some codec pack once any time

Then VLC is not for you - and there's nothing wrong with it or you - you just happen to have differing priorities.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:mpv a free, open-source, and cross-platform media player by account42 on Monday August 19, 2024 @06:00AM (#41289540)
> VLC is amazing at its design purpose: being a rock solid video player. The GUI, the UX, and other things can be criticized, but I dare you to find another video player that will play just about anything, and without having to install external codec separately with weird licence.

MPV? You know, the subject of this post we are commenting on?

Or literally any FFMPEG-based player.

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Re:mpv a free, open-source, and cross-platform media player by maeln on Wednesday August 21, 2024 @10:20AM (#41310567)
MPV use some library from FFMpeg, it is not based on FFMpeg. And yes, VLC still beat MPV and MPLayer, especially at accuracy or reading partially broken files. Although the situation has changed a lot in the last 10 or so years, and they improved a lot. But don't talk to me about UX when the two other option are MPV & Mplayer...
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