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A comment on What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File. Parent comment

Re:What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File by gruez on Friday January 02, 2026 @10:27AM (#46465670)
>It was notorious (to the point of it being a popular meme topic) for [...] having very little format support out of the box

???

I thought the meme was that it played basically everything? At least compared to windows media player or whatever.

The other items I can't say I've noticed, but then again I only play the most common of files (eg. h.264/h.265 with english subtitles in a mkv) so maybe it's something that only happens with unusual formats/encodes.

edit: based on other comments (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465349), it looks like it might indeed be caused by uncommon files that I haven't encountered.

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Re:What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File by littlestymaar on Friday January 02, 2026 @03:15PM (#46468891)
> I thought the meme was that it played basically everything? At least compared to windows media player or whatever.

Yes, that was in the 2000s though. During the 2010 VLC started falling behind because its shortcomings overweighted its capabilities.

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Re:What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File by morshu9001 on Saturday January 03, 2026 @12:05AM (#46472986)
Pretty sure VLC can play /dev/urandom
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