Nearly this entire HN comment section is upset about VLC being mentioned once and not recommended. If you can not understand why this very minor (but loud?) note was made, then you probably do not do any serious video encoding or you would know why it sucks today and is well past its prime. VLC is glorified because it was a video player that used to be amazing back in the day, but hasn't been for several years now. It is the Firefox of media players.

There is a reason why the Anime community has collectively has ditched VLC in favor of MPV and MPC-HC. Color reproduction, modern codec support, ASS subtitle rendering, and even audio codecs are janky or even broken on VLC. 98% of all Anime encode release playback problems are caused by the user using VLC.

We even have a dedicated pastebin on a quick run down of what is wrong: https://rentry.co/vee-ell-cee

And this pastebin doesn't even have all the issues. VLC has a long standing issue of not playing back 5.1 Surround sound Opus correctly or at all. VLC is still using FFmpeg 4.x. We're on FFmpeg 8.x these days

I can not even use VLC to take screenshots of videos I encode because the color rendering on everything is wrong. BT.709 is very much NOT new and predates VLC itself.

And you can say "VLC is easy to install and the UI is easy." Yeah so is IINA for macOS, Celluloid for Linux, and MPV.net for Windows which all use MPV underneath. Other better and easy video players exist today.

We are not in 2012 anymore. We are no longer just using AVC/H264 + AAC or AC-3 (Dolby Audio) MP4s for every video. We are playing back HEVC, VP9, and AV1 with HDR metadata in MKV/webm cnotainers with audio codecs like Opus or HE-AACv3 or TrueHD in surround channels, BT.2020 colorspaces. VLC's current release is made of libraries and FFmpeg versions that predate some of these codecs/formats/metadata types. Even the VLC 4.0 nightly alpha is not keeping up. 4.0 is several years late to releasing and when it does, it may not even matter.

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BoppreH an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I'm also surprised by people's defense of VLC. It's a nice project, but the bugs I regularly encountered were numerous and in seemingly common use cases.

Here's a post I made 4 years ago describing each bug, shortly before switching to MPV: https://www.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/pm6y1n/too_many_bugs_o...

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nticompass 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

MPC-HC is still a thing? I remember installing that (and K-Lite Codec Pack) on Windows, back in the day. Haven't used, or even thought about MPC-HC in years.

	▲	Lammy an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I still use K-Lite Codec Pack on all of my Windows systems: https://github.com/Microsoft/winget-pkgs/tree/master/manifes...
	▲	perching_aix 19 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yes: https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc
	▲	Drybones an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It still is, but it's not as recommended over MPV but I'm not as familiar with what it decodes and renders wrong in comparison, but it is still suggested over VLC in Anime circles.

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userbinator 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It works well enough, and I doubt the majority of VLC users are watching anime with it.

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jiggawatts 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It is the Firefox of media players.

Ironically, my main gripe about Firefox is that it has no support for HDR content and its colour management is disabled by default… and buggy when enabled.

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jaapz 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It is the Firefox of media players.

So... the better option?

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SirMaster 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://mpv.io/

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Drybones 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

IDK where you have been for the last decade, but Firefox has not been the better option since Chromium was made

Disliking Google Chrome proper is one thing, but Chromium is superior in every way. Rendering, features, speed, memory management

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pseidemann 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The person is asking for the better option.

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savolai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

-1 tab containers

Please elaborate on ”features”.

Does chromium have non-google sync?

	▲	Drybones an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Chromium based browsers have non-google sync. Vivaldi implements their own encrypted sync service and I believe Brave does as well. But I am talking about browser feature support, not stuff that can supplemented with an extension like a password manager. Firefox has poor support for modern web features including video processing and encoding which makes it very bad at web conferencing/video calls or in-page streaming. Firefox's developer tools and console is also much worse and missing important features. Other features Firefox is missing or has poor support for compared to Chromium are WebGPU, WebTransport, Periodic Background Sync, and parts of WebRTC. Plus various APIs for web serial, badging, and Web Share are missing partial or full support. Firefox still doesn't have functional HDR for images and videos including AV1.

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usefulposter 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Many HN readers won't be familiar with the fansub culture that this writeup originates from, so sharing a helpful resource in case anyone is interested in learning more:

ENTRY LEVEL FANSUBBERS' BEGINNERS GUIDE:

https://github.com/zeriyu/fansub-guide

Hope this helps anyone interested in the ancient art of subbing Japanese animes!

Be sure to read every link thoroughly, and don't worry, there are more link lists linked from the above link list.

Arigatou gomenasai!