When Jean-Baptiste Kempf joined École Centrale Paris as a student in 2003, he was tasked with helping run the university’s computer network. It included an unusual project: student-run open-source software that had been running on a couple of university servers for seven years. To students, the project was known as “Network 2000.” To the rest of the world, it was VLC media player.
Kempf—now the president of VLC’s parent organization, the nonprofit VideoLAN—is the person who helped guide VLC’s journey from student project to ubiquitous software. (VideoLAN Client, the original name for the project, is where VLC gets its name.) On the surface, he’s laid-back, casual, and frank, though that belies a steely determination. As the person overseeing the project and its team, he sets the tone for VLC as a whole.
VLC is one of those quintessential pieces of software. An outstanding application.
One of the things I appreciate the most about VLC is that it demonstrates that you can make software accessible to the casual user w/o necessarily dumbing down the UI. Pretty much anybody can use VLC and its default interface makes it obvious even to the less technically-inclined user how it works. But then you can flip a pref and get access to all sort of bits and bobs only the most advanced users will care about. That’s great, I wish more software would work that way.
crystall,
I like VLC because it plays basically everything I throw at it and at least years ago it worked better than mplayer for me.
But personally I find the UI clunky for anything beyond the basic interface. I’ve been using it to play security camera footage, but the zooming interface is terribly inefficient and awkward. Ironically a simpler interface would have been easier to implement so I don’t know why they did it this way. Please correct me if I’m wrong, I still don’t think VLC supports frame by frame scrubbing, a feature requested over a decade ago.
I haven’t tried alternatives in a long time, but I gave mpv a shot. First impressions: the scrubbing is much better! However the version in the debian repos doesn’t support any zooming. I downloaded the source and attempted to build it…however I immediately encountered dependency hell, which is notorious with ffmpeg/libav as these are constantly breaking public interfaces. Over the years I’ve gone through the process of rebuilding the entire libav suite a couple of times already, but IMHO it doesn’t become less frustrating when you just want an application to work. Oh well, it is what it is.
Meanwhile I’ve never liked it and always used mplayer instead and now mpv.
MPV has a boatload of very useful shortcuts which I can’t imagine my life without:
Brightness/Contrast/Gamma/Saturation controls
Pan/Zoom
Volume
Frame-by-frame viewing
Three different ways of FF and rewinding
etc. etc. etc.
Same here. My experience with mplayer->mplayer2->mpv has always been better than with vlc. Every time I’ve ever tried vlc, its been a bloated mess that had one problem or another playing things that mpv didn’t miss a beat with. Maybe vlc is better these days, I dunno and I don’t really care anyways. I have neither a reason nor a need to give it another chance. To call it “quintessential” is laughable. I can’t think of any platforms that would take a hit were vlc to vanish tomorrow.
I used to use mplayer, I like it, but VLC has been my de-facto player for EVERYTHING for the past 4 years. But I am going to give mpv a try though because I’ve heard good things. But as far as VLC is concerned it has never failed to play any form of media (video, audio, images, etc., etc.) that I’ve tried with it. Keep up the awesome work VLC team! 🙂
Can VLC change gamma using keyboard shortcuts? No? Then GTFO. Most Hollywood movies are deliberately underexposed for some reasons and I always add 10-20 gamma steps in mpv to make ’em look better. VLC can’t do that and you’re left with maximizing your display brightness which is painful for eyes.
First time I used VLC was on the BeOS, probably around 2001-2002? I think it was listed as VLC VideoLan MediaPlayer @ Bebits 🙂
I haven’t used BeOS for a loooong time … but VLC is still one of the first programs I install on a new Mac or PC.
MPC-HC. I just want a player with excellent subtitle and codec support but using DirectShow
mpv does that.