Posted by qbow883 12/27/2025
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.
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...
All other players lost their plot when they tried to steer users into some madness pit of millions tweaks and configurations that somehow excites aughors of those players and some cohort of people who encode videos that way.
I istall vlc very single time, because this is a blunt answer to all video playing problems, even if its imperfect. And walked away from ever single player who tries to sell me something better asking to configure 100 parameters I've no idea about. Hope this answers the question why VLC won.
So... the better option?
And the first party ones available there are for testing, with missing features :/
We do not have this kind of problems with VLC.
I’m not super knowledgeable about modern video players- I do like Infuse, which is in the App Store.
Depends on what you care about.
For me, Firefox really lacks in handling of very large amounts of tabs and a lot of features that I specifically use Vivaldi for. Does that mean Vivaldi is the best? Yes and No, it depends on what you care about.
Is Firefox still a good browser? As far as I know, yes. But I don't use it much at all because it doesn't give _me_ what I want and need.
And yes, I do actually need a large amount of tabs open at the same time very regularly due to the depth of references I work against in my line of work. That's on top of saving lots of bookmarks and syncing them via nextCloud.
You like Firefox? Great, keep at it.
You want to see features that aren't necessarily elsewhere? Consider trying Vivaldi and seeing if it's great for you or not.
Let's not act like browser selection is binary, because it isn't, and it really hasn't been since netscape navigator was new. And even then it's up for debate.
Disliking Google Chrome proper is one thing, but Chromium is superior in every way. Rendering, features, speed, memory management
Being faster, prettier and using less memory[1] is pointless if the browser won't let me block all ads.
I mean, it's like comparing a turd sandwich made with expensive exotic bread, and a cheese sandwich made with cheap grocery store break.
Sure, the one has great exotic bread, but I don't want the turd it comes with.
So, yeah, it actually doesn't matter how much prettier, faster or smaller web pages are with Chrome, at least FF lets me (currently) block almost anything.
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[1] Chrome beats out FF in exactly one of those, and it's not the memory or speed. Turns out ads take up a lot of RAM, and slow down pages considerably.
Please elaborate on ”features”.
Does chromium have non-google sync?
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.
Those seem rather marginal features from my pov but of course once you need them, you need them, I guess.
Firefox does WebRTC fine. AV1 works, simulcast works, calls and streaming work. Chrome still leads on performance tweaks and extra APIs, but “very bad” is just wrong.
DevTools aren’t “much worse.” Different, less popular, sometimes better (CSS, network). Chrome wins mainly because everyone targets it first.
API gaps are real but the list is sloppy. WebGPU and WebTransport exist in Firefox now, just behind on advanced bits. Periodic Background Sync barely matters. WebRTC support keeps closing the gap.
Missing stuff like Web Serial, Badging, fuller Web Share? True, and mostly intentional.
HDR is the weakest claim that actually holds. AV1 decode exists, but HDR support still feels half-done.
TL;DR: Firefox lags Chromium in breadth and polish, not in core modern web capability. Calling it bad for video or modern apps doesn’t match reality.” ’
I even encounter this in professional a/v contexts! If VLC can read and decode your stream, that's a good sign that most things should able to view it, but it absolutely should not be trusted as any measure of doing things correctly/to spec.
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.
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!
Its main claim to fame is that it "plays everything," and it rose to prominence in the P2P file sharing era. During this time, Windows users often installed so many "codec packs" that DirectShow would eventually just have an aneurysm any time you tried to play something. VLC's media stack ignored DirectShow, and would still play media on systems where it was broken.
We're past that problem, but the solution has stuck around because "installing codecs will break my computer, but installing VLC won't" is the zombie that just won't die.
Would have been nice if these "MUST KNOW BEFORE" advises were structured in a way so one could easily come back and use it as a reference, like just a list, but instead it's like a over-dinner conversation with your "expert and correct but socially-annoying" work colleague, who refuses to elaborate on the how's and why's, but still have very strong opinions.
This indeed just seems to jump-in in the middle and give a bunch very specific recommendation. I have no idea if they're good or bad recommendations but this doesn't seem like the way to teach good procedures.
VLC ignores a lot for it's outstanding video playback support, which is great if you want the playback too just work... But that's the player perspective, not the editing/encoding
- Transfer functions are just generally a mess but are close enough that most people don't notice they're wrong. Changing the render engine option will often change how the video looks.
- Some DV profiles cause videos to turn purple or green.
- h.264 left and right crops are both applied as left crops that are summed together which completely breaks many videos. They could just ignore this metadata but from what I've heard their attitude is that a broken implementation is better than no implementation.
> single best media player out there ... VLC is not recommended.
> Hanging out in subtitling and video re-editing communities, I see my fair share of novice video editors and video encoders, and see plenty of them make the classic beginner mistakes when it comes to working with videos.
Seriously, you quoted pretty much the only sentence in the whole article that's about plain playback, and even in that bullet point, the following sentence mentions hardcoding subtitles.
> It turns out that reading the (f.) manual actually helps a lot!
The non-recommendation of VLC vs mpc/mpv is literally for playback as I quoted! MPC also doesn't do any encoding, yet it's recommended
> the following sentence mentions hardcoding subtitles.
And that sentence starts with "Apart from simply watching the video" to tell you the same thing the previous sentence told you - that comparison where VLC was not receommended was about playback, not editing
The point was that the rest of the article wasn't and if you unironically can't tell that, then you should seriously train your reading comprehension.
There's a reason why VLC isn't used in broadcast stuff and ffmpeg is.
Seeking is surprisingly difficult. Many container formats don't support it at all, because they don't have indexes, and so it's easy to mess up playback or lose A/V sync by trying it. Constructing the index is about as hard as decoding the entire file too.
[1] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/libavformat-mkv-check...
Source?
There's also https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/25651 but that's an off by one error so likely not really relevant to video playback for the average user.
So no, I'm not just going to take an opinion without more information. I don't change my mind just on say so.
We as readers should gauge their credibility for ourselves, whether by reputation or by checking the claims. I don’t know who wrote it but it seems basically correct, consistent, and concisely argued to me.
So while this essay might be "technically correct" in some very narrow sense the author is speaking with far more authority than they have the experience to justify, which is what makes it obnoxious in the first place.
Not sure why it takes a dump on VLC - it’s been the most stable and friendly video player for Windows for a long time (it matters that ordinary users, like school teachers, can use it without special training. I don’t care how ideological you are about Linux or video players or whatever lol).
mpv is okay but its complete reliance on command line flags and manually written config files makes it a bore.
Slightly ironic, as I think a new UI is underway (and coming soon?). Not sure what version it's planned for, but I think some beta has it enabled by default already, was surprised when I saw it. So the consistent UI is here today, and will be in the future, but there will be a slice of time where different users will run different versions where some switched to the new UI, and some haven't. But it'll hopefully be a brief period, and of course it's still cross-platform :)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/glitch_art/comments/144vjl/vlc_star...
Haters gonna hate I guess.
The kicker is that many, many other players broke. Very few hardware decoders could deal with this format, so it was fairly common to get dropped frames due to software decoding fallback even if your device or player could play it. And, about devices, if you were previously playing h264 anime stuff on your nice pre-smart tv, forget about doing so with the 10-bit stuff.
Years passed and most players could deal with 10-bit encoding, people bought newer devices that could hardware decode it and so on, but afaik VLC remained incompatible a while longer.
Eventually it all became mutt because the anime scene switched to h265...
It's nowhere near enough codes, especially in darker regions. That's one reason 10-bit is so important, another is that h264 had unnecessary rounding issues and adding bit depth hid them.
If you want a MPV-based player GUI on macOS, https://github.com/iina/iina is quite good.
I've also seen many reports of it lagging or choking on complex subtitles, though I haven't had the time to investigate that myself yet.
Either way, it's not as simple as "both players use libass." Libass handles the rasterization and layout of subtitles, but players need to handle the color space mangling and blending, and there can be big differences there.
A lesson to learn in that.
Lol
???
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.
Yes, that was in the 2000s though. During the 2010 VLC started falling behind because its shortcomings overweighted its capabilities.
So at least from those times
I've also encountered the odd "this video is corrupted" error that persists even after re-encoding. But I've never thought to troubleshoot to see if it's a VLC, and instead just get a different version.
I don't doubt that there's some obscure, elite videophile hate towards it, but I'm hardly going to stop using it because a few random internet strangers hate on it.
My own anecdotal experience with VLC was that while every update fixed something, they also broke something in return - and these updates were common. This got annoying enough at some point for me to hop ships, and so I switched to mpc-hc and never looked back.
I've since also tried (and keep trying) the to-me still newfangled mpv, but I'm not a fan of the GUI or the keybinds. I know it can be customized, but that's not something I'm interested in doing. I know there are alternative frontends as well, but I checked and they're not to my liking either. So I mostly just use it for when mpc-hc gives out, such as really badly broken media files, or anything HDR.
[0] Doesn't mean there weren't any, but then I was not doing anything special. Just watched anime, listened to music, streamed YouTube. Hardly an extraordinary workload for VLC, or indeed any media player in general.
[1] I remember them changing around the volume slider widget back and forth ad nauseam for example, and that becoming in some particular way defective that I cannot recall.
I'll make up my own mind on it.
Let's be kind. Clearly not what either of us were thinking or intended to convey.
It seems there’s a lot of open-source lovers that haven’t also accepted that bugs can get fixed, projects can improve, etc. They’d rather treat a project as though it was stuck at version 0 from 20 something years ago. Deeply ironic.
Havent used it in ages, but a decade ago it felt a joke for all the video artifacts and subtitle glitches.
The one part that does get me some about people who blindly still praise it as THE video player at least outside of more technically inclined spaces like this, is so many people assume it exists as some monolith. Clearly library free, entirely the original work of VideoLAN, gracious they be that they give it all away for free.
It's not, but the Linux weenies won't hear of it. Maybe it's a great choice on Linux, but on Windows, it often renders things much worse than stock WMP (both legacy and modern). Videos with a lot of motion play especially poorly.
But, yeah, it opens everything.
(Lots of corner cases apply and VLC developers do assist ffmpeg, host a conference, etc.)
It seems like the main criticisms I am getting for this article are because it's escaped past its main target audience, so let me clarify a few things.
This post was born out of me hanging out in communities where people would make their own shortened edits of TV series and, in particular, anime, often to cut out filler or padding. Many people there would make many of the mistakes mentioned in the post, in particular reencoding at every step without knowing how to actually control efficiency/quality. I spent a lot of time helping out individual people one-on-one, but eventually wrote the linked article to collect all of my advice in one place. That way I (or other people I know) can just link to it like "Read the section on containers here," and then answer any follow-up questions, instead of having to explain from scratch each time.
> It seems really weirdly written. / ranty format
So, yes, it does. It was born out of one-to-one explanations on Discord. I wouldn't be surprised if it may seem condescending to a more advanced reader, but if I rant about some point to hammer it down it's because it's a mistake I've seen people make often enough that it has to be reenforced this much. I wouldn't write a professional article this way.
The other point many people seem to get hung up about is the "hate" on VLC. Let me clarify that I do not "hate" VLC at all, I just don't recommend it. VLC is only mentioned once in the entire page, exactly because I didn't want to slot in an intermission purely to list a bunch of VLC issues. I felt like that would qualify more as "hate."
That said, yes, pretty much anyone I know in the fansubbing or encoding community does not recommend VLC because of various assorted issues. The rentry post [1] is often shared to list those, though I don't like how it does not give sources or reproducible examples for the issues it lists. I really do want to go through it and make proper samples and bug reports for all of these issues, I just didn't have the time yet.
Let me also clarify that I have nothing against the VLC developers. VideoLan does great work even outside of VLC, and every interaction I've had with their developers has been great. I just do not recommend the tool.
If folks want to get involved, there's also a chat community that's pretty active: https://video-dev.org.
https://github.com/occivink/mpv-scripts
There is also a way to losslessly cut preserving the original encoding but you give up the precision of the cuts due to keyframes. The MPV script above can do that too: script-opts/encode_slice.conf
Why? I only know Topaz and I always thought it had its narrow but legitimate uses cases for upscaling and equalizing quality?
Other likely explanations are:
- them not liking how these upscalers look: you can imagine if they can nitpick minor differences between different encodes that most people don't notice, they'll hate the glaring artifacts these filters usually produce
- boycotting AI
The reasons stated against upscaling were that (re-)encoding video files should generally be done in a way that preserves as much of the original information and intent as possible. AI upscalers add information where there is none, thus modifying the video in a way that goes against that goal.
You wouldn't upscale a classic film in this way, but there are plenty of low-resolution shots that benefit. Especially with VGA resolution renders and modern AI workflows.
Just looking at the Topaz marketing, you can see a lot of places where it indeed does work. And 20-year industry professionals are using it today for their day jobs.
If you want to say "don't upscale a classic film in Topaz", say that. Because context makes the advice correct. This blanket "do not use" statement is flat out wrong.
You apply it to where it is needed. Not every scene need the same treatment.
Which is a sensible piece of advice.
Is what the submission says about Topaz and similar.
> Applying any kind of post-processing[4]
Is what the footnote you quoted is linked to.
> Do post-processing if you're surgical about it
> Don't do AI upscaling regardless, never do it, and don't even ask why
Is the impression I get from this article.
It's a simple tool which is great for many things, it has filters and there are most of the formats. I think it uses ffmpeg under the hood.
It's an old tool but it's fine for most things, when ffmpeg is to fastidious to use. ffmpeg is still what I use, but some more complex tasks are just more comfortable with avidemux.
Do you mean "too fussy?"
These days I'm much more inclined to try and transparently encode the source material, tag it appropriately in the media container, and let the player adjust the image on the fly. Though I admit, I still spend hours playing around with Vapoursynth filter settings and AV1 parameters to try and get a good quality/compression ratio.
I have to say that the biggest improvement to the experience of watching my videos was when I got an OLED TV. Even some garbage VHS rip can look interesting when the night sky has been adjusted to true black.
Given the increasing abilities of TVs and processing abilities and feature sets of players, I'm not much persuaded to upgrade my DVD collection to Blu-Ray. Though I admit some of that is that I enjoy the challenge of getting a good video file out of my DVDs.
I partially disagree with the use of ASS subtitles. For a lot of traditional movies, using SRT files is sensible because more players support it, and because it's often sensible to give the player the option of how to render the text (because the viewing environment informs what is e.g. the appropriate font size).