oook, but why?

Thats funny, I met him during GSoC too over a decade ago, and he's been on top of the open source game.

I vouched for this post because I have corresponded with him and he engaged in an in unnecessarily condescending way. What are you referring to by GSOC?

He’s pretty obsessed with making money off his Khyber thing afaict

K Lite Codec Pack + Media Player Classic was great

“If you insert a slice of bologna into the disc tray, VLC will play it.”

> I’m not sure what VLC brings to the table nowadays Lack of backdoors?

So, the same value-add as always!

I use it on my Android phone. Is there a better FOSS media player (or better any media player?).

VLC also still (or at least recently?) provides APKs you can download to install on very old Android versions. I have it installed on a few old Android tablets (and by old I mean something like Android version 4).

MPV everywhere else though.

I might be wrong but I think the guys at VLC are still very important contributors to ffmpeg, which is still a big deal. They also (kinda recently) developed some really low latency tech for streaming called Kyber So bottomline the player might not be used that much (although on mobile the app is very popular still) but the tech they develop for it, is

Yep.

VLC was not important on Linux. Because we have ffmpeg as foundation, used by mplayer and nowadays mpv. The later is my recommendation. Whether on the tty (awesome!) or on Wayland. If you prefer a native Gtk an interface is available, named Celluloid. In all these cases mpv is mighty, reliable, fits into the environment with a frugal interface.

We’ve also players based on gstreamer but ffmpeg is more reliable.

But the need for a reliable player on Windows, Android, macOS, iOS and tvOS is big. Because their default players suck. VLC comes with an awkward UI and the weird built-in stuff for SMB. But from a 2001 point-of-view it makes sense, LAN-parties are nice and back then they were everywhere. And Windows doesn’t support WebDAV well.

My favorite is mpv. But I’m still tankful that I’ve one usable player in my iPhone.

PS: VLC also uses ffmpeg?

I used VLC until I looked for a backward frame step functionality. I then found this thread on the VLC forums where the maintainers explain (with bad attitude) why this functionality is technically impossible. Everyone points out that mpv supports it, but the maintainers double down and say they’re Doing It Wrong and it shouldn’t be possible.

So anyways, I switched to mpv.

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=120627

Agreed except I have no idea what Jean-Baptiste actually does besides trying to run his little startup Khyber

Default player sucks and MPV is close to impossible to compile yourself. VLC is still a good solution on Linux.

I find it handy for streaming videos from my Jellyfin server with good subtitling support, then casting to a TV!

I’ve been using it to listen to actual MP3s of the music I have. I can’t find any decent MP3 player on iOS (incredibly ironic given the iPod was one of the 3 devices the iPhone was supposed to be when Steve Jobs first introduced it) and VLC is pretty good.