And jeez what happened to it anyways? It actually used to be pretty decent back in the 98/XP/7 days :(
You know VLC is soo good even your school used it.
No, that’s because it’s free.
One of the reasons ig
Windows Sound Recorder used to open literally anything - text documents, pdfs, images, executables, DLLs, and attempt to play them as audio. Photoshop files make especially interesting noises through it. I used to use it for samples. Got some great noisy stuff that way.
I cant remember the command now, but there was one on linux which let you play anything, I remember /usr/bin/ls sounded nice.
aplay is pretty decent
I definitely have pointed it at /dev/random
I used to do this with audacity. It’s fun to open an image, and apply some audio filters to it, then export it. Makes for some interesting photo fuckery results.
Oh, I didn’t know audacity would do it. Well I know how I’m wasting time at work the rest of this week…
I used to write dark ambient and noise records as a hobby. I got some of my best samples from that method.
Got any fun clips to share?
I have the album I made with them! Some of the tracks are solely composed of Sound Recorder playing non-audio files, but every track contains samples created that way. The quality isn’t the best, this is a CD rip because I’ve long since lost the original files, but since it’s experimental industrial noise, the audio quality doesn’t hurt much I guess.
https://soundcloud.com/themachinal/sets/the-machinal-disturbance
That’s the logo for a multi-billion dollar corporation’s built-in media player for their flagship OS? It looks like one of my side projects.
That logo paid for some kids house.
I could never get VLC to player videos without weird video issues.
Are you on linux and are describing this issue where VLC cannot be reopened after exiting without logging out and logging back in?
Windows. And nah it’s more like while playing any given video file there will be moments where it looks as if the video is corrupted or something. Strange video artifacts that affect the entire viewport. The issue isn’t actually in the file, as the spots are random upon playback. These were all h.264 mkv files I had trouble with so maybe the issue was with that codec but at the same time that’s the most common codec used for encoding entertainment media for playback. Moving those files over to an iPhone and playing them with infuse worked flawlessly.
First time I hear of someone having problems opening whatever format in vlc. I mean if there’s a program that reads each an everyone of them it’s VLC
Oh it opens them. Reliable playback is something else entirely.
You can rawdog the libavcodec far more robustly via ffplay, vlc def struggles on a decent amount of media still.
I forgot that VLC wasn’t standard. 😂 I looked at the other icon and thought “wait what’s that?”
I liked the old built in media player in Windows 7…
Yeah me too for the simplicity. THe “new” one is shit
Windows media asks you to pay Microsoft for a decoding license if you try to play an HDR video.
I think it does it for hvec too
Looks like your right, included by default:
MPEG-4, H.264, H.263, VC-1, Windows Media Video (WMV), DV, VP8, Motion JPEG
Then they have add-ons in the store, the HEVC I believe said was a dollar to use on 10 devices with that account. that’s terrible
mpv: those files have some exotic image format, they’re not videos. Here is your dia show with your custom upscaling shaders.
I find VLC has a hard time playing .GIF files
And it stutters when playing .ts files.
Typescript?
Forget React, all my homies use VLC+TS.
DVD
For me i tried playing a Bad apple video in 4K it struggled
4k gif? Oh please, be serious.
Nah video but thanks for reminding me to edit my comment
I love gif files
Since the time of internet I’ve used Winamp for music, MPC and VLC for videos, Irfanview for images. Now I use Kodi for movies and series, Foobar2000 for music, Irfanview for images and MPC for other videos. Fuck streaming services.
Everything is a .wav, you just lack the frequency hearing range.
Back when /dev/dsp existed, you could pipe any data to it, and it’d treat it like PCM data. Wav files sounded like they were supposed to. Everything else sounded like… well, also like they’re supposed to, i guess.
I still find it strange that windows media player classic consistently works better than every new media player they’ve introduced since. It seems like if you make OS’s you cannot simultaneously make a good media player, eg. Quicktime/itunes/wmp/groove
iTunes 1.0 was amazing. It didn’t turn to shit until they tried to make it an everything-app.
It works better because everything else is geared towards maximum monetization to the direct detriment of the user and the UX. Those alternatives suck simply because “working better” on its own is financially worthless to those selling this shit.
Everything that Microsoft has tried to improve has ultimately gotten worse. I recently installed Windows 2000 in a VM to install a similarly old game and it was kinda jarring how well it just worked and how much it didn’t suck compared to a fresh install of Windows 10 or Windows 11. Obviously there were some very dated concepts especially related to networking (it clearly was designed for a world where a lot of people only plug their computer into a phone line for dial-up, or just directly place their desktop on the internet with a public IP, and letting it listen to a DHCP server and connect to an existing network was weirdly obscured)
TBF iTunes is a terrible player but made the shit loads of money so I guess they achieved what they set out to do.
And I would argue iTunes is the reason for newer media player versions being shit since of course MS saw that there was money to be made and tried to do the same.Very true, unfortunately if something makes money other companies will line up to copycat even if the real product is licensing they don’t have full access to.
I had somehow forgotten all about the existence of QuickTime, and now I’m having flashbacks of the Wild West Web and Real Player…
Fucking real player😩
Hold on, I need about 12 minutes to render your video and even then it’s going to be at postage stamp sized resolution and sound like someone stuck a brick in a blender.
Oh no, real player has plucked a chord in me I’ve long forgotten about too lol.
Has it finally finished buffering enough for you to hear that chord?
Not yet, I had to start over because I clicked a new spot in the video before it loaded, and that is a mortal sin.
VLC represents what the internet could have been and what it should have been.
Wish we could start again with a new internet.
It’s because Jean-Baptiste Kempf is a GOAT and said “non” to fuck-you amounts of money to sell out VLC.
I don’t know if I’ve had the strength to say no to that much money and obviously, that kind of cash has corrupted all but a few bastions of what makes the Internet an awesome place.
Shoutout to Raymond Hill of uBlock Origin fame and all those supporting the lists it depends on. Some many adblockers sold out (including the original uBlock) but he champions on making the Internet a remarkably better place when used. Dude even refuses donations (says list maintainers deserve it more).
So serious question, why not take the money, become ultra rich, then immediately start a nonprofit to recreate VLC Origin
He gets to be rightfully rich, and he funds and protects a free project.
Because people would immediately call him a sell out. And because it then would be the property of whatever company, and he could be tied legally from recreating it.
I would imagine whoever bought it would write a clause to say he can’t create anything similar in future.
In those times there had been more than one popular free app that suddenly started installing crap on user’s machines.
I guess he just didn’t want to become attached to junkware being installed on people’s machines.
I don’t have the details but may they wanted to buy the source code from him and close it?
Best way to reward them would be to be like them. I’m sure they too long for world where people act with integrity
I hadn’t thought of it in these terms. Sometimes, someone says something profoundly true and you just have to stop and reckon with it. Fuck RealPlayer and all the other crap (RealPlayer may have been the first (popular) app to deliberately trick people into enabling stuff (hidden checkboxes)). What if capitalism hadn’t happened to the internet.
Thank you.
who the hell still uses windows media player? I use windows and everyone else I know who uses windows never opens WMP. We all have VLC for videos, but for the movies that we all totally pay for we use Kodi/XBMC or jellyfin
VLC is fairly common but the people who use Kodi, jellyfin, or Plex are in a very small minority compared to everyone else.
XBMC is still a thing?
They re-named it “Kodi” but a lot of the stuff in it doesn’t work very well anymore
Mpc is significantly better than VLC. Occasionally I need VLC to play a file but we’re now talking every 1-2 years. VLCs UI is baaad.
VLC’s UI on windows hasn’t changed much in over 10 years now. It definitely would benefit from a search function to quickly find certain settings to fine tune your expirience with it. But I sandbox all of my software, so no cache files or data it writes onto the drive I make it write to ever sticks around for very long.
Any time I need to open a link from a friend I copypaste the link into a sandboxed browser that doesn’t have access to any of the shit going on in the other sandboxes instead of opening it rawdog into that same sandbox.
Mpc is literally designed to look like the media player from windows 98…just with actual functionality.
VLC doesn’t need to be new it needs to be good. How about a nice forward=next in folder backward=back in folder? How about a nice click-anywhere-to-pause. How about being able to move the video player around without grabbing exactly the right piece of chrome? What about sane fucking volume normalization instead of letting you accidentally crank the volume to 200%? These are all things mpc does right.
Given your description I’m assuming Linux. Mpc is one of the things I find impossible to replace on Linux because all of the options are VLC or yet-another-half-baked-mpv-wrapper authored by lickmydragonballz93 on GitHub. On the other hand VLC has the strong half-baked UI vibes that Linux is known for, so maybe you’re used to it?
Media Player Classic enjoyer here 👌
(Though for some very specific use cases I still have VLC installed and sometimes use it)
I just use Media Player Classic to rip CDs the handful of times a year I get a new CD and just want to quickly rip it without running to a different computer
