VLC Core is LGPL

Which very often happens.

If you run Windows, using Media Player Classic - Home Cinema with madVR[1] will give you much, much better quality.

VLC handles some large video files - or file types - very poorly in my experience, too.

VLC is great, because it has an excellent standard of video quality, and it's easy as heck to use and set up for others, but for people who really care about optimal playback, it isn't really the best choice.

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I think the main allure of VLC used to be that the tortuous labour of finding and installing codecs was suddenly moot. Using MPC-HC requires a lot of painstaking effort, especially once a codec stops working all of a sudden for some reason.

VLC is very Apple-esque in how it does everything for me and gives me an ease of mind, but with no guarantee that I will get the highest quality. And MPC-HC is very Windows-esque in how it requires a bunch of tweaking and pulling out hairs, which will eventually result in superior quality, but all in all perhaps an inferior experience and enjoyment, because it takes jumping through so many hoops to just get there.

Moving on from VLC to MPC-HC is very much like moving on from using primes in typography to curly quotes; it might be more aesthetically pleasing, but most of all, you kinda wish you could just unsee the difference and quit pursuing the folly of proper typography. These days, I can hardly stand reading books with justification, which unfortunately is quite a large majority of them.

It's a blessing and a curse, and I'd properly just recommend most people to find a video player similar to VLC in how easy it is to use, all while providing superior video quality and performance.

If you're watching a movie or TV show, I recommend that you watch it on Netflix or Blu-ray, if the option is available to you. That's what I do. :)

[1]: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228

As long as the author is ok with that, and proprietary interests are happy with merging their own changes on each upstream release, I don't see any wounds.

Also, sometimes it's better for proprietary interests to lift (for example) a working TCP/IP implementation, rather than implementing their own poor thing and put it on the 'net for everybody else to deal with.

EDIT: wow, checking now, PowerDVD 'Standard' edition is AU$55 - you can get actual hardware DVD players for less than that!

Anyway, the title is, of course, misleading. VLC core, named libVLCcore is LGPL since last year (I did it too in december) and the wrapper for 3rd party applications libVLC was relicensed too at the same time.

This is different, since most modules of VLC are now LGPL. We speak about codecs, demuxers, format parsers, protocol accesses, filter and outputs. And those modules are way more important in terms of contributors and lines of code than the VLC core. In fact, we speak here of 230 people with around 300,000 lines of code, compared to 80 people and 80,000 lines of code for the VLC core.

Of course, from a higher-level point of view, all those playback modules are part of the "core of VLC" :)