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What you need to know before touching a video file

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Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#171

Post by astrange »

jandrese wrote: post #78
BitsAndObjects wrote: post #5

Interesting read, it’s a shame the ranty format makes it 3x longer than necessary. 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).

He's talking about using VLC for transcoding or encoding, where the functionality has lots of issues and is kind of bolted on the side. VLC for playing is totally fine.

No it isn't, VLC plays everything back slightly incorrectly in all sorts of ways, the subtitle rendering and colorspace handling isn't compliant at all.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#172

Post by astrange »

gpvos wrote: post #48
happytoexplain wrote: post #19

I'm always amazed when I see how many people are unfamiliar with VLC hate. It was notorious (to the point of it being a popular meme topic) for video artifacts, slow/buggy seeking, bloated/clumsy UI/menus, having very little format support out of the box, and buggy subtitles. I assume nowadays it's much better, since it seems popular, but its reputation will stick with me forever.

Do you have sources for that? As far as I know VLC has actually always been famous for supporting basically every format.

ffmpeg supports every format. ffmpeg wrappers don't need add much value in order to also do this.

(Lots of corner cases apply and VLC developers do assist ffmpeg, host a conference, etc.)

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#173

Post by astrange »

dylan604 wrote: post #65
jokoon wrote: post #34

I wish he talked about avidemux. 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.

Some of the simple tools might not be using ffmpeg per se, but using the libav or similar libraries. ffmpeg is just a tool built to utilize the functionality of multiple libraries like this.

ffmpeg and libavcodec are the same project.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#174

Post by tuna74 »

jdprgm wrote: post #151

Just writing off AI upscaling completely is bs. It's not some magic bullet to use on every video and there is a learning curve on how to apply but there are absolutely scenarios where you can get shockingly good results. I think a lot of people make judgements on it based on super small sample sizes. On a separate note also not mentioned llm's are really good at generating ffmpeg commands. Just discuss with chatGPT y…

The article defines quality as being as close to the source as possible. AI upscaling adds detail that wasn't there in the first place.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#175

Post by drtgh »

SirMaster wrote: post #127
jaapz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the Firefox of media players. So... the better option?

https://mpv.io/

Unofficial third-party builds from unknown github accounts; I think that you are really brave if you installed it.

And the first party ones available there are for testing, with missing features :/

We do not have this kind of problems with VLC.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#176

Post by astrange »

Agingcoder wrote: post #165
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man it extended well past the 90’s. Finding some weird windows video codec in a dodgy .ru domain was a time honored tradition for quite some time. I remember all the weird repackaged video codec installers that put mystery goo all over them machine. The article bashes VLC but I tell you what… VLC plays just about everything you feed it without complaint. Even horribly corrupt files it will attempt to handle. It mi…

I used mplayer ( the ancestor to mpv as I’ve just realized ) in the early 2000s which I think could handle everything under the sun back then.

That's ffmpeg. Neither mplayer nor VLC were doing anything special that let them "play everything". They just used ffmpeg.

(nb they did often use their own demuxers instead of libavformat)

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#177

Post by netsharc »

derefr wrote: post #92
netsharc wrote: post #86

The second technical definition in this document is wrong. Great way to put the "the author is opinionated but is clueless" marker right near the top. > Actual video coding formats are formats like H.264 (also known as AVC) or H.265 (also known as HEVC). Sometimes they're also called codecs, short for "encode, decode". Codec is coder/decoder. It's not the format. There's a footnote claiming people mix the 2 terms up…

> If you want to educate, educate with precision, and don't spread your misinformation! I would assert that the author was already being precise. A statement that X is "sometimes called" Y already conventionally carries the subtext that Y isn't actually the correct term; that Y is instead some kind of colloquial variant or corrupted layman's coinage for the more generally-agreed-upon term X. Why mention the incorrect…

Maybe it's my bubble, but a video format is a name given to the description of how the video is stored as a stream of bytes/how to get the video from the stream of bytes, and "codec" is the piece of software (more generally, logic) that handles that work.

It's not fine to say "oh those 2 things are the same", especially in an introduction, because then you're leading people astray instead of educating them.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#178

Post by dylan604 »

astrange wrote: post #173
dylan604 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the simple tools might not be using ffmpeg per se, but using the libav or similar libraries. ffmpeg is just a tool built to utilize the functionality of multiple libraries like this.

ffmpeg and libavcodec are the same project.

yes. but do you have to include the ffmpeg part to include just the other libraries?

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#179

Post by amelius »

Nowadays, I just ask an LLM to give me the ffmpeg command that I need.

No need to know anything about the video file anymore.

(Of course if you're hosting billions of videos on a website like YouTube it is a different story, but at that point you need to learn a _lot_ more e.g. about hardware accelerators, etc.)

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#180

Post by amelius »

BoppreH wrote: post #148
Drybones wrote: post #116

Nearly this entire HN comment section is upset about VLC being mentioned once and not recommended. If you can not understand why this very minor (but loud?) note was made, then you probably do not do any serious video encoding or you would know why it sucks today and is well past its prime. VLC is glorified because it was a video player that used to be amazing back in the day, but hasn't been for several years now. I…

I'm also surprised by people's defense of VLC. It's a nice project, especially when it was created, but the bugs I regularly encountered were numerous and in seemingly common use cases. 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...

My main problem with VLC is that when I accidentally hit the wrong key on my keyboard (usually in the dark, because that's how I watch movies), it is quite often almost impossible to get the settings back to what they were without restarting the player.
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