What you need to know before touching a video file • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by Izkata » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 4:55 AM UTC

perching_aix wrote: post #38

I've had a lot of misconceptions that I had to contend with over the years myself as well. Maybe this thread is a good opportunity to air the biggest one of those. Additionally, I'll touch on subbing at the end, since the post specifically calls it out. My biggest misconception, bar none, was around what a codec is exactly, and how well specified they are. I'd keep hearing downright mythical sounding claims, such as…

> And then, not even a very long time ago, the mystery unraveled. What the various codec specifications actually describe, and what these codecs actually "are", is the on-disk bitstream format, and how to decode it. Just the decode. Never the encode.

Soooo with everyone getting used to creative names instead of descriptive names over the past decade or two, I guess "codec" just became a blob and it just never crosses peoples' minds that this is right there in the name: COding/DECoding. No ENCoding.

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

#202

Post by econ » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 5:01 AM UTC

socalgal2 wrote: post #193

drtgh wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you miss the github builds or just discounting them?

What happened to downloading an installer from the official website? Are we sending grandma to GitHub now?

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

#203

Post by morshu9001 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 5:03 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #149

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…

> It is the Firefox of media players. 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.

Lack of HDR is my second favorite feature

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

#204

Post by Izkata » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 5:04 AM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #39

g4zj wrote: post #14

I'm curious what the issue is with using Handbrake? I use it all the time on macOS and it's generally a simple and effective tool for my purposes.

Handbrake is fine if you truly need to reencode (aka “transcode”) your video, but if you find yourself with a video that your player can’t read, you might be able to just change the container format (remux it) using ffmpeg, copying the video and audio streams directly across. With video there are 3 formats: the video stream itself, the audio stream itself, and the container (only the container is knowable from the ex…

Subtitles are another kind of stream aside from video/audio.

Also there's one user-level aspect of MKV that makes it not too surprising to me: It can contain any number of video/audio/subtitle streams and the interface needs some way of allowing the user to pick between them. Easier to just skip that complexity, I guess.

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

#205

Post by morshu9001 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 5:05 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #22

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.

>It was notorious (to the point of it being a popular meme topic) for [...] having very little format support out of the box ??? 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 onl…

Pretty sure VLC can play /dev/urandom

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

#206

Post by morshu9001 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 5:08 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #180

BoppreH wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keyboard shortcuts with no modifier key involved are evil. Even Gmail has those.

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

#207

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #187

amlib wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for the real part there was the great 10-bit encoding "switch off" at around 2012 where it seemed like the whole anime encoding scene decided to move into encoding just about everything with "10-bit h264" in order to preserve more detail at the same bitrate. VLC didn't have support for it and for a long time (+5 years?) it remained without proper support for that. Every time you tried playing such files they…

8-bit and 10-bit almost give digital video too much credit. Because of analog backwards compatibility, 8-bit video only uses values 16-235, so it's actually like… 7.8 bit. 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.

[deleted]

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

#208

Post by napkin » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 5:57 AM UTC

econ wrote: post #202

socalgal2 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss the github builds or just discounting them?

What happened to downloading an installer from the official website? Are we sending grandma to GitHub now?

Things are complicated. As a policy, I wouldn’t want to encourage grandma to be going to any web site to download software. Grandma should probably stick to the App Store. And personally, I would way rather install github builds than downloads from ‘official’/independently maintained web sites. Especially in the case of free / open source projects, sometimes cash constrained. Security is hard.

I’m not super knowledgeable about modern video players- I do like Infuse, which is in the App Store.

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

#209

Post by ifh-hn » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 7:07 AM UTC

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…

Knowing nothing about video stuff my only question from this is: what's wrong with Firefox?

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

#210

Post by heavyset_go » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 7:08 AM UTC

throwaway2046 wrote: post #8

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).

VLC works great on Linux too! It's one of the few programs where I expect the exact same look and feel regardless of the underlying OS. mpv is okay but its complete reliance on command line flags and manually written config files makes it a bore.

No it doesn't, its Wayland support is a mess, its codec support is lackluster, and somehow the experience is worse when you use VA-API hardware decoding.