Have used VLC for at least 20 years. Recently I upgraded an old Dell 9400 laptop that dates from around 2006 to Debian Bookworm (the end of the line for the 32-bit machines). It has a nice 1600x1200 display, but the Nvidia Graphics (Geforce Go 7900 GS) is poorly supported and mpv now requires --hwdec=no, making 720p videos barely playable. VLC now uses a fraction of the CPU as mpv does for video, which makes even 1080p videos playable. For some reason VLC chokes at the beginning of every video (tries to play before everything is ready), but by pausing the video and backing up to time zero it plays perfectly. All of this to say that VLC has saved the day as it frequently has over the years.
VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
41–50 of 106 posts
Re: VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
#42Well deserved!
Re: VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
#43The award is well deserved, VLC was a godsend a few years ago but I’m not sure what VLC brings to the table nowadays. All other players play videos just fine on Linux now. I guess VLC is only a thing on Windows because the default software is crap. On Linux almost everyone now use whatever is the default player or MPV for the nerds.
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…
On Windows at least VLC has had better alternatives for the past 20 years, both feature and UI wise. I had frame-stepping hotkeys back in the mid-00s with Korean video players. These days I use the currently maintained fork of MPC-HC which similarly has this.
On Mac it wasn't until the mid-10s that I found a decent player.
Re: VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
#44Re: VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
#45Re: VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
#46I met that guy during a gsoc mentor summit and it inspired me, out of spite, to never install VLC on any device I own
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?
Same. Maybe it's the open source ecosystem that forced him to be overly self confident, to fly above the cognitive noise.
Re: VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
#47So many hours of fun watching videos over the years, without the constant fear that some odd codec would make the experience impossible. Thanks, VLC!
VLC was a big deal in the 2000s if you wanted to watch torrented anime. Operating systems didn't come with players with broad codec support and it was a legitimate nightmare to figure out what fly by night codec worked with whatever the bootleggers cobbled together to encode the video of the week.
These days, operating systems already have rock solid video players with far less clunky UI.
On Linux, video is already sublime thanks to ffmpeg and the dozens of available frontends.
It feels like wrestling with 1998 in trying to use VLC these days. It's got a real WinAmp feel to it.
But the real elephant in the room is that the lionshare of video is now being delivered by major media platforms like YouTube.
Re: VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
#48Years ago I remember complaining on HN that VLC didn't support remembering the position of the video you've already partially watched, when multiple other video players supported it.
The only reply was someone saying you should contribute to the open source project yourself to fix it instead of complaining. I don't know anything about coding a multi-platform video player so I wasn't much use but not long after they released a version supporting it and I felt bad for complaining.
Re: VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
#49One of the few honorable techies who didn't sell out
He’s pretty obsessed with making money off his Khyber thing afaict
That's not what a sell out means in this context. He refused offers in millions of dollars to sell VLC to possibly shady parties, thereby keeping it safe for people like us. Kyber on the other hand, is a dual licensed AGPL - commercial software. That's an entirely acceptable and respected practice in the FOSS community. That doesn't make him a sell out.
Re: VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
#50He is a good guy for not selling out but let’s be honest, it’s just a thin wrapper around ffmpeg.