Just use mpv

Edit: guess I'll just go fuck myself

No. I don't think I will.

I've been using MPC-QT for a while on Linux after deciding to ditch VLC. It works pretty well.

If I end up with a weird file I can't open or something, I'm glad the VLC tool is there if I need it. But as an everyday media player, I found the experience to be lacking.

“Bug”

Windows ain't done til VLC won't run.

Instructions unclear

I read the article. The author questioned why this bug has existed for so long, and if it’s also a design flaw of vlc.

Now I am curious. Why not?

I'm a big fan of using mpv, I still keep vlc installed for niche use cases.

I end up with issues with it because I do a lot of graphic design which means I have a lot of fonts. So, it ends up rebuilding its subtitle font cache for little reason every time I start it. Can at least disable that though.

Completely unusable for normal human beings. I use it in combination with yt-dlp and for that it's nice but as a general purpose media player it's awful. No graphical interface or settings that are usable without a wiki.

Not really, MPC-QT is a pretty good graphical interface that I'd say is "comparable" with VLC?
https://mpv.rocks/ has some decent setup write ups on setting up mpv on windows and linux both.

Microslop is so unbelievably shit. I do pity all windows users who can't switch

Ways of stating the obvious

That is fair. Use it daily on Linux because its so customizable and powerful, but not a plug n play solution.

libmpv is used in a wide variety of user friendly players.

When people say "use mpv", its like "use Linux". Generally speaking you aren't doing much with the Linux kernel, you need the rest of the tools around it to make it friendly.

No difference here - grab one of the many players that use mpv under the hood. mpv.net, smplayer, iina, moonplayer, haruna, mpvex, etc, etc.

Thats good to know. Saved for future reference

I 100% believe it's Windows' fault on this one.

I've never had problems with VLC in over a decade of use until MS started vibe coding everything and doing zero QA.

I’ve used windows 95 and 98 on a pentium 166 with an old spinning hard disk. It was faster than windows 11 is now on an octocore ryzen.

Everything is sooo slow.

I want to so bad, like I'm so close that I can feel my autism coming into its full power, but there are still a few niggling things that make it hard to switch. The hope is that I can make the move this year sometime, but who knows...

VLC does so much more than play videos, but honestly, the interface is bonkers.

The one thing they've refused to do saying it's too hard, or whatever, is backward frame-by-frame stepping. SMPlayer has done it for as long as VLC has refused to do it. Celluloid does it, too.

I always wondered if it was just my pc that was painfully slow opening VLC.

Aside from their slow progress on QT6 transition, I have never had any problem with VLC in my life.

I installed a local Jellyfin server pointed to my media, and just connect to 127.0.0.1:8096 in the browser or app. Jellyfin is a crazy good media player.

What's stopping you?

Maybe if you define a custom path for fonts available to VLC? idk

Is the pseudo gui not enough? And it explains pretty much everything I'd need when 'H' is pressed.

The way I see it you're either a non-techie that'll be fine with the on screen controls, or you're a techie and will discover the various shortcuts yourself or by making a web search.

But as the article says, it works awfully slow on windows 10 as well, I thought it was just me.