And jeez what happened to it anyways? It actually used to be pretty decent back in the 98/XP/7 days :(
I liked the old built in media player in Windows 7…
Yeah me too for the simplicity. THe “new” one is shit
Everything is a .wav, you just lack the frequency hearing range.
Back when /dev/dsp existed, you could pipe any data to it, and it’d treat it like PCM data. Wav files sounded like they were supposed to. Everything else sounded like… well, also like they’re supposed to, i guess.
I could never get VLC to player videos without weird video issues.
First time I hear of someone having problems opening whatever format in vlc. I mean if there’s a program that reads each an everyone of them it’s VLC
That’s the logo for a multi-billion dollar corporation’s built-in media player for their flagship OS? It looks like one of my side projects.
who the hell still uses windows media player? I use windows and everyone else I know who uses windows never opens WMP. We all have VLC for videos, but for the movies that we all totally pay for we use Kodi/XBMC or jellyfin
Mpc is significantly better than VLC. Occasionally I need VLC to play a file but we’re now talking every 1-2 years. VLCs UI is baaad.
VLC’s UI on windows hasn’t changed much in over 10 years now. It definitely would benefit from a search function to quickly find certain settings to fine tune your expirience with it. But I sandbox all of my software, so no cache files or data it writes onto the drive I make it write to ever sticks around for very long.
Any time I need to open a link from a friend I copypaste the link into a sandboxed browser that doesn’t have access to any of the shit going on in the other sandboxes instead of opening it rawdog into that same sandbox.
Mpc is literally designed to look like the media player from windows 98…just with actual functionality.
VLC doesn’t need to be new it needs to be good. How about a nice forward=next in folder backward=back in folder? How about a nice click-anywhere-to-pause. How about being able to move the video player around without grabbing exactly the right piece of chrome? What about sane fucking volume normalization instead of letting you accidentally crank the volume to 200%? These are all things mpc does right.
Given your description I’m assuming Linux. Mpc is one of the things I find impossible to replace on Linux because all of the options are VLC or yet-another-half-baked-mpv-wrapper authored by lickmydragonballz93 on GitHub. On the other hand VLC has the strong half-baked UI vibes that Linux is known for, so maybe you’re used to it?
Media Player Classic enjoyer here 👌
(Though for some very specific use cases I still have VLC installed and sometimes use it)
VLC represents what the internet could have been and what it should have been.
Wish we could start again with a new internet.
I hadn’t thought of it in these terms. Sometimes, someone says something profoundly true and you just have to stop and reckon with it. Fuck RealPlayer and all the other crap (RealPlayer may have been the first (popular) app to deliberately trick people into enabling stuff (hidden checkboxes)). What if capitalism hadn’t happened to the internet.
It’s because Jean-Baptiste Kempf is a GOAT and said “non” to fuck-you amounts of money to sell out VLC.
I don’t know if I’ve had the strength to say no to that much money and obviously, that kind of cash has corrupted all but a few bastions of what makes the Internet an awesome place.
Shoutout to Raymond Hill of uBlock Origin fame and all those supporting the lists it depends on. Some many adblockers sold out (including the original uBlock) but he champions on making the Internet a remarkably better place when used. Dude even refuses donations (says list maintainers deserve it more).
So serious question, why not take the money, become ultra rich, then immediately start a nonprofit to recreate VLC Origin
He gets to be rightfully rich, and he funds and protects a free project.
In those times there had been more than one popular free app that suddenly started installing crap on user’s machines.
I guess he just didn’t want to become attached to junkware being installed on people’s machines.
I don’t have the details but may they wanted to buy the source code from him and close it?
I would imagine whoever bought it would write a clause to say he can’t create anything similar in future.
Best way to reward them would be to be like them. I’m sure they too long for world where people act with integrity
I still find it strange that windows media player classic consistently works better than every new media player they’ve introduced since. It seems like if you make OS’s you cannot simultaneously make a good media player, eg. Quicktime/itunes/wmp/groove
I had somehow forgotten all about the existence of QuickTime, and now I’m having flashbacks of the Wild West Web and Real Player…
Oh no, real player has plucked a chord in me I’ve long forgotten about too lol.
Has it finally finished buffering enough for you to hear that chord?
Not yet, I had to start over because I clicked a new spot in the video before it loaded, and that is a mortal sin.
Windows Sound Recorder used to open literally anything - text documents, pdfs, images, executables, DLLs, and attempt to play them as audio. Photoshop files make especially interesting noises through it. I used to use it for samples. Got some great noisy stuff that way.
I used to write dark ambient and noise records as a hobby. I got some of my best samples from that method.
Got any fun clips to share?
I have the album I made with them! Some of the tracks are solely composed of Sound Recorder playing non-audio files, but every track contains samples created that way. The quality isn’t the best, this is a CD rip because I’ve long since lost the original files, but since it’s experimental industrial noise, the audio quality doesn’t hurt much I guess.
https://soundcloud.com/themachinal/sets/the-machinal-disturbance
If something doesn’t open in VLC, you can usually safely assume the file is corrupt lol
Just because VLC plays a file doesn’t mean that the file isn’t corrupted.
If something doesn’t open in VLC…then you should probably try it in Media Player Classic, and if that doesn’t work then the file is totally fucked.
Or mpv, the real chad.
VLC is so much better than the solution I was using before it. Windows Media Player Classic with the Mega Codec Pack downloaded from a super shady warez website.
VLC has always just worked. Never had to fuck with settings or download extra shit. Dealing with codecs and different formats was such a pain in the ass until VLC came along.
aplay: “Hey kid… wanna listen to the sound the Linux kernel makes when you push it through the sound card?”why is that valuable though
aplaydoesn’t bitch about encodings or signatures or checksums or something not looking like a media file. If you do something stupid (like pipe an executable file into it), it won’t tell you to go back to the child-safe play pen, it will pass the data to ALSA and do its best to render it as sound.The Windows mind can’t comprehend the importance of the freedom to fuck around. But, looking at your comment history, you’re more of a professional contrarian and won’t even try to do that.
Why does it need value? Living to extract value and nothing else is toxic to your body mind and soul.
Because you can listen to the sound the Linux kernel makes when you push it through the sound card?
Who are you?
Why are you so angry lol? Most of your post history is just you yelling at random people on the internet. It’s weird.
I am someone who likes to listen to the sound the Linux kernel makes when you push it through the sound card.
I have a script for this! I took the commands from somewhere, I just put them into a script. https://codeberg.org/JetpackJackson/arch-dotfiles/src/branch/main/shared/scripts/kernel-songs
k
The C in VLC stands for Chad
From Wikipedia:
The VideoLAN software originated as a French academic project in 1996. VLC used to stand for “VideoLAN Chad” when VLC was a chad from the VideoLAN project. Since VLC is no longer merely a chad, that initialism no longer applies.
“Oh no, I can’t play this modern video file using a codec that’s literally been around for more than 10 years unless you pay me $0.99 for a codec pack…”
Every single time I forget to change it and I want to play an h265 file from my phone.
Enshitification is what is happening, the original windows video player was way more capable than this modern garbage.
It’s also partly the patent holders for H.265.
H.264 had a license fee, but it wasn’t ridiculous. It was jacked up for 265, to the point that a lot of software houses no longer bundle the 265 decoder license.
It annoys me too: Security cameras often use turnkey H.265 encoding packages rather than more open codecs, which makes dealing with the files using FOSS more of a pita.
I think this part actually isn’t enshittification. I think this is being legally cautious, as you probably should be when you’re Microsoft.
