What Media Player do you use to watch downloaded videos?

[Wake]

If I could switch my vote from VLC to Media Player Classic - Home Cinema I would (I voted like a year ago on this). A few months ago I started using MPC and have not looked back since.

[Dan Den]

Because the world is filled with idiots and every time one of them grows a brain they switch to something better.

Iki knows about half the hell we go through on a daily basis giving tech support because of problems with idiots using VLC and the simple solution we give them is to switch and voila it solves their problems everytime.

VLC is broken, It's the Internet Explorer of video players, it gives inferior playback, and the video quality is diminished with it's use of outdated and broken codecs.

Pretty much every single player in the poll is a better choice.

ok look i have never had any problem with vlc but just out of curiosity what player would you recommend.

[† L4ugh]

@Dan Den if you haven't already I would just drop this battle, because it really isn't worth the trouble. You know vlc is good, I know it's good, and according to the poll alot of others do as well. It would be nice if the staff would follow the same rules they enforce on the community but when you run the place I guess you can do as you please.

The player they are talking about is media player classic home cinema (mpc-hc) which on the windows platform is probably a bit better then vlc. Good luck getting it to run on anything other then windows because it won't.

Vlc is the most downloaded because it is designed to run on pretty much anything you install it on and play anything you throw at it. Problem is supporting all those OSes/video formats and fixing general bugs on top of coding new features is alot of hard work. While some people fault the dev team for not focusing on full support for the anime fan subbing/piracy community, others are just happy to have a player they can use on all their OSes.

[Koby]

@Dan Den if you haven't already I would just drop this battle, because it really isn't worth the trouble. You know vlc is good, I know it's good, and according to the poll alot of others do as well. It would be nice if the staff would follow the same rules they enforce on the community but when you run the place I guess you can do as you please.

The player they are talking about is media player classic home cinema (mpc-hc) which on the windows platform is probably a bit better then vlc. Good luck getting it to run on anything other then windows because it won't.

Vlc is the most downloaded because it is designed to run on pretty much anything you install it on and play anything you throw at it. Problem is supporting all those OSes/video formats and fixing general bugs on top of coding new features is alot of hard work. While some people fault the dev team for not focusing on full support for the anime fan subbing/piracy community, others are just happy to have a player they can use on all their OSes.

L4augh, honestly you clearly don't know what you are talking about in this regard. There is a good reason why I do everything I can to advise others to switch. Anyone who has helped me run any of the front end sites (ask Iki) know this reason to. If you have to do tech support for any of my sites you'd know the hell we have to go through on a daily basis from VLC users having problems. The simple solution we give them is we do not provide support for a fail player and to download MPC-HC and you know what? It ALWAYS solves the problem they were having with the video.

The thing is, even if it seems to work for you, because of the way VLC works you are viewing the files in inferior rendering. Meaning you are actually not seeing the video in the same quality you would on another player.

At the same time your recommendation that it works on all OS's doesn't really mean anything because it is inferior on every OS. If you run something that MPC-HC doesn't support (which is pretty much everything else besides Windows) then by far your best option would be Mplayer Extended.

Now try not to make stupid comments again that are aimed at doing little more than clearly trying to attack or piss off the staff simply because you're mad that you use an inferior product without realizing it. Funny thing is, pretty much all over the internet people rant and rave about VLC which is a product that gives many site owners hell and pretty much every fansub group worth a damn try to avoid.

[Nero D. Ace]

I used VLC a long time ago when it was the only player I had install on my PC. It would take 2 minutes to load up any file that wasn't AVI and if i played an MKV file and tried skipping forward or back a few seconds, it would crash. (wtf?)

That and every now and then it would tell me that I was missing some codecs and would have to download so and so pack from the internet.

Switch to MPC+CCCP ... it plays EVERY file without a hitch, be it MKV/AVI/MP4/OGG or whatever format I haven't heard of yet (except maybe RMVB but i have RealPlayer for that). I haven't ONCE had to go back to the net and search for a codec pack since I installed this.

Also, it doesn't stutter when I play MKV files, it automatically makes a playlist of all files in a folder and it remembers the location of the point i was watching when i close it.

In VLC, i had to do all this manually. I had to manually add each episode to the playlist, manually remember at what time i closed it to answer the doorbell, manually do everything.

Thinking back on it, if i could, i'd slap the guy silly who installed VLC on my PC and told me it was "the best player ever"

And i can back what Koby said 100%. Almost everyday, i see a guy who's commented that he can't "open" the file, that it's corrupted and i should "re-upload" it.

Is that what I'm supposed to do now? Go around telling each and every encoder that their encodes are shit that don't run on VLC and they oughta be ashamed of themselves for not making everything super-duper-VLC-noob friendly?

No thank you. You sir, can go f*** yourself or just download the 8 MB CCCP file for which I've posted hundreds of links and you can find yourself if you just took a minute to google it.

... that said, you won't believe the amount of times people refuse to download it 'cause they think it's a "communist" product *facepalm*

[Dan Den]

ok so i guess i have no choice but to admit:surrender: you were right koby mpc does play the hd files in perfect vision compare to vlc but this doesn't mean that vlc is a second grade media player.

[thinh112]

My go to is Winamp (always been using it, so i guess it's habit) and BSplayer when winamp doesn't play.

[Remotay]

Vlc needs more love... Had more issues with mpc (the one that comes with ccp) than vlc

[Alucard101]

i use divx because of its high quality and reliable players!!

[Spacecreepkitan]

mpc-hc that thing is just a juggernaut

[belgarionau]

I like to watch these on the TV, so find the easiest option is to store on my server and then stream the files direct to XBMC (running from an installation of the live cd) on a little ion based PC. Very nice setup and plays everything quite well.

[bangb12]

I used VLC until it started messing up on me, now I prefer to use Media Player Classic

[chojen]

I use vlc it is very good

@blueuthedog, I say this with respect and sincerity: Your standards are pretty low.

VLC is "evil in carnage". BUT, it is the most "convenient".

I use VLC, alot, but only to spot check my re-encodes or dub track additions. Since I do a lot of re-syncs, the ability to easily "slow down" the playback to verify my audio timing changes is pretty useful. But I've never been able to get my external encoders to work in VLC (like AC3-filter or COREAVC).

I have a dedicated media PC hidden behind my 62" DLP. VLC is HORRIBLE at up-scaling Anime in full-screen mode (the linear extrapolation is crap). But, on my laptop, it does not have that problem (but the extrapolation does not have to go up to 1920x1080p).

What's the BEST home theater player. For my situation (wide screen TV) it's Xbox Media Center (XBMC). It plays EVERY format on the planet! And the video scaling/extrapolation/up-conversion is flawless. I use an $8 IR dollar remote to control XBMC or I remotely take over XBMC from my laptop using realVNC or a web-browser since it has a web client host built into it. Yeah, it eats some CPU horse power but it's incredible. And the live action BluRay playback is "perfection". The only drawback, for me, is that I'm running on Windows XP (if it ain't broke) so it does not take advantage of CUDA or DirectX-11's DXVA-HD. So, it's not the "best" for laptops/PC use but for HDTV it's tops!

[Strick9]

I like MPlayer for its portability and the fact that you can write scripts to run it with arguments. On one of my comps, I can drag a movie to my MPlayer script and it plays in fullscreen with an 8:5 aspect ratio. On another one, the brightness is increased to overcome an old, crappy, dim monitor.

[loukovits]

I'm using Media Player Classic - Home Cinema.

I just install K-Lite Codec Pack, so it can play all formats and it's rules!

[Anonymous]

I use VLC it is cheap and easy to download.

[Shinigami King]

whatever video playback program, The PS3 uses.

[chuck199]

I away use vlc player it works must formats

[zolockit]

Hrmmmmmmmmmmm....

>MPlayer *good* (Mplayer Extended is best for other OS's)

Hell is that.

>MPlayer (Good Player)

>Not much to say about it really, it can do almost everything the CCCP can, plus a lot of other >things the CCCP can't. The only real problem is that it's rather obscure and not really user-friendly.

I resent that. I dislike having to go through a multitude of menus just to set a player up correctly, I much rather edit the appropriate config file, then just type in whatever triggers, and have the video play.

MPC-HC + CCCP (which I will now refer to as just CCCP as using the package with WMP is nonsensical) is pretty much the best choice for Windows.

Of course you can opt to mess with the beta, or mess with the individual player/splitter/filters/decoders, or have fun making your own build for your system, of what they use specifically.

Some people have praised CoreAVC (which you can install alongside CCCP), honestly I don't see much improvement using for h264 playback.

On Windows I either use CCCP or mplayer2. I'm used to CCCP, so I use it with Windows. mplayer2 is what I use when I need something more minimal that takes up less to nothing. If I have a 720p video that is giving me playback problems with CCCP on my archaic single core processor system, I use mplayer2. 9/10 times playback is perfect. (trying to play 1080 isn't happening though ;x) I've sometimes used the older mplayer too, recently it's been giving me better playback on somethings than the pre-built binary of mplayer2. Should compile my own but mehhhhhhhhhhhh...

If you're on Windows the best choice is CCCP.

On *nix, I use my build of mplayer2 on top of my build of ffmpeg-mt. No gui.

If you're on *nix you shouldn't really need one anyways. And smplayer is shit, don't let anyone tell you differently. It's a crappy front end that frequently does wrong calls to the back-end that is mplayer, which leads to crashes. The point of being on *nix is to have control. Why would you let someone else have it?

If you're on Mac, you can follow ^, OS X is based on a *nix, but it OSuX.

VLC isn't good. The devs haphazardly compile the libraries for portability with playback compatibility. What is that? Well, they want the player to play anything on any system, out of the box, with minimal need for the user to configure it. That is a terrible concept. So of course crashes and horrid playback ensues.

Also fun fact, since most devs use *nix to compile code, there's a good chance that they (CCCP devs) are most likely using mplayer (whatever version they fancy and ofc their own builds) on their *nix boxes.

xD

[salmun]

does my PSP count?