VLC 3.0 Released

[tomtomme]

We're in a new generation of video tech that Linux just doesn't work with yet. VLC is just fine for stuff from 2006, but worthless for stuff from 2016. Use it on Windows and it pretty much works because support is already built in via DirectX, while Linux is trial and error. (Mostly error!)

you seem not to have heard of kodi or mpv... My observation is that many vlc-linux users did the switch some years ago.

[wdb974]

Downloading right now, wondering what to expect from it on the Blu-ray side of things.

[EDIT] Wow, Blu-ray menus are working! Even though I couldn't use the mouse to click on stuff (tested with The Hobbit).

[Veto]

Kodi?! That is this kitchen-sink style media-center application with a 5-feet interface that lags along on a Raspberry Pi. mpv/mplayer is a command line player with a crappy UI that will play whatever you throw at it. Totem is the Gnome-style barely functional video player that will play your files on a lucky day. VLC is the go-to hassle free media-player/streamer you can use across Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android etc.

... But of course YMMV

[ssokolow]

Kodi?! That is this kitchen-sink style media-center application with a 5-feet interface that lags along on a Raspberry Pi. mpv/mplayer is a command line player with a crappy UI that will play whatever you throw at it. Totem is the Gnome-style barely functional video player that will play your files on a lucky day. VLC is the go-to hassle free media-player/streamer you can use across Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android etc.

... But of course YMMV

My experience has been that the SMPlayer frontend for MPlayer and MPV provides a better Linux experience than VLC in situations where I want a UI... that said, in most situations, I prefer using MPV with a custom config to turn off the crappy UI so it's just a video window driven by keyboard and mouse bindings.

[thelongdivider]

MPV has a pretty good UI honestly. It requires like 5 lines of text to get hardware acceleration work properly, and the interface is simplistic and elegant.

[DJViking]

Does that thing finally work correctly? I use it for a long time now (since v0.x), but sadly it often messed up in a few corners. HW accel, some codecs not working, different shortcomings form platform to platform. mpv seems to be a better solution meantwhile for a bunch of cases, and for audio are plenty of solutions out there.
I'll still install it, it's by far not a bad SW, but sadly there are some caveats that hardly ever seem to get fixed.

I am in the same situation. Used VLC for a long time, but nowadays use SMPlayer mostly. Reason is VLC for me had worse performance when jumping back/forward while playing FullHD/UHD movies. Its been a while now (perhaps two years) since I used VLC. Perhaps I should give it a go again.

[Veto]

MPV has a pretty good UI honestly. It requires like 5 lines of text to get hardware acceleration work properly...

So, you are saying that I'll need to spend 5 hours of reading man pages to make a 5 line command line or a magic config file tuned to the actual capabilities of my graphics drivers and specific brand of GPU to get it to work...?! Yeah, that is impressive and sounds just like MPV

[Gusar]

So, you are saying that I'll need to spend 5 hours of reading man pages to make a 5 line command line or a magic config file tuned to the actual capabilities of my graphics drivers and specific brand of GPU to get it to work...?! Yeah, that is impressive and sounds just like MPV

No, *you* are saying all that. Worst case of putting words in a person's mouth I've seen in a long time. If you want to go all videophile then yes, you can spend hours finding those magic options. Or you just consult your distro's wiki on the basics, which is basically the --hwdec command, and you're set in a minute or so.

On-topic: This version of VLC now finally has zero-copy VAAPI support. However, the devs have decided against a vaapi-specific video output and went for vaapi/egl interop instead. Which currently works only on Intel. The interface to provide egl interop on non-Intel won't be available until libva-2.1 and mesa-18.1 are released, and then VLC will need to implement said interface.

[BwackNinja]

So, you are saying that I'll need to spend 5 hours of reading man pages to make a 5 line command line or a magic config file tuned to the actual capabilities of my graphics drivers and specific brand of GPU to get it to work...?! Yeah, that is impressive and sounds just like MPV

First off, the defaults for MPV are rather good. I'd imagine that the biggest issue is the difference between VDPAU and NVDEC, because VDPAU doesn't support HEVC, and is necessary for older Nvidia graphics, as well as older versions without NVDEC support enabled. This also affects AMD graphics, because the also support VDPAU, but for the same reason (and that VDPAU is otherwise dead) are better with VA-API.

Really, the kind of people who are excited about MPV are the ones wanting the best video player. Those excited about VLC want the best video player application. It's hard to argue against the reality that MPV plays everything (except dvd/bluray menus, which don't strictly qualify as video) better than VLC, VLC is friendlier, for sure, but if you want to do anything halfway non-standard you'll start leaning on MPV.

I'd say the biggest hurdle for people using MPV is wanting to open the application and then the video rather than just opening a video itself, like you do with images. GUIs like SMPlayer help that, but the kind of people who'd care to use MPV over VLC are largely the kind of people who just want a video playing GUI, not a configuration GUI.

[FishPls]

Any chance of Ubuntu 18.04 picking this up?

Also, VLC really should do more frequent releases. Releasing a new version after 20k commits is _not_ normal.