VLC and MPlayer: which one plays more types of files?
New: ProcessKO (May 09, 2024), Platform 29.5.1 (May 08, 2024)
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New: ProcessKO (May 09, 2024), Platform 29.5.1 (May 08, 2024)
1,100+ portable packages, 1.1 billion downloads
Please donate today
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MPlayer plays more, but I doubt VLC will fail to meet your needs in this area. Your criterion for what makes a media player better is quite odd.
Vintage!
MPlayer plays more? I would have thought VLC, which has never failed to play anything I threw at it, though I've recently been called out for saying so as, apparently, it doesn't play RealMedia files. My statement remains true, however, as I have no RealMedia files on my computer, or that I know of on any computer I use.
MPlayer is garbage; look for SMPlayer here. Same engine, better front end.
VLC takes a day and a half to start up. SMPlayer, XMPlay, and CoolPlayer all start up relatively fast.
VLC sounds the best with its EQ set up right. CoolPlayer has an EQ, but I can't replicate my settings from VLC. Not sure about XMPlay and SMPlayer, but they don't sound bad. SMPlayer has software amplification that can turn up the volume as loud as you want (I've gone over 1200%) but I'm not sure how smart/wise using this feature is. And I still get better volume out of VLC between the EQ and preamp.
Only VLC and SMPlayer can handle video, among my portable media players. VLC can play audio as well, but it can't tell how long the song is on its status bar, though the progress bar is accurate, and I assume SMPlayer can play video as well.
VLC has the best interface in my opinion, followed by none. SMPlayer is OK, XMPlay is weird, and CoolPlayer is ugly as sin, but it's nice that it can quickly show you the remaining time as well as the elapsed time.
VLC can take screenshots, subs can be turned off, delayed or sped up, and I can skip ahead or back in two incremental values (10 and 30 seconds, I think).
VLC and Firefox don't play nice together when VLC is playing video. The video will skip and lag. Firefox has to be closed. Not sure about SMPlayer.
In my opinion VLC is the best, but it takes so damn long to start up. At least 30-60 seconds. But it's worth the wait.
I use SMPlayer (Mplayer
portable. It is in my opinion better than VLC for DVD rendering.
PS:"Bahamut" foobar2000 rocks! (your icon)
How can you tell? Once I went to watch a movie with VLC, and it crashed a couple times. Regular MPlayer was able to play the movie, though. VLC sounds better, and I can make movies with a lot of dark spots look better with the image settings (mostly with gamma correction) but leaving both on default, they look the same to me. Any specifics or is it just personal preference/habit?
I used to watch ripped DVD (.rmv) on BS Player Pro, the quality was crisp. I have moved to VLC (v.8) if I recall, and I noticed a degradation of the colors and grain when I was watching the same movies on the newer version VLC 0.9. Of course, that's a subjective opinion, however I did not have this complain when watching the same movies with SMPlayer or KMPlayer - I guess they share the same engine. On the other side, I have never experienced a single crash with any of these software with DVD, ripped DVD, etc. I do not have a very good sound system here (COMPANION® 3 multimedia speaker system) so I can say tell about sound with objectivity.
VLC might be slow at startup, but after that, works like a charm.
MPlayer has some issues with the hungarian (accented characters) subtitles.
SMPlayer was unable to play .FLV files.
Personally, I've stuck with VLC because of that. VLC won't let you hang.
Pick your choice, there's no such thing like "best" for everyone.
There is an option when you install SMPlayer - download additional codecs - have you used it? If you still have it, send me the flv movies you cannot play. It has never happened to me so far. Anyway, subtitles or codec is not related to quality rendering - which was my observation - but as you you say, there is no such thing like "best" for everyone.