I don’t really understand the praise for VLC. I might be wrong here but isn’t it basically a GUI around FFMPEG? While VLC is great at playing anything you throw at it, that’s pretty much all due to the hard work of FFMPEG devs. The parts that VLC adds - the GUI - is really not that well done in my opinion. However it is absolutely critical that we have some sort of open source, cross platform, multimedia player, and for that I applaud it.