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Comment by jbk | Hacker News Reader

Geeks and video geeks love to tweak at the best their media players. VLC is not the best tool for that, compared to selecting your own renderer, own codec pack+configuration and own subtitles codecs. This is normal.

However, since VLC is getting too mainstream, I see more and more of hate that is unjustified. When asked why, they cannot explain why. This is a bit annoying to be honest.

Finally, VLC being Cross-Platform cannot be the best on all platforms. We do our best, but we cannot be 100% perfect, especially with so little time. We need to do a company, but what Business Model?

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Don't listen to the haters. We (me, my wife, my family) are all using VLC and don't care about anything else.

It can open all media files we care until today.

It displays subtitles correctly.

It enhances the sound of some media files that would otherwise have lower volume level when played on Windows Media Player.

It is cross-platform: we use it on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Did I tell you that people around me are happy users (regardless the UI tweak?) because it just works with minimum effort to install?

Keep the very good work.

While praising this player let me add that I absolutely love the ability for increased playback speed!

This is a great timesaver for keynotes, lectures, and shows which move too slowly ;)

This is absolutely true. Some keynote speakers just speak rather slowly, or repeat themselves and you can easily get away with 1.3x speed. Even though it sounds funny.

I really wish there would be some sort of plugin that could select an even higher speed for silent/quiet parts.

I figured "how hard could it be" (having some experience writing tiny softsynths in the past I wouldn't even mind writing a low quality pitch-preserving resample filter) but digging into it, coding a plugin for VLC is pretty arcane. At least, I couldn't figure it out without having to dig into all sorts of audio/video decoding issues I didn't really want to get in to.

If anyone has any tips it would be greatly appreciated. I cannot promise I'll manage to code that particular filter but at least I can have some fun writing crazy VLC filter effects :)

Can't agree more. Thanks for all the great work. Keep it up!

I don't know, I just want a video player that plays anything with minimal hassle. Therefore, VLC gets installed on every new machine first thing.

I love it to bits, keep up the good work! Haters are a reeeeally small minority.

VLC is one of maybe 2 or 3 open source programs I recommend to everybody. Family, friends, girlfriend, from tech-savvy to first time computer users, mac, PC and linux. VLC is one of the few shining example of OSS at its best.

I wouldn't listen to anyone hating on VLC. Everyone will always have their preference. Personally, I find VLC to be a fantastic low-friction video player that covers all my needs (except for blu-ray which still lacks full functionality even in this release, but I know is in the works).

That's why I recommend it to everyone and why everyone I know uses it.

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