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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

> I never understood why VLC was so widely praised.

Because it's the one you can reasonably suggest to all your utterly nontechnical friends and relatives to get them to stop downloading random sketchy exe's from the internet to install codecs.

mpv, and mplayer before it, has always been better for me and I find VLC to be pretty shoddy. But when it comes to people like my mom, I don't hesitate to sing praise for VLC. In that context, VLC is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I don't muddy the waters by even mentioning mpv.

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> Because it's the one you can reasonably suggest to all your utterly nontechnical friends and relatives

I concurr.-

PS. On a related tangent the amount of unpaid "support" tech knowledgeable individuals are doing for (particularly) FAANG is enormous.-

> PS. On a related tangent the amount of unpaid "support" tech knowledgeable individuals are doing for (particularly) FAANG is enormous.-

Which is exactly the same for every profession. If you have a plumber friend and have issues with plumbing, who you call first, a random contractor or your friend? Replace "plumber/plumbing" with any profession and the answer is usually the same, you call your friend first, at least to get some more understanding before reaching out to a contractor.

The difference is that if your plumber friend helps you out with your toilet, Big Plumbing Inc does not get your business.

If however your tech friends help you with Windows/Android/Apple issues, MS/Google/etc. still get paid and save up on support costs.

These two situations aren't even remotely comparable.

> Windows/Android/Apple issues, MS/Google/etc. still get paid and save up on support costs.

This was kind of like what I was getting at: Kind of wondering what the total savings for FAANG on support costs would amount to, factoring in all this "offloaded" support that they hand off to their own customers (or, affiliated tech-savvy individuals).-

Sure. I understand, and agree.-

I was just wondering about what the sum total of the (otherwise) "billable" hours might amount to, were they to be accounted for as a cost of business for FAANG.-

Well stated.

VLC has a few nits, e.g. common settings and useful functionality buried somewhere. Like mouse gestures for instance, you have to go out of your way to enable them and cannot customize the mapping.

mpv on the other hand, I have multiple config profiles different viewing purposes. It introduced me to ffmpeg, which as someone who became a dev later in life, made me more comfortable with using cli tools and diving in to documentation. Being able to tinker made me feel like hackerman.gif and is one of the things that things that helped my career transition.

But yeah, not for my mom or wife, VLC is best for them.

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