VLC is like Valve. It does nothing, and wins.
Good thing RAM is cheap and abundant, right?
Why wouldn’t you just use VLC?
Copyright ©2002-2026.
VLC FTW
Question: how does VLC get away with playing these proprietary codecs without compensating the owners of them?
VLC relies on open source media decoding libraries and projects. Thanks to the mechanisms and math behind many video/audio encoding schemes being public knowledge due to whitepapers on the topics in question being available and so forth, these can be reverse engineered by dedicated nerds who are way better at this sort of thing than me. As long as you’re not explicitly circumventing DRM there’s nothing the owners of proprietary codecs can do to anyone making a compatible decoding library in a clean room fashion, especially as mentioned elsewhere nobody is charging any money in the process. You’re licensing the code, not the method.
I imagine this is at least partially why the Jean-Baptiste Kempf is so adamantly against selling, monetizing, or allowing the VLC project to be bought out in any way whatsoever.
Does Microsoft not have anyone capable of reverse engineering these drivers too? Isn’t it in their best interest to also broaden compatibility?
Can’t charge a markup on Free.
Could you imagine how much it would suck if VLC got bought out by corporate privateers?
Like the guy’s been putting a lot of work in for a long time, so I couldn’t exactly blame him for it, but we would need a fork immediately because otherwise that would just be too sad for words.
I think if it was bought it would be simply discontinued to force people to use their existing media player.
Also despite what people on tech forums think, probably 95% of people don’t even know what VLC or 7zip are and have never even heard of it. Of that 5% that have heard of it, maybe half use it.
mpv exists so if vlc dies there’s just another reason to use linux.
Also dude has been approached and offered millions just for ad placement. I don’t think he’ll sell even if he’s dying or homeless. It’s a Terry Davis level of software development dedication at this point.
French law and European law don’t have the concept of software patents, so there’s no basis to sue VLC.
Maybe it’s because they’re not selling their product? I don’t know though, just guessing.
There are other video players?
mpv is good too
Mpc-hc is a good alternative. It’s a matter of preference
Nothing else exists besides VLC imo.
In my case this is literally true, because the IoT editions of Windows don’t even come with a bundled media player (nor a bundled photo viewer other than classic Paint, for what it’s worth).
I do continually find it baffling that companies repeatedly replace existing products with something worse
I literally can’t think of one time some service or software was retired in lieu of a like for like* replacement and it wasn’t actually worse for a very long time.
I’m actually struggling to think of any example actually
You’re describing a fork
You could maybe make an argument for Counter Strike or Team Fortress or something like that… maybe.
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Laughs in Linux
malware infested ‘codec packs’ about to make a comeback.
It now uses under 400mb memory.
Licensed codecs aren’t free, which isn’t new.
This isn’t significant.
Yeah did it ever natively play h265? You’ve always had to pay the $2 for it, had an OEM computer that they paid for it, or gotten it from something else. It was the exact same in windows 10.
