Vlc's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European Sfs Award 2025
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The HN community congratulates Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of VLC, on receiving the European SFS Award 2025, praising VLC's impact and Kempf's commitment to keeping it open-source.
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https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=98182&p=3281...
TL;DR: they decided to force the playlist to stay open all the time, thus killing "mini-player" mode; reaction to this was, unsurprisingly, uniformly negative (but expressed politely); Mr. Kempf's response was to attack VLC users; I did an end-run around him by opening a bug ticket so other developers would be made aware of the problem, and Mr. Kempf banned me for doing so; my ticket was approved and addressed by other developers, fixing the issue; Mr. Kempf tried to back-pedal pitifully.
/s obviously
So in my view he IS a sellout. You’re entitled to your view but don’t go around telling me or others they’re wrong, thank you.
https://preview.redd.it/bekphnqftcb41.jpg?width=1080&crop=sm...
These days, operating systems already have rock solid video players with far less clunky UI.
On Linux, video is already sublime thanks to ffmpeg and the dozens of available frontends.
It feels like wrestling with 1998 in trying to use VLC these days. It's got a real WinAmp feel to it.
But the real elephant in the room is that the lionshare of video is now being delivered by major media platforms like YouTube.
The problem with VLC is that the interface consistently feels... both imprecise and ridiculously granular. Everything just behaves weird. It felt weird in 2002 and it still feels weird in 2025. Like they cribbed the design from a DivX player, and haven't thought about it since.
VLC seems bound and determined to not let you interact with a video without pausing it, then opening the menu and hunting for option you need. Yes, I could set up my own interface, but that's not an excuse for not having a bare minimum of functionality that matches modern user expectations. Besides, configuring VLC to have the interface you want is itself not an easy task. Like, they have interface presets. Why isn't there a preset interface for "make this match YouTube"?
Just looking at what they chose to make be default key bindings is just bizarre to me. Half the things they have bound to single key presses are things that have never come up for me ever, while several things I want to use frequently are double or triple key combinations or not available for binding at all. All the default adjustments like skipping ahead or adjusting speed are all so granular that you have to hit them 10 or more times to actually accomplish anything. Just a completely alien interface to me. This software feels like it was built to solve media problems that I have not encountered since the late 90s when video tracks and audio tracks were more frequently out of sync from the producer.
What using VLC has taught me over 20 years is that the best way to play media with VLC is to open the software, begin playback of the media, and then under no circumstances attempt to interact with the software again.
Youtube is dubbing videos with AI for no reason whatsoever if you play the videos from the website these days.
The cynic in me says some PM rolled out it out because they had an internal metric to hit.
I know a lot of people who are bilingual (or trilingual) and they utterly loathe it.
I assumed that was meant with "dubbing".
It's pretty funny considering how google claims that their hiring practices make them hire only the most intelligent people on the planet.
It is of course worse when it tries to do so on a language I already speak.
What do you mean by that? To me, it's like any other application - you double-click the file (or run `vlc file.mp4`), and it plays. That the UI is not oversimplified is a cultural thing, VLC decided to cater to those that prefer to have the extra controls.
This was mitigated by vlc and mplayer, two video players that integrated most codecs as fast as they could, and it was a breath of fresh air. You just started them and any video would play, no codec issue anymore. MPlayer has not been updated for some times, and traction was lost, but VLC, although looking a bit old on the UI-side (and a little buggy on ARM Windows) is still here and is solid when someone just wants to watch a video on any platform.
What does this mean? I double-click and video file and it starts playing. What wrestling are you doing?
Not my experience at all. At least colleagues using Windows always run into video playing troubles in online meetings unless they use VLC.
VLC also still (or at least recently?) provides APKs you can download to install on very old Android versions. I have it installed on a few old Android tablets (and by old I mean something like Android version 4).
MPV everywhere else though.
VLC was not important on Linux. Because we have ffmpeg as foundation, used by mplayer and nowadays mpv. The later is my recommendation. Whether on the tty (awesome!) or on Wayland. If you prefer a native Gtk an interface is available, named Celluloid. In all these cases mpv is mighty, reliable, fits into the environment with a frugal interface.
We’ve also players based on gstreamer but ffmpeg is more reliable.
But the need for a reliable player on Windows, Android, macOS, iOS and tvOS is big. Because their default players suck. VLC comes with an awkward UI and the weird built-in stuff for SMB. But from a 2001 point-of-view it makes sense, LAN-parties are nice and back then they were everywhere. And Windows doesn’t support WebDAV well.
My favorite is mpv. But I’m still tankful that I’ve one usable player in my iPhone.
PS: VLC also uses ffmpeg?
So anyways, I switched to mpv.
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=120627
On Mac it wasn't until the mid-10s that I found a decent player.
Anyway, you should be able to install both VLC and mpv from your distro's repo, assuming your distro isn't weird. Building mpv is only something you'd do if you're hacking on it or need a bleeding edge build for some reason.
So I used Media Player Classic without any issues for years.
When I moved to Linux Desktop, it came with VLC so I tried and forced me to use that damn "space to pause". But half my videos had issues playing. Being in KDE, I switched to Haruna. It's ugly, but I can play anything without issues... and I can "click to pause"!
I suddenly became the computer person of my family at 11 because of that
past winners: https://www.sfscon.it/awards/
The only reply was someone saying you should contribute to the open source project yourself to fix it instead of complaining. I don't know anything about coding a multi-platform video player so I wasn't much use but not long after they released a version supporting it and I felt bad for complaining.
But glad you had your feature!
Free software is not "free" (as in free beer). People have to build and maintain it.
Many projects have great communities, making it all fun and engaging.
But that is incorrect. VLC has even more supported features, if you do not believe me, check the source code https://github.com/videolan/vlc/tree/a33f33ddb0a9e0d26d779eb...
On Windows, VLC is quite convenient though. While I also use mpv there, for an elderly relative I have simply used and installed VLC there, as the default GUI mode is more convenient for elderly people.
Incredibly accomplished already. What gravy this would be though.
I've heard he was working on an extremely low latency gaming system: Kyber
Anyone has any recent news on that subject?
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