The subtitle problem is clearly some sort of dumb bug because the on-screen text showing things like volume and time doubles in size as well.
The seek bar usually works (except for FLV), but I watch movies on the couch. To use it I have to get up, exit fullscreen, seek, re-enter fullscreen, and sit down again. Compared to hitting a button on the remote (which just emulates the "back/ahead x seconds" keys), this isn't exactly desirable.
The broken video output can be fixed with various tweaking of output modules. It's not a big problem once I get it working (until it randomly breaks and I have to either change some other random setting or reinstall the OS to fix it), but it can be a pain in the ass since the exact tweaks that need to be made seem to change every time, the resulting settings are never anywhere near optimal, and shit like that just plain shouldn't happen in the first place.
The time problems happen on probably 3/4 of videos, the random crashes are as best I can tell completely random (except for only happening when subtitles are on). I could send you some videos that have given me problems, but there are so many of them, I don't know what you intend to accomplish.
Basically VLC appears to be extremely buggy and I was curious if other people have the same problems/overall impression, and if so, why they continue to recommend it. I used to hail it as the best video player around too, but now I'm looking for alternatives.
Maybe it's just the Windows version, and most of these people don't run Windows?
There are more bugs I didn't mention because they didn't come up last night or aren't too bad:
- The default volume setting randomly changed itself a couple times.
- It frequently skips the first several seconds of the video.
- Turning the speed up on more CPU-intensive videos causes it to completely stop responding to input. How far you can go is anyone's guess. On other videos, the output simply stops.
- Speed adjustments don't affect subtitles. So if you play at double speed, you get subtitles overlapping eachother, and if you play at half speed, they disappear early.
- There's no way to take a screenshot with the subtitles in it.
- Most of the commands in the remote control interface don't work.
- Many keys can be assigned as hotkeys but won't actually work (this one has been documented forever, but never fixed).
- Enabling the "extended" GUI while using the TV tuner crashes it.
- TV tuner settings are sometimes forgotten.
- Video from the TV tuner is horribly butchered on most settings and extremely slow and distorted at 640x480.
- Only one specific set of settings under Stream/Save works at all and produces shitastic results (the rest crash or produce empty files).
- The video sometimes doesn't show up at all until toggling fullscreen, stopping and restarting, or closing and reopening VLC.
- If I open certain types of video files (MKV and one other I don't remember), it will load the entire contents of every file in that directory into RAM (meaning generally several gigabytes), and not play.
- Attempting to open a video that's locked by another process produces no error message. It just refuses to start.
- The screenshot hotkey sometimes doesn't respond.
- If you have the screenshot format set to PNG, it will crash or freeze after about the 4th screenshot.
- If you select "default" for the audio or video module, there's no way to tell which one is the default.
- "Wallpaper mode" doesn't always work. It's related to the system settings, but I don't know precisely which ones.
- Its method to disable the screen saver is to change the system settings. Thus when it crashes you're left with no screen saver. The correct way to disable the screen saver (catch and reply to a notification) is piss-easy, and there are plenty of less intrustive/more reliable hacks (automatically move the mouse), so this is just inexcusable.
- If the video is set to repeat and you're playing in fullscreen, at the end of the video it will exit fullscreen and enter it again.
- The tooltips in the settings disappear before you can read them all, because they're ridiculously long. Then they won't pop up again until you show a different one, at which point they like to fade in and out really fast a few times. Last I checked a few of them don't wrap either, so they stretch waaaaaaay off the screen.
- Opening the Hotkeys settings takes forever, and the interface used to assign them is retarded.
- When you seek, it doesn't generally jump to the next keyframe (if this is the right term) nor does it simply decode and discard frames as fast as possible until it reaches the destination. Most video formats only have one keyframe every few seconds containing an entire image, and then several frames containing only the parts that differ from the previous frame. Since VLC will just jump right to an arbitrary frame you don't get the image from the previous keyframe, thus you get garbage for several seconds (the changes overlaid on a black background instead of the keyframe).
- Occasionally when started, the main window never actually appears.
- If I drag a video file into it, stop, then drag a second file into it, it will play the first one when the second one finishes. There is no way to disable this.
Many of these have been in the bug tracker for a long time, and I frequently see many of them brought up on the forums (receiving no response), which makes me seriously doubt it's just me having these problems. And as I mentioned I've used it on 4 different machines* and noticed similar problems on all of them, so it's not some problem with the system. I don't doubt there
is something wrong with the OS or hardware, but it certainly isn't responsible for most of these problems. (Not to mention, most programs work just fine, it's mostly only VLC, Firefox, and Windows itself that act up.)
*Two of them I built, one is my laptop, and one was bought from Future Shop and not tweaked at all, so that about rules out the possibility of me breaking something on all 4 of them.
I tried one of the latest nightly builds, BTW, and it's even worse. They've added dozens of new useless features, but have hardly fixed any of the bugs, and all of these new features come with new bugs. It wouldn't play anything with subtitles at all. This is what bugs me the most - they seem more intent on adding new features that nobody needs than fixing the important ones. We can now apply that "everything except this certain character is monochrome" effect at will, but we still can't seek.
If someone wants to suggest alternatives, I do have a fair number of needs:
- Not be bloated or use a ton of RAM/CPU power. (I.E. not Windows Media.)
- Support hotkeys for most/all actions in fullscreen, for remote control.
- Support MKV, OGM, FLV, AVI, MPEG, ASF, MOV, DVD,
PHP. WMV would be a bonus.
- Screenshot command with hotkey.
- Subtitles, obviously. Including videos with multiple subtitle tracks, and ability to adjust the subtitle position, size, colour, and outline.
- Multiple audio tracks.
- Fullscreen mode not have anything but the video itself except when displaying notices, like VLC.
- TV tuner support and speed control would be a major bonus.
As you can probably imagine I started using VLC in the first place because it was the only player I could find that met all these requirements.
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Pretty sure it plays WMVs, though.
