mplayer vs vlc
Posted 10-10-2010 at 01:52 AM by Web31337
I've been a VLC media player user for a long time. But some funny thing happened when I upgraded my gentoo and VLC started lagging extremely hard. I tried everything: from downgrading codec libraries to removing ~/.vlc : nothing helped. The problem was when I was trying to watch DVDs and some avi files, it shown "buffering" on every frame, and, of course, I had a hang of few seconds every time. I've decided to try mplayer, as many people told me it's teh best.
So I emerged mplayer and smplayer. I really was impressed by quality improvement.
First of all it won't lag on DVDs while VLC does on some, in same places. That seems to happen when switching to next "title". While mplayer does that uninterruptedly, VLC lags for about 0.1-0.2 seconds, and even when you know places where it will lag it's really disturbing.
Secondly, and mainly, it won't lag on HDs (mkv, ts). When I first opened HD movie in it I was amazed: it runs MUCH faster than VLC, for some unknown reason!
You know, after all, I don't know HOW can you code something in such BAD way, because VLC lags with really LARGE amount of resources, with core i7 2.8 ghz, 4G RAM and GTX 465 video... that's just... no I don't have any words to say. All I have to say is that mplayer ownz.
Maybe VLC has much features, but all I want is to watch movies so it won't lag. mplayer gives me that.
So I emerged mplayer and smplayer. I really was impressed by quality improvement.
First of all it won't lag on DVDs while VLC does on some, in same places. That seems to happen when switching to next "title". While mplayer does that uninterruptedly, VLC lags for about 0.1-0.2 seconds, and even when you know places where it will lag it's really disturbing.
Secondly, and mainly, it won't lag on HDs (mkv, ts). When I first opened HD movie in it I was amazed: it runs MUCH faster than VLC, for some unknown reason!
You know, after all, I don't know HOW can you code something in such BAD way, because VLC lags with really LARGE amount of resources, with core i7 2.8 ghz, 4G RAM and GTX 465 video... that's just... no I don't have any words to say. All I have to say is that mplayer ownz.
Maybe VLC has much features, but all I want is to watch movies so it won't lag. mplayer gives me that.
Total Comments 1
Comments
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I'm just gonna play the devil's advocate here and put in a word for VLC...I personally think media on Linux in general has a ways to go (thanks a lot, DVD Forum and patent freaks) so it's understandable that there be some...kinks here and there from distro to distro.
To be frank, I have zero experience with practical Linux (I use Fedora and you use Gentoo - the difference is clear) and so I can't say if either or both of us speak of universal problems.
One, I remember getting "Elephants Dream" in high-quality Theora a while back. No lag at all. The same for Big Buck Bunny, methinks, but I can't say for sure.
Two, DVDs play fine for me regardless of whereever and whenever...though it was a bit of a struggly before I knew of libdvdcss.
On the other hand, I found an interesting issue with MPlayer which did not manifest itself with VLC. When I did a window-switch operation of any sort (alt-tab, or even minimizing the related MPlayer window) there would be a jump in my audio output. Hardly a show-stopper, but it was very annoying.
Then again, for the first two months of my time on Fedora, VLC was flagged to be highly suspicious be SELinux for reasons I didn't understand, while MPlayer never raised such issues.
And of course, we have Totem. Slow for me, a strange GUI (or so I feel), and almost zero support for the media files I want out of the box. The last was easily solved, the other two - eh. My question is how the GNOME team (or whoever is in charge of that) could include such software by default - at the least they could include a barebones MPlayer or something which wouldn't raise copyright death flags.
Just my two cents.Posted 11-28-2010 at 07:28 PM by dannysepley 
