Wow. I cannot believe the pettiness of comments here. VLC is a fantastic media player, and I'm quite appalled to see the conversation here dominated by such little gripes. VLC plays media more reliably than any other program I've tried, on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. And whether or not you consider it perfect, reaching the 2.0 milestone is something to be lauded, not bitched about.
Geeks and video geeks love to tweak at the best their media players. VLC is not the best tool for that, compared to selecting your own renderer, own codec pack+configuration and own subtitles codecs. This is normal.
However, since VLC is getting too mainstream, I see more and more of hate that is unjustified. When asked why, they cannot explain why. This is a bit annoying to be honest.
Finally, VLC being Cross-Platform cannot be the best on all platforms. We do our best, but we cannot be 100% perfect, especially with so little time. We need to do a company, but what Business Model?
This is absolutely true. Some keynote speakers just speak rather slowly, or repeat themselves and you can easily get away with 1.3x speed. Even though it sounds funny.
I really wish there would be some sort of plugin that could select an even higher speed for silent/quiet parts.
I figured "how hard could it be" (having some experience writing tiny softsynths in the past I wouldn't even mind writing a low quality pitch-preserving resample filter) but digging into it, coding a plugin for VLC is pretty arcane. At least, I couldn't figure it out without having to dig into all sorts of audio/video decoding issues I didn't really want to get in to.
If anyone has any tips it would be greatly appreciated. I cannot promise I'll manage to code that particular filter but at least I can have some fun writing crazy VLC filter effects :)
VLC is one of maybe 2 or 3 open source programs I recommend to everybody. Family, friends, girlfriend, from tech-savvy to first time computer users, mac, PC and linux. VLC is one of the few shining example of OSS at its best.
I wouldn't listen to anyone hating on VLC. Everyone will always have their preference. Personally, I find VLC to be a fantastic low-friction video player that covers all my needs (except for blu-ray which still lacks full functionality even in this release, but I know is in the works).
That's why I recommend it to everyone and why everyone I know uses it.
