What non-maintenance work needs doing? From the outside, it plays basically all the formats. There is always the potential for improving algorithms, but it strikes me as pretty feature complete.

> has many small seek/sync issues

Playback issues... scrub problems mentioned elsewhere, audio/video get out of sync when seeking a lot; need to hit left arrow to reset, speed changes lag when changed a lot, when there's a short clip it can end audio early, etc, etc.

Not a huge deal, but if you use it every day for video and audio file testing/lyric transcribing these little bugs get old. The playback core needs a rewrite to be "preemptive" I'd guess.

> audio/video get out of sync when seeking a lot

I have a very similar issue with subtitles in MPV sometimes. Some unknown (at least to me) combination of codec, encoding settings, subtitle format, switching subtitle tracks, and seeking will utterly break it to the point that I have to exit and reopen the file. I can't be bothered to debug the issue (so far).

In general I don't understand the negative comments I see VLC get. I've never encountered major problems with either piece of software. I've encountered minor bugs and annoyances with both.

Lots more folks use vlc I’d guess.

The media players we have on mobile don’t suffer from these issues, so they must be solvable.

Also, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41278499

> to be in maintenance mode.

Sad to hear.-

PS. On a tangent, rethorically - baring bugs and security - at one point is (if ever) software "finished"?

"We built this search engine. It works. The infrastructure has team enough to run it. But we have this huge payroll of people."

So "improvements" and "features" (and constant UI and UX changes) ...

... "enshittification" ensues.-

When is "good enough" ... good enough?

> PS. On a tangent, rethorically - baring bugs and security - at one point is (if ever) software "finished"?

“PS” originates from “post scriptum”, meaning “written after”. It doesn’t make sense to have it at the start of the text.

But to answer your question, yes, it is definitely possible for software to be done and finished. I’ve done it multiple times, where I have built something that does exactly what I set it out to do, it does it fast and without bugs and has been doing so for years and years with zero maintenance needs.

The general obsession with the idea that “software is never done, only abandoned” needs to end, it’s harmful to good software and its users.

Here’s millions more examples of finished software, in a single word: games.

> The general obsession with the idea that “software is never done, only abandoned” needs to end,

My thinking was along those lines. Or at least along the lines of "engineering and/or organizational processes should exist to know when to stop".-

PS. Thanks for your attention to detail. It was a "PS" to an otherwise one-sentence comment.-

A web search engine is never done because spammers never cease attempts to.game it in new ways, and because new phenomena keep appearing on the web, from presidents posting official news on twitter to the proliferation of AI-generated texts with subtly incorrect information.

A media player, though, has fewer challenges.

Media player projects are in an arms race with exploit devs, though, especially since Google keeps introducing and popularizing new media formats.

Speaking of which: which project tkaes security more seriously, vlc or mpv?