VLC is *amazing* at its design purpose: being a rock solid video player. The GUI, the UX, and other things can be criticized, but I dare you to find another video player that will play just about *anything*, and without having to install external codec separately with weird licence.
You can throw at it a broken mp4 file, a https url with basic auth, a weirdly encoded video, a DVD full of scratches, etc, chances are VLC will manage to play it (at least what is playable). There is just no other video player in the world that achieve that.
A lot of other video player might beat it at other features, but just straight video playing, VLC is just the best.
It's not artificial at all. It's a real limitation that was so outrageously annoying for the reasons mentioned above that VLC was able to "win" by tackling this one issue alone.
The success of vlc is all the proof you need. As you say, why else would it be so popular?
> What's up with this artificial limitation? I'd take frame back function over not having to install some codec pack once any time
Then VLC is not for you - and there's nothing wrong with it or you - you just happen to have differing priorities. Back when the Internet was more p2p, the ability to play uncommon media formats and containers was crucial. Even today, VLC offers a lot of value to anyone who has to playback media whose encoding they have no control over.
VLC has other useful features as well (like streaming while playing back, allowing for multicomputer watch parties on the same network)
> VLC is amazing at its design purpose: being a rock solid video player. The GUI, the UX, and other things can be criticized, but I dare you to find another video player that will play just about anything, and without having to install external codec separately with weird licence.
MPV? You know, the subject of this post we are commenting on?
MPV use some library from FFMpeg, it is not based on FFMpeg. And yes, VLC still beat MPV and MPLayer, especially at accuracy or reading partially broken files. Although the situation has changed a lot in the last 10 or so years, and they improved a lot.
But don't talk to me about UX when the two other option are MPV & Mplayer...
You can throw at it a broken mp4 file, a https url with basic auth, a weirdly encoded video, a DVD full of scratches, etc, chances are VLC will manage to play it (at least what is playable). There is just no other video player in the world that achieve that.
A lot of other video player might beat it at other features, but just straight video playing, VLC is just the best.