Ehmmmm… Vlc?
Windows is the new Winrar.
WinRAR said it had a 40 day trial, but it actually never expired and you could continue using it forever for free. You never had to pay.
Which is why we have all the WinRAR memes.
Due to this, it was actually pretty goated, and remembered fondly by many.
I honestly would buy a $300 copy of Windows Enterprise, provided it didn’t have adware and other invasive things. Unfortunately, the last time I bought a premium Windows was back when Windows 7 Ultimate roamed the world.
These days, I just pirate a copy of Enterprise via RUFUS, and use ShutUp10 to kill whatever nastiness that Microsoft is up to. That sucks. I want to just buy a perfect Windows and get on with my day.
Omg they’re trying to destroy Microsoft from the inside.
They’re the good guys everyone, it’s an inside job! ～(つˆ0ˆ)つ｡☆
VLC is like Valve. It does nothing, and wins.
Man it’s been like 15 years since I last watched that…
I use Media Player Classic Home Theater. It is free, and is still maintained.
Oh so it is! I didn’t know there was an active fork, I stopped using it when the original repo was archived.
VLC FTW
Question: how does VLC get away with playing these proprietary codecs without compensating the owners of them?
Short answer: many have no licensing requirements for playback, only encoding. Sales are easy when you have a good codec that everyone can watch.
VLC relies on open source media decoding libraries and projects. Thanks to the mechanisms and math behind many video/audio encoding schemes being public knowledge due to whitepapers on the topics in question being available and so forth, these can be reverse engineered by dedicated nerds who are way better at this sort of thing than me. As long as you’re not explicitly circumventing DRM there’s nothing the owners of proprietary codecs can do to anyone making a compatible decoding library in a clean room fashion, especially as mentioned elsewhere nobody is charging any money in the process. You’re licensing the code, not the method.
I imagine this is at least partially why the Jean-Baptiste Kempf is so adamantly against selling, monetizing, or allowing the VLC project to be bought out in any way whatsoever.
Could you imagine how much it would suck if VLC got bought out by corporate privateers?
Like the guy’s been putting a lot of work in for a long time, so I couldn’t exactly blame him for it, but we would need a fork immediately because otherwise that would just be too sad for words.
videolan itself is a nonprofit, formed around the time of the 1.0 release of vlc.
mpv exists so if vlc dies there’s just another reason to use linux.
Also dude has been approached and offered millions just for ad placement. I don’t think he’ll sell even if he’s dying or homeless. It’s a Terry Davis level of software development dedication at this point.
I think if it was bought it would be simply discontinued to force people to use their existing media player.
Also despite what people on tech forums think, probably 95% of people don’t even know what VLC or 7zip are and have never even heard of it. Of that 5% that have heard of it, maybe half use it.
Does Microsoft not have anyone capable of reverse engineering these drivers too? Isn’t it in their best interest to also broaden compatibility?
What those drivers do is patented in the US. See MPEG licensing. VLC is based in the EU which does not have a mechanism for software patents that do not solve a physical problem (moving bits around isn’t patentable there) so they can avoid issues. Microsoft, Corel, and Nero would not be able to do that, they have assets in the US, even if it would only be a bank account.
I would not be surprised if codec licensing would not allow shipping with old and open codecs like MJPEG, Theora and AV1 with an addon for the proprietary codecs.
Can’t charge a markup on Free.
Probably, if they wanted to. The historical writing is on the wall that they don’t want to, though, as part of whatever their business strategy is. Fear of legal complications due to overtly being a for-profit commercial enterprise might also have something to do with it.
Microsoft is already quite infamous for e.g. going so far as to license third party .zip decompressing code to build into Windows Explorer rather than develop their own, code which apparently nobody in Redmond could be bothered to understand and thus to this very day the .zip archive handling capabilities of Explorer remain frozen and time from the XP era and so rinky-dink that they pale in comparison to commandline tools from the '90s. That’s let alone compared to something like 7-Zip.
This also raises the issue of having to maintain said code over subsequent releases and continually update it to support evolving standards, etc., which not only isn’t free but presents no obvious mechanism for extracting any revenue from anybody to offset that cost. The current plan of simply outsourcing the entire problem to its rightsholders and passing the licensing cost directly to the consumer allows Microsoft to handily wash their hands of the entire affair, enabling them to devote more resources to trying to shoehorn Copilot AI into the character map or the registry editor, or whatever the fuck.
microsoft publishing a free version of the paid codec would rightly be considered anticompetitive business practices due to their market position. VLC not so much.
You’re licensing the code, not the method.
I don’t think this is true or ffmpeg wouldn’t keep the proprietary codecs in a separate branch with no binary download. If you want a compiled ffmpeg binary with mp3, you need to download it from a 3rd party.
ffmpeg binaries from pretty much anyone should have libmp3lame baked-in. the format was ‘freed’ from the last patent in 2017.
That’s good to know that it’s been updated but the reason it wasn’t in the default binaries until the patent expired was because “it’s free” isn’t a defense from being sued by a patent holder.
Vlc including patented codecs is getting away with it despite the sword hanging over the project. Ffmpeg prefers to be safe because many free OpenSource projects have been shut down by patent holders.
French law and European law don’t have the concept of software patents, so there’s no basis to sue VLC.
do they have the concept of intangible assets?
Something only becomes an intellectual property (intangible) asset if there is a law that says that said specific kind of thing can be intellectual property - the whole domain is an entirely artificial creation and there is no such thing as natural intellectual property.
So whilst French and EU do have the concept of intangible assets, it’s irrelevant here because software patents aren’t intellectual property according that those laws and hence are not “assets” and are thus not covered by such laws.
Maybe it’s because they’re not selling their product? I don’t know though, just guessing.
There are other video players?
mpv is good too
Mpc-hc is a good alternative. It’s a matter of preference
Nothing else exists besides VLC imo.
In my case this is literally true, because the IoT editions of Windows don’t even come with a bundled media player (nor a bundled photo viewer other than classic Paint, for what it’s worth).
‘classic’ wmp can be ‘enabled’ on iot under optional windows features.
the old photo viewer is also still in the code but has to be enabled with a few registry entries.
but vlc and irfanview will support more formats.
i do still kinda like wmp, though, for mp3 and audio cd. its crossfade (audio or video playlist) is also the only thing i’ve found that keeps my tv from detecting ‘no audio’ and shutting down when i have manually blanked its screen (for audio only).
Good thing RAM is cheap and abundant, right?
Why wouldn’t you just use VLC?
Copyright ©2002-2026.
Everyone saying “why not use VLC?” Because I have never liked its interface. MPC BE though… That is my jam.
I wonder if people have made mods to zhuzh up how the interface looks
Some people like eating crayons and that’s okay
Which ones are the crayon eaters though?
The ones paying to watch video formats without a doubt.
Windows Media Player CodecPass Ultimate Series X 360 Enshittified™ Edition with Copilot AI
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I do continually find it baffling that companies repeatedly replace existing products with something worse
I literally can’t think of one time some service or software was retired in lieu of a like for like* replacement and it wasn’t actually worse for a very long time.
I’m actually struggling to think of any example actually
It’s worse for the end user, but better for shareholders.
The best software in many categories is open source and it’s astonishing how few people use it. I mainly blame governments in the 1990s and early 00s for embedding Microsoft into their own systems, administrations and most of all: schools. We could be living in a much nicer world right now.
You could maybe make an argument for Counter Strike or Team Fortress or something like that… maybe.
aren’t current iterations of both basically ‘live service games’ now, with microtransactions driving their continued existence?
they are not the same games as the hl mods i started playing way before steam came along.
You’re describing a fork
Laughs in Linux
malware infested ‘codec packs’ about to make a comeback.
It now uses under 400mb memory.
Licensed codecs aren’t free, which isn’t new.
This isn’t significant.
Yeah did it ever natively play h265? You’ve always had to pay the $2 for it, had an OEM computer that they paid for it, or gotten it from something else. It was the exact same in windows 10.
You didn’t have to pay if the GPU came with a hardware decoder. But the HEVC patent owners have been infighting over royalties. So some hardware isn’t shipping with the codec anymore or have it disabled.
