TheFluff Wrote:0.9.2 trip report

After experimenting for about 10 minutes I have the following bugs to report (there are most likely a lot more but I haven't found them yet):

1) H.264 support is extremely broken, even by VLC standards. This especially affects H.264 in MKV, but H.264 in MP4 also suffers from problems, although less than MKV. You are quite likely to get random garbage artifacts at random places. This is especially evident when seeking; every time you seek you are likely (more likely with MKV, somewhat less likely with MP4) to get garbage output and/or lots of hilarious blocking until next IDR-frame.

2) MKV support is a complete joke. It isn't just broken, it's completely unusable. First off, the playback is jerky; pans that are smooth in any other player are extremely jerky in VLC. Second, see the seeking problems above; they happen almost every time you seek in an MKV. Third, even after reaching next IDR-frame after a seek, you're quite likely to get random borks for a while, it seems. Bitrate peaks also seems to make it spoon its pants; things like the Kurenai OP that works fine in all other media players I've tested breaks VLC spectacularly (actually, high bitrates in MKV in general seems to break it).

Ordered chapters are "supported", but segment linking isn't, so a virtual timeline is built but if you try to seek to somewhere that would land you in an external segment, VLC instead seeks to the start of the file, making it extremely annoying to try to seek anywhere near segment switch points.

3) The famed libass support is erratic at best. It seems that they screwed up the libass position in the render chain so subtitles are rendered after anamorphic stretching, so on anamorphic releases subtitles end up off-center and with an odd aspect ratio (this will reportedly be fixed in 0.9.3). It also doesn't support fades for some reason, and colors are wrong (it seems it interprets them as RGB instead of BGR), at least with the opengl.

4) The only video renderer that really works decently on my Windows XP installation is OpenGL; all the others have either incorrect blacklevels, absurdly bad scaling or other problems, at least on my system (this is probably related to video drivers).

5) The ancient problem that if you seek to the end of a file, VLC instantly closes it is still there, and you can't disable it. This makes seeking near the end of a file extremely annoying because if you seek too far you need to reload the file to seek backwards.

Funny screenshots: http://uppcon.se/thefluff/fansub/vlc/


Conclusion and public service announcement: never use VLC.



subtitle speaks the truth