The famous VLC player has been playing almost everything for 25 years, but the orange cone now has competitors
Some programs get installed on a fresh PC almost by reflex, even before the graphics drivers. Over time, that kind of software earns a reputation as an all-powerful tool. With VLC, people expect it to open a file that even the operating system doesn't know exists.
Another VLC meme on Reddit quickly turned into a love letter to the player and a debate over whether it's time for it to retire.
One commenter captured the spirit of the program best:
wanna play a 20 year old video in a format that you and God didn't even know existed? I gotchu, it doesn't even need to be a video or sound file, I'll figure it out
VLC began in 1996 as a student project at École Centrale in Paris and went open source under the GPL in 2001. The nonprofit VideoLAN organization now develops the player, and downloads have passed 6 billion.
To understand the cult following, it helps to remember the era before VLC. Back then, Windows Media Player met any unfamiliar file with the classic "you don't have the codec" error. Users installed entire codec packs into the system: K-Lite, ffdshow, Haali, or CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack). CCCP was especially popular with anime fansubbers, who sometimes encoded releases with something truly exotic. A codec handles compressing and decompressing data. Video in H.264, H.265, or AV1 is just a meaningless pile of bytes without a suitable decoder. VLC carries its decoders inside, largely built on FFmpeg libraries, so there is nothing extra to install.
Echoes of that old pain linger: in Windows 11, HEVC video requires buying a separate extension in the Microsoft Store.
The appetite of VLC sometimes borders on absurd. The player plays chiptune and tracker music from the Commodore Amiga without asking questions, partially plays damaged files, and opens DVDs with a foreign region code. Some people still keep VLC around only for the Java menus in Blu-ray rips. But the player never became perfect. Artifacts when seeking have gone unfixed for years, and 360-degree video works properly only if the file contains special metadata.
While VLC remained the symbol of "just works," its competitors pulled ahead in image quality and fine-tuning. These are the players mentioned most often:
mpv. A minimalist player with a text-based config, up-to-date FFmpeg versions, and advanced rendering. It correctly converts HDR to SDR on regular monitors, while VLC often produces a washed-out gray picture in such cases.
MPC-HC. The original project was abandoned in 2017, but an active fork by developer clsid2 gets regular updates and ships with K-Lite. Paired with the madVR renderer, it remains a favorite among OLED TV owners, and its own renderer even supports Dolby Vision.
MPC-BE. A parallel branch of the same family with its own set of features.
PotPlayer. A Korean player with extremely deep settings. It can run Nvidia RTX Video Super Resolution and RTX HDR at the same time, and it can show two subtitle tracks at once, which saves movies with dialogue in a third language.
Those in the know have long been watching movies in mpv and PotPlayer.
