> On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised.
It's praised because it "plays everything."
It developed this reputation in an era when even average people were installing numerous DirectShow "codec packs" (often of dubious pedigree) in an often futile effort to "play that thing I just downloaded" from the P2P file sharing network du jour.
For a number of reasons, installing a bunch of these codec packs would often leave video playback broken globally[1]. Since VLC is cross-platform, it does not use DirectShow, and would "fix" a system that had been "broken" by other software.
[1]: most of these issues could be fixed with the GraphEdit utility, which offered a simple but powerful UI for configuring and testing every codec in the system. GraphEdit should have been included with Windows, and be something you could invoke from within Control Panel.
Literally every FFMPEG-based player will play whatever you throw at it. While it may be an advantage over basic bith OS-provided players it hasn't been a unique selling point for VLC for a long long time.
It's praised because it "plays everything."
It developed this reputation in an era when even average people were installing numerous DirectShow "codec packs" (often of dubious pedigree) in an often futile effort to "play that thing I just downloaded" from the P2P file sharing network du jour.
For a number of reasons, installing a bunch of these codec packs would often leave video playback broken globally[1]. Since VLC is cross-platform, it does not use DirectShow, and would "fix" a system that had been "broken" by other software.
[1]: most of these issues could be fixed with the GraphEdit utility, which offered a simple but powerful UI for configuring and testing every codec in the system. GraphEdit should have been included with Windows, and be something you could invoke from within Control Panel.