VLC Media Player
 

Installed it specifically to capture some screenshots of a specific movie I have on DVD, unfortuately the one thing it refuses to do is play THAT particular DVD.

I also thought it might be used to capture YouTube videos, but I couldn't make it work within 10-15 minutes of trying that, and that's about all the time I was willing to spend.

So far, zero for zero success with this program. Before I summarily uninstall it, can anybody tell me why VLC is supposed to be so great?

I don't have hours of free time to scour message boards for obscure tips on patches I need to install or way/the/hell/far/down/vaguely/titled/parameters to get a thing to do what it is supposed to do. I want something that somebody MADE SURE works before I waste my time. Yeah, open source is cool and everything IF IT ACTUALLY WORKS.

VLC is good as a no frills media player for a huge variety of video file types. Stuff that Windows Media Player doesn't have the codecs for, etc. Never had issues with VLC freezing or stuttering like WMP has for me in the past.

Never heard of it being able to capture YouTube videos. That's usually done easiest through a browser extension. Firefox has a number available, and Chrome should as well. Not sure about IE.

Sure, there are better ways to capture YouTube.

But...playing a DVD??? Umm...I'm not asking for a freakin' miracle.

This is the most basic function of a "media player" --does it PLAY MEDIA?

Should be as easy as hitting Media, then Open Disc, and going from there. VLC was created to streamline the playing of a wide variety of video files. Which makes life easy for those of us who have many different films, home videos, etc. stored on our hard drives in a bunch of different file types. The videos from my digital camera, my dad's videocamera, downloaded movies from the pirate bay, and dvd rips are all different and VLC is a one stop easy way to play just about anything.

I agree, it "should be" that easy. The very next DVD I grabbed at random off the shelf played with no problem (I'm not, as you might suspect, too stupid to figure out how to play a DVD). Unfortunately it is not the DVD I wanted to play, so, no points for that. If it doesn't play the DVD I want to watch, it doesn't work.

No error messages, no trail of breadcrumbs, just . . . nothing. It does literally nothing.

I'm sure you know more about all things audio/visual than I do, since if I recall you do that for a church or something along those lines. Anyway well if it doesn't work right for you then you can always try a reinstall. It and WMP always seem to play off the shelf DVD's just fine for me. If you downloaded a new release beta version that might be the problem, but idk. There might be an DRM issue with the DVD that won't play, I have run into that before. If that's the case then good luck getting it to play on anything besides a traditional player.

Ever see this?

I got a refurbished Dell laptop a couple years ago. It wouldn't play DVD movies. This refurbished laptop had been scrubbed clean of many things, including that licensed codec every computer has so it can play a DVD.

Nothing would play a DVD, until I found VLC. So I like VLC. It will play DVDs when my computer isn't supposed to be playing them.

For Flint: I use Firefox and a little program called Download Helper. It works for getting those vids from an amazing amount of websites. They (the program developers) update it regularly and everything. It even has the capability to use your existing vid converter to automatically convert your vids/clips, it can automatically save and rename them, also.


ETA: I've never encountered the "puter won't play dvd" issue. Knock wood, I guess.

I found that you really need about five different media players since none of them will work for every movie. There are things about VLC that bug me like not always being able to drag the slider to put the movie to the spot you want it.

This is so fucking bad I can't think of the word for that--and it's in my goddamn industry. WTF? Where are the nouns going?