What's Up With VLC?

[Australis]

I've been using VLC media player for some time, and find it a nifty little device.

But the last couple of versions, 1.1.0 and 1.1.2, have been having problems. They don't shut down properly if you stop a video, though it's usually fine if you let it finish itself. And I opened a vid tonight (which I'd only played on the weekend), and only got a black screen and couldn't pull up the bar across the bottom to stop it.

Have now rolled back to 0.9.9 and it's fine, if a little lighter on the functions..

I've sent them an email, but no reply.

So, anyone else having troubles?

 

[Roger Wilco]

No idea; I'm guessing the problem is probably on your end. I've been using VLC for years (currently 1.05, I don't constantly download the newest version) with much fewer trouble than any other video player. Some codecs used to be annoying on VLC though (.wmv for example).

 

[Brent]

The newer versions, from 1.1.1 onward support GPU acceleration now, meaning it will use your graphics card for accelerating video, especially H.264 video, so make sure you have the latest graphics cards drivers installed also.

 

[Rett Mikhal]

I've found all the new versions to be awful. One of them didn't even use smooth seeking, ie you click to minute 1 and it goes to minute 1 on the nose, instead it just skipped it forward proportional to how far you clicked forward. No one would ever be able to effectively use that to find something.

Plus new versions crash when they use the screen shot function, which is why I keep a back up of an older version for screen shots.

 

[Count Zero]

I've had various troubles with newer versions of it, too. It seems to me that the Windows versions are often released a bit prematurely, now, and thus contain annoying bugs and regressions. It's a shame, really. I've been using VLC for years and always recommended it but now I'm hesitant to do that because most people I know aren't very computer-savvy and wouldn't know what to do about those problems. I had to go back to older versions a few times after the newest release turned out to have bugs that drove me mad. I'm also quite reluctant now to update and I'm still on version 1.0.1, which works fine.

 

[Rowan Sjet]

I'm still on 1.0.5 as well and only stopped myself from downloading the 1.1.2 update recently because of an attempt to curb my downloads. But if new versions are causing problems, I'll just stick with what I've got.

 

[Sparky]

I'm using 1.1.2 and everything is working just fine. As Brent mentioned above VLC now supports hardware gpu acceleration. Maybe this feature is on by default and is incompatible with the cards or drivers you currently have installed.

 

[Australis]

As my PC is a bit older (but quite adequate for my purposes), this is probably true. AS I said, I rolled back to v0.9.9, but I might move up to v1.05, as it seems to have no bugs. Ta for the advice all!

 

[Meredith]

Anything is better than Windows Media Player, usually use WinAmp to play videos.