Video Players - Need recommendations

VLC is perfectly decent. It has a few issues with ASS/SSA softsub rendering, and a few bugs here and there, but it's a perfectly decent player. My own favourite codec/player solution is CCCP though. It's made of win.

The reason it is so great is because it is minimal. Some of the other codec packs will give you a full installation of almost every codec under the sun. That can lead to incompatibility problems. The thing is, unless you need to encode video, you can just use ffdshow. It's a playback-only solution, but it can play back most common video codecs. CCCP just consists of ffdshow, Media Player Classic, VSFilter for subtitles, and Haali's Media Splitter for Matroska/Ogg files.

It's better because it is simpler.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by AcerBandit

I'm going to guess that Mplayer sucks at MKV subtitles for Linux and Mac as well so I'd recommend using VLC for those. Unfortunate but that's probably your best option. Although I'm unsure for Linux as I've no experience there.

Actually... that has been the case for some time, you are correct. However in the latest release candidate, the MPlayer team have finally added support for SSA/ASS subtitles, which means that the problems you've been having with MKV files will just disappear. All that said...

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If you use Windows do the smart thing and use Media Player Classic.

I do agree entirely with Acer on this point. All I am attempting to do is to clarify the situation in regards of MPlayer. Since I use XBMC on my XBox, and MPlayer is a core component of XBMC, I like to keep up to date with developments. If I'm watching video on my computer, though, nothing other than MPC will do.

As for the ongoing VLC debate, I simply would have to maintain that it is far from the best player, and equally far from the worst. What it has going for it is simplicity. Some people like that. There's only one thing to install, and no configuration.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by AcerBandit

I downloaded the latest release for their GUI for Windows and subtitles did not work for MKV. I did noticed that the download for the one for Windows without a gui was larger in size but since it has no gui it is unusable to me. Perhaps you could shed some light on the situation.

I'm afraid that I cannot. I'd guess that since this version is still at the release candidate stage, not everything has been finalised yet... sorry to disapoint you Acer. I've been following the discussions on the MPlayer mailing list, but I had planned to wait for the final released build of 1.0 before trying it out.

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GALM-2In any event, now that I have an Intel-based Mac I'm going to see what the SSA/ASS subtitle realm is like w/ specialized builds of mplayer.
From my experiences with 1.0-pre8 (the latest build in Ubuntu's repositories,) it's pretty much the basics right now. It supports no styling whatsoever. All it can really do it read the subtitles and then display them such that they won't overlap each other, which is really just all you need to watch a video.

Yeah, that's what MPlayer has always been able to do. 1.0-pre8 is from before the ASS/SSA patch was committed. It may not be working perfectly in the RC, but once 1.0 comes out, it will be a different story.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.