VLC 0.8.4a - Many problems/bugs...

[Rekrul]

I searched and didn't find most of these mentioned.

I have tried several versions of VLC over the past couple of years on two different systems and so far 0.8.4a is the first one that's actually worked for me. However, it is still extremely buggy for me.

First, I only have a couple of DVDs to try it on (yes, I know I'm way behind the times). On Team American, World Police Unrated, if I choose any deinterlacing method other than Blend, VLC crashes when I select from the DVD menus, or if I move the position slider while it's playing. On a cheap Dollar-DVD of the movie Creature, other deinterlacing methods often cause it to show a grey window instead of the image, but this isn't consistent.

Changing options in the preferences often causes an Illegal Operation crash. This seems to happen at random, although I've noticed that checking the box to show advanced options for some of the sections often causes a crash. Also, changing too many of the parameters in the Spectrometer settings will often cause a crash.

Trying to display any visualizations while playing a video is just asking for trouble. If VLC doesn't crash immediately, it bogs down to the point where the audio starts looping and the mouse pointer takes 10-20 seconds to move.

WMV files usually don't play properly. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to which ones work and which ones don't. Some WMV9 files play fine. Some are extremely jittery. One set of files (any one of them) causes VLC to open three additional windows labelled "Software RGB DirectX Output". A WMV8 file displays the image as if it has been run through Edge Detection and Emboss filters in an image processing program. Even the ones that play mostly the way they should seem to stutter. It's like they display 2 frames forward and then 1 frame back.

Pressing 'I' in fullscreen mode brings up a blank copy of the VLC window complete with a big blank video area, which covers a large portion of the screen. Checking the option in the prefs to show the interface does nothing. I checked it, saved it, then opened a file, switched to fullscreen, moved the pointer to the top of the screen and nothing happened.

When I first installed it (using the EXE) it would open most files instantly. Now, the main video file I used for testing causes it to go into limbo for the first 10-20 seconds. There is no picture or sound and the controls don't respond. Then the picture appears and the audio starts playing, already 10-20 seconds into the file. If I stop/start it, everything is normal. Also, if I close VLC and immediately re-run it and load the same file it works fine, but the first time I open it after VLC hasn't been used in a while starts with a big pause upon loading the file.

And yes, I have tried using the reset menu item. It didn't make any difference.

My system;

P4 1.8Ghz, Windows 98SE, DirectX9c, 512MB RAM, GeForce 4 MX440, Intel Soundmax onboard sound.

[DJ]

I agree that VLC could and should be more consistent in the way it performs.

Some of the things you mention are more user related. IE having a working knowledge of VLC. Perhaps better documentation would help.

VLC is an unusual program simply for the shier number of things you can do with it. Yes, sometimes getting it to do the things you want it to do can be a pain and it crashes.

But you must remember that this is a free program. People have literaly put hundreds of hours in development for just sections of this program. If a person has contributed or worked on plugin X, it's sort of his/her responsibility to monitor what others may do to it, which means following all of VLC development, including all changelogs - quite an undertaking.

The developers try to keep track of everything and provide updates, changes and or fixes as they are necessary. You might have a look at the to do list or browse the known bugs list.

All the time spent here is donated for the benefit of the end user in the belief that it will make VLC a better tool.

This is the ethic of free open source software. VLC represents one of the largest most complex pieces of cross platform, open source software in existence today. It is an amazing tool, it can also be a pain at times.

Seems you can either complain or rejoice over this. But you can always obtain the source code and thus change the things you don't like and make it better. If you share you changes, the developers most likely will incorporate it into the next version.

[Rekrul]

The problem is that while VLC may do a large number of things, it doesn't do any of them particularly well, at least in my experience.

The WMV support is seriously broken, the DVD support is kind of hit or miss, just toggling options in the prefs can cause it to crash and the DivX/mpeg4 support doesn't seem noticably better than the actual codecs.

I've known about VLC for a while now. I think the earliest version I tried was 0.5.3 on my old 233Mhz system with a Voodoo1 graphics card. It never worked for me. I tried a few versions on that system and never got any of them to work properly. My next system was an 800Mhz Athlon system with a TNT2 card (which I only used for a few months because it had a bad habit of crashing at random) and I tried a couple versions of VLC on that one too. None of them worked. I've been using this system for a year or two now and this is probably the third version of VLC I've tried on it, and the first one that actually works. I think the last one was 0.8.2, which played the video, but the audio was horribly distorted.

Past releases of Media Player Classic also gave me problems, but the last few have been pretty good. In fact, although there are still a couple bugs left in it, I can't recall the last couple versions ever crashing on me, unlike VLC which seems to crash about every third time I change something in the prefs.

I'm really not trying to belittle VLC and I appreciate that a lot of work went into it, but I have to wonder what good all the features are when the program itself is so unreliable.