I get the sense that VLC doesn't really care if something is a valid video file, it's just gonna start playing and see what happens.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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You can shove French fries into a CD drive and vlc will still make it a video
Rallys/Checkers fries? Or Burger King? Because there is a HUGE difference!
Or Wendys?
Or McDonalds?
WHOSE FRIES ARE WE TALKING ABOUT??? I WANT TO WATCH VIDEOS ON FRENCH FRIES!!!!
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Extract the eyes of murder victims and VLC will show their final moments.
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I'm pretty sure it can still do that. Like if you can trick it into playing something that isn't even video, it'll shit out whatever it can interpret as video. Which of course will be garbled nonsense, but it did exactly what you asked.
I wish every program was this way. Fuck off with your file format restrictions, I know what Im doing
Audacity does as well and I use it to edit pictures sometimes.
Yes pictures.
You can get some interesting effects from it.
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Which of course will be garbled nonsense, but it did exactly what you asked.
Is it possible that someone took a copy of hitlers book, shoved it into VLC, took the video it spit out, and somehow we got a president from that process? Garbled nonsense. Highly racist. But it did what you asked!
Wait.....does this explain Mark Zuckerberg? They put a piece of cellery, mixed with dog shit, and out comes Mark Zuckerberg who's almost a real boy?
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I recall a few AVIs from the long ago that VLC would throw an error on, something about a format error, and it gave the option to try converting it or try playing as-is. Attempting to convert took forever, and playback was mostly fine, though IIRC you couldn't scrub through the file.
Yeah it absolutely can fix broken avi files! Was a lifesaver back in high-school for me, during that era, avi was every camcorder format (at least that I had).
I always stored it on this 128gb external drive and I swear that drive was cursed, always corrupted my files. Vlc was an easy way to fix them for class.
IIRC that's AVI files that aren't indexed properly. VLC could either build its own index for the file or it could just start playing the file one frame at a time and hope for the best.
That's it! Thanks for the assist lol.
MacOS was telling me "Open this openSUSE ISO in: Balena Etcher, VLC"
what
VLC be like: "it's a disk image is it not?????"
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The creator of VLC just won the European SFS Award "in recognition of his outstanding and lasting contributions to the Free Software movement and his long-term dedication to the VLC project."
Til vlc is older than me
TIL I’m older than you.
sad ffmpeg noises
sad mpv noises
Dont you mean sad libavcodec noises?
VLC, IPlayer, and FFMpeg are interfaces for libavcodec 😀
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Long ago; a non-tech friend saying to another non-tech friend. "you should try it on VLC; it'll play a slice of cucumber" when referring to some obscure video file they had.
I did a CTF once where one of the challenges was forensics on a video file. It had the header ripped off, the entension removed, and was split into chunks that had to be ripped out of a pcap and reassmebled
VLC just played the mangled chunks as-is. It was an unintended cheat code for the challenge
VLC: "I am 4 Parallel Universes ahead of you"
I had it once play a video recorded on an old Motorola razr circa 2004. It was this super obscure file format, that basically only this one phone used, and was never used on any other phone.
VLC didn't care, played it right out of the box without any problems.
It supports an obscure single use, 2004 video format. If aliens come to earth, VLC will be able to play their files too.
And it still supports devices with Android version 4.2 (released on November 13, 2012) and newer. That's a 13 year old release.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.videolan.vlc/
Perfect use of old devices as a media player. It struggles with modern file formats but having modern UI and support this long is epic.
Which is what I did. Had an old 2nd gen Nexus 7 from 2013 which I used as an occasional media player. Finally died back in January, had VLC running on it until its last day!
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Arch split out the h264 decoders from vlc, and its not installed by default, so last time I needed to use it, it didn't work. No idea why they did that.
Most likely patents and licensing.
The packages still exist, you can install them, its just not by default. Their argument for splitting is that they can be updated independently, but that doesnt explain why the h264 plugins aren't just included by default.
useful things are bloat apparently
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Yep, and lately it stopped working altogether. I have since switched to mpv.
Eventually, after I stop using my steam deck I'm going to turn it into a VLC machine. With emulators on it too
Isn't a tablet gonna offer a larger screen for less weight if all you wanna do is watch videos
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I rarely take a laptop on trips anymore (unless its my work one), bt kb+mouse, plug in 4tb ssd (that has built in hdmi out). shitty plywood stand that i made. It's cool.
frankly the shitty cheap used laptops that i get, its probably better performance than any of them if i do need to do anything serious.
VLC is good but I like MPC-HC best. Open source and has a shit load of nerdy ass technical options and great upscaling through madVR.
Me, upon installing Debian KDE distro, and having Dragon Player pop up: I ALREADY INSTALLED VLC, WHAT THE HELL DUDES
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There are other media players?
Back in the day Media Player Classic was this for me. I didn't know enough about codecs but I knew that player seemed to have all of them.
Of course it's now superceded by vlc (and maybe even was at the time) but it's still a fond memory of working out why the video I downloaded only played audio.
the only one that could play the videos i recorded on my BlackBerry 2008-2012
Somehow I'm unable to let VLC play any kind of video on my Arch (actually cachyos) laptop. Whatever the format it says codec is missing even if I installed everything (mpv, totem and others can play them).
(I tried to install vlc-git from aur but then gave up when after 30 minutes was still compiling, I don't have enough patience to wait all that time every time I run yay)
I'm forced to run the flatpak version of VLC for some reason, the only way to make it work
You should read the wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VLC_media_player
Likely you just want vlc-plugins-all
Developed by the French and funded by the EU. I'll download it.
If you're telling us you found Lemmy before vlc that's honestly remarkable.
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