VLC versus non-free movie players

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Khaydarin

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I've got VLC (which is free, of course), but I was thinking about getting a better program to play my ripped DVDs. Is a program like the latest PowerDVD or WinDVD really much better than VLC in terms of playback quality and features?
 
Even the free versions of PowerDVD I got with either vid cards or drives work VERY well for DVD playback, and upscaling to full screen (1920x1200 > 1080p) looks phenomenal. I don't use it often, but when I do, it is enjoyable.
 
I have found that VLC, at least for me, has a hard time playing 1080p movies. But, when i play them in powere dvd... its awesome!!!
 
I have found MPlayer (though free like VLC) to be far better than anything I have ever found, including VLC. With the codecs I've installed, I don't think I ever came across a video I couldn't play.
 
What version of VLC? 0.8.6i is the present stable release, but the src release of: vlc-0.9.1 is /really/ good
 
I'm a fan of Media Player Classic Home Cinema and ffdshow. It'll play everything including 1080p x264 perfectly (barring your machine of course).
 
illuminate said:
I have found that VLC, at least for me, has a hard time playing 1080p movies. But, when i play them in powere dvd... its awesome!!!
Click to expand...

Thats cause, and this is pretty much the main reason why VLC sucks, VLC doesn't support hardware acceleration. Really hard to tell with regular DVDs since it's so easy now to do it all in software but for HD material it's just going to struggle.

Other then that you don't really need to shell out lots of cash for Power DVD or Win DVD (which are crappy but still better then VLC). Try out Media Player Classic (free) or Zoomplayer (something like $30) is awesome (use it myself). Shit, even WMP 11 is better then VLC....

What matters most, really, is getting your codecs all together. VLC intergrates them so it's something that you didn't really have to deal with (Media Player Classic also includes codecs but you can over-ride them with different ones and they're commonly used codecs too).

http://www.cccp-project.net/
 
ah. Ok, thanks for that.

what is a good one for linux? I've got VLC for just my standard DVD's... but for 1080p.. whats a good one for linux?
 
shoot, I just downloaded VLC the other day but haven't installed it. guess I wont.
Been ripping some DVD's but haven't found a decent player yet. What additional specific codecs do you need for DVD playback? I like media player classic. I used to have WinDVD but seem to have lost all my install CD's/keys.
 
mcatrage said:
I'm a fan of Media Player Classic Home Cinema and ffdshow. It'll play everything including 1080p x264 perfectly (barring your machine of course).
Click to expand...

What's the difference between MPC Home Cinema and the regular MPC?
 
The author of MPC stopped working on it so it hasn't really been updated in, like, forever. Any new work on MPC is being done by other people which is just what MPC HC is.
 
Media Player Classic is open source software, anyone is welcome to take the source and do whatever they want with it. MPC Home Cinema just leverages aspects of Vista because of the Aero interface to work better... there are some other goodies in there also.
 
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