If you run Windows, using Media Player Classic - Home Cinema with madVR[1] will give you much, much better quality.
VLC handles some large video files - or file types - very poorly in my experience, too.
VLC is great, because it has an excellent standard of video quality, and it's easy as heck to use and set up for others, but for people who really care about optimal playback, it isn't really the best choice.
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I think the main allure of VLC used to be that the tortuous labour of finding and installing codecs was suddenly moot. Using MPC-HC requires a lot of painstaking effort, especially once a codec stops working all of a sudden for some reason.
VLC is very Apple-esque in how it does everything for me and gives me an ease of mind, but with no guarantee that I will get the highest quality. And MPC-HC is very Windows-esque in how it requires a bunch of tweaking and pulling out hairs, which will eventually result in superior quality, but all in all perhaps an inferior experience and enjoyment, because it takes jumping through so many hoops to just get there.
Moving on from VLC to MPC-HC is very much like moving on from using primes in typography to curly quotes; it might be more aesthetically pleasing, but most of all, you kinda wish you could just unsee the difference and quit pursuing the folly of proper typography. These days, I can hardly stand reading books with justification, which unfortunately is quite a large majority of them.
It's a blessing and a curse, and I'd properly just recommend most people to find a video player similar to VLC in how easy it is to use, all while providing superior video quality and performance.
If you're watching a movie or TV show, I recommend that you watch it on Netflix or Blu-ray, if the option is available to you. That's what I do. :)
VLC struggles with DVD playback. In fact most DVDs this year will simply not play at all in VLC due to the menus causing it to crash.
Some random examples: Thor, The Dictator, The Avengers Assemble, (essentially everything published by "Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment", and many things published by "Paramount Home Entertainment")
Now one might say to "just disable menus!" but unfortunately that is ineffective as they have put a bunch of fake tracks on the disc which cause you to bounce around the movie out-of-order.
Playback works fine on Windows Media Player, PowerDVD, and most hardware players. Only VLC and the DVD extraction software seem to crash. Unfortunately there are likely things in the spec' which allow this.
The audio drivers for my on-board soundcard are shit.
I'm using Arch Linux and PulseAudio.
VLC and Skype (but only these two) exhibit the problem of a crackling echo when playing sound which sometimes fixes itself. Since there's only two applications that exhibit this problem and
1) I don't care about sound quality on Skype
2) mplayer2 handles everything perfectly
3) My hardware is a crap on-board chip that's 5 years old and not made any more
I haven't been interested in pursuing a fix for this.
Also, mplayer2 does better upscaling with -vo gl:yuv=4:lscale=5:cscale=5
Subtitle rendering (with xy-vsfilter/vsfilter in general and newer versions of libass).
High-quality video rendering (madVR).
I'm not at home right now so I can't reliably confirm if certain long-time issues still remain in the latest version (2.0.4), but VLC has also for the longest time had issues with pause not being completely instant (despite claiming so), the audio glitching slightly when pausing/unpausing, and seeking in H.264 video producing a garbled mess (this at least has gotten better with over time). Matroska ordered chapters support has also been shoddy for a very long time. Subtitle rendering was also absolutely hideous before they started using libass in version 1.0 (IIRC), at which point softsubs had already been in use for quite a long while. As I mentioned, VLC's development in terms of high quality playback has mostly been about playing catch-up with the better players, at worst being years behind them.
It most certainly does when we're talking about complex ASS subtitles.
>madVR is very CPU heavy
Actually, it's more GPU-heavy. And while it's only available for Windows, it doesn't change the fact that it's basically the best video renderer out there.
Anyway, I'm certainly going to give VLC 2.0.4 a spin with some of my files when I get home in a couple hours. If some of these issues have finally been fixed, then good for VLC, but again, it sure took them a while to do so in comparison to other players.
