Sol4 - VLC Media Player Review

VLC Media Player Review

This player started its life as the cross platform client for the videolan open sourced video streaming server solution. Since those days its matured into the versatile and just about unbreakable player we see today, which will play, just about anything you throw at it. That may sound good, but its actually much better, as its open sourced under the GPL license, and is available for a number of operating systems in addition to OSX, such as Linux, Windoze and BSD. All of my experience with this player has been under OSX plus various flavors of Linux with zero issues, as for the other supported platforms, I have no experience with, so cannot comment on how well, or otherwise things function.

Yes I did say play just about anything you throw at it which is a statement that I do not use lightly, especially when talking about any form of media player, but in this case its well justified, as this player, not only claims to support a large selection of video and audio formats, but actually delivers on those claims, which comes as a pleasant surprise.

This updated review covers the use of VLC version 0.72 running under OSX 10.3.4, playing the most common types of digital video, together with freeze frames, where possible to illustrate the type of playback quality you can expect. The types of video covered are; MPEG2, MPEG1, MPEG4 (Xvid, Divx, 3ivx and libavcodec codecs), DV25 (25Mb Digital Video) and even to a limited extent those Microsoft WMV files.

With the upgrade to this new version the most notable change is the addition of support for DTS sound. Now as anyone who had read this the previous version of this review, will note my comments about the beta version of VLC 0.71 and its interesting problem related to DTS support, well as expected when it moved out of beta, all is now good with the world. More on DTS audio after the video tests.

Before moving onto the quality tests, here is a good place to talk about the controller, and general settings available from VLC. So starting with the controller here goes.

As with the Apple, and just about every computer based video player, VLC has its floating controller, which looks like this.

My first impression on seeing this was, that its very simple, without any of the clutter of some of the other players I have used over the years. Seeing its this simple, I was expecting to find something in the configuration to add more buttons functions etc, but no, this is it, which was a surprise. Not that this is a problem as even though it is very simple, it does have all of the most common functions that the vast majority of users will need, in a layout that should allow for its use by even the most technically challenged of users.

Most of the buttons functions need no explanation, with the exception of the two in the lower right corner, which control the playlist and full screen display. Which while on the subject brings me to my first minor gripe. Now I use two displays with my 1GHz G4 Powerbook, the integrated LCD and a Sony 500PS 21" CRT hooked up via the DVI-VGA converter that came with the machine. The problem comes with VLCs full screen playback, which defaults to the LCD only, whereas I would like to display full screen on the external display only. Other than that one, another minor gripe is the habit VLC has of displaying some dialogs behind the video display, when its set to float on top. Yes I know they are minor, and may even be down to limitations of the operating system rather than VLC, but they are to me annoying.

Enough with the gripes, now for the goodies. VLC supports its video playback window floating on top of all others, which is something that the Apple player does not, and something that I could just not live without especially with the problems with the full screen playback. Then comes the ability of VLC to correctly detect the aspect ratio of all the MPEG4 files I have ever played, which makes a pleasant change from xine which from time to time seemed to select what ever aspect it felt like.

Finally before moving onto the quality tests, there is additional functionality that, as far as I am aware is unique to VLC, this is the ability to transcode video to different formats, by setting the source playback to a file and not the screen. I did test this with one of the few WMV files that would play, and managed to produce a MPEG2 file which plays well using VLC, but which nothing else will touch. In the future I am planning to dig into this and some of the other advanced VLC functionality in another article, and will link to it from here when available.

Playing DVDs: Yes this is the one that makes this player a real must have as it not only plays them with support for menus etc, but also movies from any region, regardless of the drive used for playback. Yes that means that you no longer have to risk a firmware upgrade to cure the region madness, even if such a upgrade is available. Now all you need is to install VLC which bypasses the drive, just ignoring the region setting on the disk, and retrieving the encryption keys as it plays the title.

So far I have tested several hundred DVDs from regions, 1,2,3 and 4, all just worked, no need to change regions or anything else, each disk just played. Yes the way things should be, buy a DVD from anywhere and play it, without the pain the movie companies make us go through, all in the name of revenue raising. oops sorry for the minor rant :-)

OK so it plays DVDs without the region madness, but thats the down side? bad quality? high CPU loading? both?

Well yes as expected there is a down side, and no its nothing to do with the video quality, but more to do with the CPU loading, which is higher than Apples DVD player, which should come as no surprise given that VLC is a software only player, and does not support any of the hardware acceleration thats found in most recent video chipsets.

Back in the early days the CPU loading drawback used to be a real problem, and usually meant that if you played a DVD you could do nothing else without frame drops giving choppy playback. Thankfully these days with the newer versions, things are much better, with the difference in CPU loading being in the order of 5% when compared to the Apple player running on my 1GHz G4 Powerbook.

From personal experience, I cannot notice any difference with the responsiveness of OSX during DVD playback, indeed as I am typing this, a DVD is playing in the top corner of the screen, with no signs of any problems. So while the higher CPU loading, is well worth talking about its not a killer, and should not put you off.

Now for the image quality, which is after all the most important aspect of any player, and in this VLC comes out at the top of the heap in every one of my tests, with quality that, put simply is stunning, but don't take my word for it, have a look at this freeze frame, taken at random from one of the Region 2 Farscape boxed sets.

Yes I would have liked to include a freeze frame here from the Apple player, but no for some reason best known to Apple, its just not permitted, none of the screen capture tools I tried would work if the Apple player was running. If anyone knows why its not allowed, please let me know (I could do with a good laugh!), and as expected the error dialog produced by the capture app, is less than full of information.

Video CDs: These things are often referred to as the predecessor to DVDs as they where one of the first digital video distribution methods to actually make it into the market place. Yes even though they are digital, they are no DVD, being encoded using the older and less efficient, MPEG1 compression standard, which allowed for around 60 minutes of, what some call "slightly better than VHS quality" video, to be stored on a standard 74 minute CD.

Now before anyone emails me, yes I know there are multiple different formats that all claim to be "Video CDs", with the two most common being "Video CD" and "Super Video CD", as to the differences, here is not the place to go into that, all you need to understand is that "Super Video CD" is higher resolution and better quality than the older "Video CD" and is not covered here only due to my total lack of any production pressed disks to test with. So on with the tests, this next shot was taken at random from a production pressed music video CD, and is shown actual size.

As for media compatibility, well so far I have not found a single VCD that VLC will not play, and yes the disks tested include; production pressed, home made and some others of interesting origin.

Before moving onto MPEG4 files, its worth talking a little about the overall quality of video CD playback, as some will think that after looking at the above shot, that this format is actually quite good, but no, try increasing the size of the playback, and watch what quality it had, go away real fast. And no this problem is nothing to do with VLC, its just the nature of Video CDs.

MPEG4: This is one of the newer formats around, and offers video quality thats very close to DVD, but with much smaller file sizes and considerably lower bitrates. And yes, as if anyone really needed to be told, VLC plays these things with minimal pain, more on the pain later...

For my MPEG4 tests I used sample videos encoded using the, xvid, divx, 3ivx and libavcodec MPEG4 codecs, from the same DVD source using the same physical hardware, encoded using transcode, with a bitrate of 2000Mbps, and with no edits of any kind.

The above screen shot, was taken from the test clip encoded with the libavcodec MPEG4 codec, and is a good representation of the quality of VLC MPEG4 playback, using any of the codecs tested.

Now before anyone emails, yes I know this is only one screen shot, from one sample video encoded using one of the four codecs tested, and is the only one shown as the differences between all these codecs are so slight as to make screen shots from each of them pointless.

Yes before I forget, its time to talk about the pain mentioned earlier. And yes its pain, but not really a VLC issue, being more a problem with the way that some MPEG4 files are encoded. In all the tests with VLC and these files, not a single one would not play. The same is not true with files sourced from else where, in which some produced excessive artifacts (square blocks), others just refused to play at all, and one even crashed VLC.

While I did not get the time to investigate the exact nature of the problem with these files, but did test them again under Linux using the Linux version of VLC, plus Mplayer and Xine, all of which showed the exact same or even worse problems, which leads me to suspect that what/who ever did the encoding did something odd, or just plain, had a bad day.

This pain is most definitely worth mentioning, but just like the CPU loading problem, is not something that should stop you from using VLC, its just something to be aware of.

Windows Media Files: Being in the UNIX/Mac world, these things are not something I usually deal with, but as they are mainly supported by VLC, they need covering here.

As far as I am aware there are no production WMV files/disks etc available, so my testing has been limited to copyright free downloads from various web sites, which means that I can not really comment on the playback quality as the source encoding is of totally unknown origin.

That said, what I did find, was the majority of these files would not play under VLC, and those that did where at times limited to audio only, very choppy, or had a habit of just stopping dead for no reasons. Yes it sounds bad, and to me it is, but given the closed nature of the format, the unknown origin of the source material, and the current lack of any support for the newer WMV3 codecs, its not really surprising that playback support is not good.

To give you an idea of what is supported, the WMV1/2 codecs are supported via libavcodec which is part of the ffmpeg project, and that only supports WMV1/2 because the developers reverse engineered them. If only Microsoft would actually open up, and publish full details of these codecs, things would be much easier for the non-Windoze world to support these things.

Until they actually do this, or hell freezes over (much more likely!), if you want them under OSX, then I am afraid you are more or less limited to using Microsofts Media Player, with all the risks and baggage that comes with it, just read some of the comments on versiontracker before even thinking about using this thing. You have been warned....

DV25: This is the format used by some digital video cameras, various media converters and other misc video hardware, and is included here I use it for various commercial video services.

To test with this format, I used my DAC-100 analog to digital converter to record a random sample of broadcast TV, which resulted in a file of a little over 10GB (about right for around 50 minutes). As expected VLC played this without any issues, and even played a DV25 file I created totally by accident, which was well over 200GB in size, all without any issues, with a video quality about as good as it gets from this format.

Not bad, right, and much better than you would get from your average VCR recording, but before you make up your mind on the quality, click the above image to see the full sized version.

Now before I forget, comes the new, and most welcome, DTS sound support, plus answers to the important questions, things like "How good is it?" and "How much CPU does it consume?".

When I tested the beta release, yes the DTS support worked, but with one less than wonderful side effect, it broke every other sound tracks. Anyway, now its out of beta, just as expected all is well with the world, I tested many DVDs, plus other sources with all sorts of different sound formats, and all just played without a single failure.

As for hows it sound, well the only real comment that comes to mind is, WOW the sound is crisp, rich, very clean, and yes thats using my powerbooks internal speakers. The DTS difference is very noticeable, which did come as a pleasant surprise as I was not expecting to notice much if anything, especially given the speakers in my Powerbook.

For my DTS playback tests, I used the a number of DVDs from various regions

Moving on. When I first spotted the announcement regarding the DTS support on the videolan site, I was more than a little concerned about the amount of CPU that it would consume, expecting it to be off the planet. Well wrong again, yes while the CPU usage is higher the difference seems to be minimal, having no visible effect on playback quality, nor anything else running while watching a movie.

Note. The DTS decoder used by VLC (and others) has its own page, which while its aimed more at developers still has lots of information, plus links to other sites, on the DTS sound.
And before anyone emails me, yes I did see the BIG FAT WARNING: libdts is still in early development stage so don't expect too much of it, well after my testing its works well, and without eating excessive CPU, which is more than was expected. Expect it to get better and better with newer releases.

Closing Words

I have been using VLC as my player of choice for several years now, and have no plans to change that, given that its getting better with each new release. So in short, if you want high quality video playback, DTS audio, all region DVD support without hacking your drive, and the ability to play just about anything, then you want this player bad....

Highly Recommended.