Shitting on Windows built-in media player if you didn't know

aplay: "Hey kid... wanna listen to the sound the Linux kernel makes when you push it through the sound card?"

why is that valuable though
- Because you can listen to the sound the Linux kernel makes when you push it through the sound card?
- Why does it need value? Living to extract value and nothing else is toxic to your body mind and soul.
- aplay doesn't bitch about encodings or signatures or checksums or something not looking like a media file. If you do something stupid (like pipe an executable file into it), it won't tell you to go back to the child-safe play pen, it will pass the data to ALSA and do its best to render it as sound.
  The Windows mind can't comprehend the importance of the freedom to fuck around. But, looking at your comment history, you're more of a professional contrarian and won't even try to do that.
- why is it not
- That’s what the meme is praising VLC for

"Oh no, I can't play this modern video file using a codec that's literally been around for more than 10 years unless you pay me $0.99 for a codec pack..."

Every single time I forget to change it and I want to play an h265 file from my phone.

Enshitification is what is happening, the original windows video player was way more capable than this modern garbage.
- sometimes i forget the "new and improved" version exists, i switched my default to the old media player years ago
- It's also partly the patent holders for H.265.
  H.264 had a license fee, but it wasn't ridiculous. It was jacked up for 265, to the point that a lot of software houses no longer bundle the 265 decoder license.
  It annoys me too: Security cameras often use turnkey H.265 encoding packages rather than more open codecs, which makes dealing with the files using FOSS more of a pita.
- I think this part actually isn't enshittification. I think this is being legally cautious, as you probably should be when you're Microsoft.
VLC bypasses this by being based in a country that doesn’t recognize the software patent

From Wikipedia:
The VideoLAN software originated as a French academic project in 1996. VLC used to stand for "VideoLAN Chad" when VLC was a chad from the VideoLAN project. Since VLC is no longer merely a chad, that initialism no longer applies.

If something doesn't open in VLC, you can usually safely assume the file is corrupt lol

Just because VLC plays a file doesn't mean that the file isn't corrupted.
If something doesn't open in VLC...then you should probably try it in Media Player Classic, and if that doesn't work then the file is totally fucked.
- Or mpv, the real chad.
I've had corrupted files play in VLC.
After a while it crashed VLC because of the corruption, but reopening the file and skipping pas the corruption worked, lol.
- Bot
- I, too, would like to know when will you Brazilians stop letting Bolsonaro get away with using Windows Media Player?
- What would this sound like played in aplay?
- What the fuck did you just say about me, you little shit? I'll have you know that I...
- sir this is a Wendy's drive thru

Windows Sound Recorder used to open literally anything - text documents, pdfs, images, executables, DLLs, and attempt to play them as audio. Photoshop files make especially interesting noises through it. I used to use it for samples. Got some great noisy stuff that way.

Got any fun clips to share?
- I have the album I made with them! Some of the tracks are solely composed of Sound Recorder playing non-audio files, but every track contains samples created that way. The quality isn't the best, this is a CD rip because I've long since lost the original files, but since it's experimental industrial noise, the audio quality doesn't hurt much I guess.
  https://soundcloud.com/themachinal/sets/the-machinal-disturbance
I used to do this with audacity. It's fun to open an image, and apply some audio filters to it, then export it. Makes for some interesting photo fuckery results.
- Oh, I didn't know audacity would do it. Well I know how I'm wasting time at work the rest of this week...
I cant remember the command now, but there was one on linux which let you play anything, I remember /usr/bin/ls sounded nice.
- aplay is pretty decent
  I definitely have pointed it at /dev/random
I used to write dark ambient and noise records as a hobby. I got some of my best samples from that method.

Windows media asks you to pay Microsoft for a decoding license if you try to play an HDR video.

I think it does it for hvec too
- Looks like your right, included by default:
  MPEG-4, H.264, H.263, VC-1, Windows Media Video (WMV), DV, VP8, Motion JPEG
  Then they have add-ons in the store, the HEVC I believe said was a dollar to use on 10 devices with that account. that's terrible

I forgot that VLC wasn't standard. 😂 I looked at the other icon and thought "wait what's that?"

To watch this new type of hvec media you need this free codec.

Wait did we say free i mean

~~There is a paid version next to the free one.~~

~~You can pay here, that other one is for retail and industry please dont use it, only use the paid one.~~

Your hardware doesn't support the free codec according to the error message we gave it. Hand over your money to install this identical approved one please.

I still find it strange that windows media player classic consistently works better than every new media player they've introduced since. It seems like if you make OS's you cannot simultaneously make a good media player, eg. Quicktime/itunes/wmp/groove

TBF iTunes is a terrible player but made the shit loads of money so I guess they achieved what they set out to do.
And I would argue iTunes is the reason for newer media player versions being shit since of course MS saw that there was money to be made and tried to do the same.
- Very true, unfortunately if something makes money other companies will line up to copycat even if the real product is licensing they don't have full access to.
It works better because everything else is geared towards maximum monetization to the direct detriment of the user and the UX. Those alternatives suck simply because "working better" on its own is financially worthless to those selling this shit.
Everything that Microsoft has tried to improve has ultimately gotten worse. I recently installed Windows 2000 in a VM to install a similarly old game and it was kinda jarring how well it just worked and how much it didn't suck compared to a fresh install of Windows 10 or Windows 11. Obviously there were some very dated concepts especially related to networking (it clearly was designed for a world where a lot of people only plug their computer into a phone line for dial-up, or just directly place their desktop on the internet with a public IP, and letting it listen to a DHCP server and connect to an existing network was weirdly obscured)
iTunes 1.0 was amazing. It didn't turn to shit until they tried to make it an everything-app.

I absolutely love VLC

Thanks for mentioning the name because I honestly didn't know what software the second icon was supposed to be.

I thought it was mpv first
Really? The classic hombre sunset graphic didn't clearly say this is a Microsoft Windows product? /s

Usually MPV first then VLC if I have some specific need, but that's me I guess.

MPV for movies, VLC for anything else.
- Share why you use mpv specifically for movies?
I don’t know about windows, but on linux if you don’t need and of VLC’s advanced features, MPV is significantly faster, takes nearly half the cpu on my setup for the same quality.

For real though. I have yet to find a file VLC can't play. I have some old 8-bit .au files that play perfect. It even supports really obscure proprietary codecs from 20 years ago.

VLC is the only android app I've found that still supports tracker MODs, absolutely required for my music listening.

If I'm not mistaken the people behind Videolan also did x264 which is a pretty major library used to encode h.264.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X264

It's a lesser known project from videolan but with a rather broad use online.

They also got h265 and Hevc libraries aswell
And couldn't crack/play DVD without them.

That's the logo for a multi-billion dollar corporation's built-in media player for their flagship OS? It looks like one of my side projects.

That logo paid for some kids house.

I find VLC has a hard time playing .GIF files

And it stutters when playing .ts files.
- Typescript?
For me i tried playing a Bad apple video in 4K it struggled
- 4k gif? Oh please, be serious.

I miss the windows XP media player that had the visualizers for music and skins and shit.

VLC is okay..but it doesnt autopopulate my CD names and tracks.

Let me recommend Strawberry Music Player. It is multi-platform, open source, has a nice library organization system and links to Musicbrainz for identification.
- For some reason it always puts ampersands in the text on the left side, for me anyways. Like, it'll say "Alb&ums" and stuff like that.

Everything is a .wav, you just lack the frequency hearing range.

Back when /dev/dsp existed, you could pipe any data to it, and it'd treat it like PCM data. Wav files sounded like they were supposed to. Everything else sounded like... well, also like they're supposed to, i guess.

Had to install VLC last week because the Windows player didn't have the codec to play a video someone sent me from their smartphone. Seems like a pretty common use case to not have figured out..

They make you pay for some codecs, it might have been that.
- It was and fuck that if they can't even include the most basic ones

mpv: those files have some exotic image format, they're not videos. Here is your dia show with your custom upscaling shaders.

mpv

you seem like a cool person :)

I think WinXP was the last time i used the Win Media Player 😞

Playing a video in the background on loop with wmp prevents your desktop from locking or showing you as away
- Never knew that one.

You can rawdog the libavcodec far more robustly via ffplay, vlc def struggles on a decent amount of media still.

remember mplayer2? That was a great built-in Mediaplayer. wmplayer was okay-ish, then after that it only went downhill.

Yea that was 98/ME era right? The one with the crazy skins lmao
- 2000/xp also had still mplayer2 even though MS wanted to promote wmplayer (which was first shipped with Me)
  and yeah the skins for wmplayer were absolutely crazy. But from back then my favourite freeform player was Sonique.
- You just unlocked a memory. My grandparents bought us a computer that had ME installed in 2001. It was a nightmare.

I could never get VLC to player videos without weird video issues.

First time I hear of someone having problems opening whatever format in vlc. I mean if there’s a program that reads each an everyone of them it’s VLC
- Oh it opens them. Reliable playback is something else entirely.
Are you on linux and are describing this issue where VLC cannot be reopened after exiting without logging out and logging back in?
- Windows. And nah it’s more like while playing any given video file there will be moments where it looks as if the video is corrupted or something. Strange video artifacts that affect the entire viewport. The issue isn’t actually in the file, as the spots are random upon playback. These were all h.264 mkv files I had trouble with so maybe the issue was with that codec but at the same time that’s the most common codec used for encoding entertainment media for playback. Moving those files over to an iPhone and playing them with infuse worked flawlessly.

Blu-Ray is kind of a pain to deal with, but that's more of a Blu-Ray problem than a VLC problem I guess.

that's more of a ~~Blu-Ray~~ DRM problem
Fixed that for you, and fuck DRM.
Correct, plus the fact that you can inject libraries for dealing with Blu-ray DRM into VLC is yet another reason why VLC is awesome.

who the hell still uses windows media player? I use windows and everyone else I know who uses windows never opens WMP. We all have VLC for videos, but for the movies that we all totally pay for we use Kodi/XBMC or jellyfin

Media Player Classic enjoyer here 👌
(Though for some very specific use cases I still have VLC installed and sometimes use it)
- I just use Media Player Classic to rip CDs the handful of times a year I get a new CD and just want to quickly rip it without running to a different computer
Mpc is significantly better than VLC. Occasionally I need VLC to play a file but we're now talking every 1-2 years. VLCs UI is baaad.
- VLC's UI on windows hasn't changed much in over 10 years now. It definitely would benefit from a search function to quickly find certain settings to fine tune your expirience with it. But I sandbox all of my software, so no cache files or data it writes onto the drive I make it write to ever sticks around for very long.
  Any time I need to open a link from a friend I copypaste the link into a sandboxed browser that doesn't have access to any of the shit going on in the other sandboxes instead of opening it rawdog into that same sandbox.

wmp still exists, but microsoft has neglected it for years--pushing the 'app' shit instead.

on win11, you should find 'windows media player legacy' hiding in 'windows tools'.

Since the time of internet I've used Winamp for music, MPC and VLC for videos, Irfanview for images. Now I use Kodi for movies and series, Foobar2000 for music, Irfanview for images and MPC for other videos. Fuck streaming services.

I liked the old built in media player in Windows 7...

Yeah me too for the simplicity. THe “new” one is shit

You know VLC is soo good even your school used it.

No, that's because it's free.
- One of the reasons ig

KODI

IIRC you have to pay for a certain media format. 1984