I Love Ubuntu Mate...I Dislike VLC Media Player

Thoughts & Feedback
#1

I love Ubuntu Mate 16.04. It is just right for my old HP Mini 210 4000. I customized a lot of the look of my desktop and login start-up. And I installed a lot of apps from the repositories and most of it run excellently. And the best part is it took just 15 GB from my partitioned 53GB just for ubuntu. I know its tiny, but at first, I only installed this lovely Linux distro just to test it but now I am seriously thinking of using it for a long time.

One thing about this OS pre-installed app called VLC media player. I’ve been using it since 2004 because it loads up any video format without a hitch. But a couple of years now, I am really exasperated with this app. It lags when it plays some video formats especially MKV files, most times I only hear the audio no video. At other times I only see gray areas on the screen. In my Windows OS I recently shifted from VLC to Media Player Classic because it played all my videos compared to this VLC. Nowadays, VLC Media Player sucks big time for me. I am really looking forward when Media Player Classic developers will make a Linux version of their app so I can get rid of VLC once and for all.

1 Like
#2

You can also try SMPlayer with mpv. SMPlayer is the frontend for the latter. Ignore the default skin that will probably give you nightmares and go to settings to configure the player to your liking. It’s wonderful, consumes less resources and plays everything.

As for VLC, it may take a little while longer for some distro maintainers to feel comfortable about taking it out of their default media player. The growing complaints of VLC users will eventually lead to it losing ground to other solutions, if the videolan team keeps down this path. For now however it remains the most used.

8 Likes
#3

@marfig,

Hello. I did try SMPlayer but I found it more or less having the same issues as VLC Media Player. I had a number of MKV files that also lags and in some cases the video freezes but the audio keeps on playing. Before when MKV files were beginning to get popular I used Media Player Classic and VLC because they were the only ones reliable enough to play any format including MKV. I dropped MPC in favor of VLC because I didn’t like to interface of the old Win 98 Media player and MPC was exactly its clone. Just recently, due to my unbridled chagrin that I could not play all the MKV files which I borrowed frm a friend – I remembered MPC. So I surfed the Net and was surprised that it still exists. So I installed it in my Win7 and was so happy with the result that it played all my mkv and other video formats files.

So now I play videos on my Windows but do the rest of computing jobs in Linux which is sad because I don’t like Windows at all. Like I would like to stop using it forever–but reality is there are apps which runs better in Windows than Linux. Well we can’t have everything in one place but I do hope that someday I will solely be a Linux user. God bless everyone.

#4

Hi!
That is strange … I set smplayer as default and is able to read any files here.
Smplayer as many others can look the way you like. Just go to option >preferences > and i guess in english should be " interfaces" ? something about “look” anyway, then you change the “body”
You even can try others players such as “Totem” (gnome-video)

I understand this for playing games but for videos ? Maybe, this belongs to restricted formats that are not installed ?
Maybe take a look about ubuntu-restricted-extras packages from “> welcome” > codecs
or
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

#5

@Tristan_VILLERS

Hi.

Yep playing videos in Windows and not in Linux does sound a bit strange since only games are kinda the strong point of using Windows but unfortunately before using ubuntu Mate 16.04 I was already playing around (not doing heavy customization) with other Linux distros like Ubuntu 12.04(?), OpenSuse 11, Fedora 8, Linux Lite 2.8 and 3 (this is the OS of my wife’s netbook), AntiX 16, LXLE,PC-BSD 8, Puppy Linux, MacPup and Lubuntu. All of these had pre-installed media players and they didn’t play MKV files as smoothly and I had to install VLC then because – well, at least VLC played SOME of my mkv files a bit better than the pre-installed.

But I will give SMPlayer another go. I maybe was a bit to hasty dismissing SMPlayer when I didn’t do any tweaking with it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts @Tristan_VILLERS.

#6

Hey @rex_everett_Tibus - I feel ya on VLC. It was my go-to on Windows for many, many years. When I transitioned to Linux back in 2015, I continued using it because of it’s cross-platform maturity. But as I continued to trek down the Linux rabbit hole, I discovered MPV. It is a fork of mplayer2 and MPlayer. I have found it to be an absolute beast on any multimedia I throw at it. It just works and it’s incredibly lightweight on resources and hard drive footprint. The UI is minimal which I just love. It gets out of the way so you can focus on the content. And, it’s just about the most configurable piece of software I’ve ever come across. It’s at http://mpv.io if you want to read up on it. I can’t recall if it’s in the Ubuntu repositories.

2 Likes
#7

@mekevinb and @Tristan_VILLERS

Guys, I installed your suggested apps (SMPlayer and MPV player). Both installed ok no problem there. But…yes there are buts. Here is my take on both apps.

SMPlayer:
I did like its looks it was easy to control since there were menu and toolbars where I can see them clearly. My problem is when I wanted to change the aspect ratio of the screen of the movie, no matter how many time I toggle from 16:9 to 16:10 it didn’t make any difffernce the screen was small. Unlike in VLC when you toggle aspect ratio to 16:9 it fills up the whole screen.

And then some mkv files, particularly the ones i borrowed (HDTV 720px265 ACC) still lags, I mean the video was not synching right with the audio. It was ok with the other video formats though but MPC had no problem playing all my MKV files.

MPV Player:
I love its simplicity. But I think its too simple for my taste but it did play the troublesome MKV files, not quite smoothly at first when i plaay the video but after a few seconds it was smooth-sailing. Like I said too simple, I don’t know how to control or toggle or disable anything because there is NO menu bar and if I right click the screen no menu nothing. and I literally was scratching my head trying to figure things out.

And the video, can’t change the aspect ratio to 16:9 because I don’t know how.

So that’s my take fellas, if you have some suggestions to make things right kindly tell me. Thank you both.

#8

@rex_everett_Tibus I hear ya buddy. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I think if you can take some time to read over how MPV uses its configuration file, you will quickly learn how powerful one text file can be.

https://mpv.io/manual/stable/

The MPV documentation has everything from on-screen controls to keyboard shortcuts for all the playback controls. If you use CTRL-F in your browser on that page above you’ll find just about anythingyou need to setup the perfect MPV instance from the configuration file. There’s even commands to adjust aspect ratio on the fly. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#9

[quote=“rex_everett_Tibus, post:1, topic:12925”]Nowadays, VLC Media Player sucks big time for me.[/quote]For the time being, it still remains my personal go-to media player. For various reasons. Anyhow, I know exactly what you mean, I ran into similar issues with VLC and I found that tweaking its configuration does help. So, if you’re still stuck with VLC while waiting for something better to come along, start by disabling Hardware Accelerated Decoding in its configuration.

1 Like
#10

You are meant to use SMPlayer with mpv. You will be watching videos through the mpv player inside SMPlayer.
If I recall correctly, SMPlayer defaults to mplayer after installation, not mpv. Even if mpv is already installed when you install SMPlayer.

So, on SMPlayer, go to Options->Preferences. On the General pane, make sure you are on the General tab and set Multimedia Engine to Other. Next type /usr/bin/mpv on the textbox to the right. (Initially I had trouble using the standard mpv option instead of Other. This may not be the case with you. So, to be sure, this is what I have done ever since.)

If for some reason you need to pass command line options on to mpv, then you do it on the Advanced pane.

As for changing video aspect ratio, on SMPlayer after you do the above, you can simply use the video menu and it will instruct mpv to do its thing.

7 Likes
#11

@marfig

Yes marfig, you got the right solution. Changing the multimedia-engine from mplayer to mpv did the trick. Now I can play ALL my videos. SMPlayer/MPV rocks, man!

@1Q7FE6zp, @mekevinb
thanks for your comments I really appreciated it.

Thank you all guys! Ubuntu MATE rocks! Linux Forever hehe!

Now let me say goodbye to VLC Media player. Goodbye VLC, thanks for all the fun you have given me all these years. I hope that you will fix the issues so that your app will be useful again.

4 Likes
#12

@rex_everett_Tibus You are quite welcome! MPV does rock!

1 Like
#13

If VLC lags, it probably isn’t the program, but the low-power-PC, or the CODEC.
“HP MINI”? This sounds like it doesn’t have much compute power, so any MP4/MPV video encoded at H265 will pixellate and lag. Even some H264 MPVs also do this.
But then, it may be the choice of this particular CODEC used by VLC in Mate Linux. I would guess that your Windows video program is running on a more powerful computer.
(Windows needs more power!) :grinning:
Try installing VLC in the Windows PC and watch it fly!
In Windows, go to http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ and follow their simple instructions for DLing VLC in Windows. I bet you’ll prefer it to the std Win video player! :wink:

2 Likes
#14

hello :slight_smile:

if it is my computer cpu, yes hp mini is old has an Atom processor I don’t knowthe exact version. so VLC is for powerful CPUs nowadays? well, if that’s the case the more I am not going to use it no more. i have 2 OS in hpmini and yeah VLC isn’t better in my Windows 7 but Media Player Classic does a great job where VLC suck. so yeah I guess today’s VLC is for newer CPUs so good luck to them.

#15

[quote=“rex_everett_Tibus, post:14, topic:12925”]so VLC is for powerful CPUs nowadays?[/quote]Not really but it’s good you have options available to you. Good luck with those.

1 Like
#16

I’ll stick to SMPlayer and MPV for now, It does what I needed done :slight_smile:

1 Like
#17

Thanks for good job. Your operating system is comfortable and stable. But VLCplayer is very uncomfortable. It would be better if there was a Totem based on the MPlaer engine or Xine. And in the rest, very good system.

1 Like