Are there a real good open source video player?

11 réponses [Dernière contribution]
jules_verne
Hors ligne
A rejoint: 01/02/2017

I love VLC. I think it's marvelous. Although recently I've been feeling the desire watch videos with a really high quality. VLC doesn't works properly when playing a high quality video. It has saturation problems, sometimes it even glitch and clearly do not reproduce the full quality of the video. Which player could be a good alternative for watching this highly quality medias?

onpon4
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A rejoint: 05/30/2012

I can't say I understand what you're talking about when you say "saturation problems". Any video player will output the same video file the same way, unless one intentionally makes alterations. Perhaps you're used to the alterations your TV makes? If that's the case, VLC does have options to adjust the colors.

As for the other thing, that sounds like something that sometimes happens when you start a video in the middle. It's because of how video compression works, not a bug in the video player.

As far as I know, VLC is the best video player period. Even Windows users commonly install and use it. But GNOME Videos (Totem) is pretty good, too.

Magic Banana

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I am a translator!

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A rejoint: 07/24/2010

Any video player will output the same video file the same way

It is not quite true. Well, it is not the video player that makes differences but the codec. E.g., VLC uses their own x264 library to decode H264 videos and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X264#Capabilities tells:

x264 contains some psychovisual enhancements which aim to increase the subjective video quality of the encoded video.

  • Adaptive quantisation in two modes using VAQ. The second mode, a later addition, adapts the strength per frame in an attempt to improve the quality.
  • Psychovisual Rate–distortion optimization which attempts to maintain a similar complexity. The complexity is measured using a combination of SSD and SATD.
  • Macroblock-tree rate control which controls the quality by tracking how often parts of the frame are used for predicting future frames.

x264 is often said to be the best H264 codec.

jules_verne
Hors ligne
A rejoint: 01/02/2017

Well, when playing something with VLC the image does look quite unregulated. Somewhat very alike to the "Sport mode", "Cinema mode" and so on, that you find in any TV.

By glitch I mean something very similar tho the image available here: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=56287.

It's not related to the same matter pointed there although. Nor is so intense.

onpon4
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A rejoint: 05/30/2012

> By glitch I mean something very similar tho the image available here: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=56287.

Yeah, that's just because of how video compression works. It occurs when you start reading the video in the middle of it rather than at the beginning. One of the ways video codecs save space is to not repeat pixels that are found earlier in the video, so if you don't have those pixels, you'll see a glitchy mess for a few seconds until they're provided again later on.

jules_verne
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A rejoint: 01/02/2017

Does it configure itself as a problem? Your explanation had me thinking it isn't but a mere accident.

onpon4
Hors ligne
A rejoint: 05/30/2012

I don't think you understand: it's not actually a problem or a glitch or anything like that, just a consequence of clever compression techniques, at least if I've correctly identified what you're experiencing.

Suppose the picture looks like this:

00000
01010
01111
01100
11111

And then the picture changes to this:

00000
00000
10001
00011
00011

The compression algorithm will not store the entire second frame, but just the parts that are different. So, what it stores might look something like this, with "-" representing unchanged areas:

-----
-0-0-
1000-
-1100
000--

So if you start playing back the video on that second frame, or skip to it, without first viewing the first frame, all those dashes will be whatever junk was last displayed by the video player, most likely, because it's impossible to tell what should be there without checking the first frame.

This is actually a huge simplification of what's going on, for the record, and it also varies depending on what specific video codec is being used, but it's basically why it happens.

jules_verne
Hors ligne
A rejoint: 01/02/2017

Oh I see it now.
Thank you very much for the explanation.

Peter Boughton
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A rejoint: 01/24/2017

If VLC has problems which you can demonstrate to be a fault in VLC (and not the video itself and/or your machine) then raise an issue in the VLC bug tracker.

If you've already done that, reference the ticket in your message so that anyone who wants to suggest alternatives has a chance of knowing whether the same problem exists (i.e. if they share the same codec).

SuperTramp83

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A rejoint: 10/31/2014

I love smplayer, and I also find mplayer faster than mpv. Also, yeah, I see no video "quality" difference, unless like Onpon pointed out one makes alterations.

jules_verne
Hors ligne
A rejoint: 01/02/2017

I'm not a very experienced person when it comes to the subject of image quality. In the past two days I've been testing MPV and indeed it has a better video quality than VLC. I can't point exactly how but I can detect it quite clearly.
I think I might need to test a little more and even test VLC against MPV with some changed configurations.

Allanitomwesh
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A rejoint: 10/24/2015

SMPlayer with mpv as backend