June 13, 2018

Video Players Gone Bad

On the Sunday after the Australian Grand Prix, in an attempt to figure out just what the hell happened with the virtual safety car (and to watch the race in a form that wasn't ESPN's first try), I yarrrr'd the broadcast.  It was a 5GB file, nothing at all out of the ordinary and actually somewhat smaller than either Kimi No Na Wa or the KanColle film.  No huhu, in other words.  Which is why it came as such a surprise to me when my video player grabbed its throat, choked, and died when I tried to watch it.  And froze, then crashed, Windows.


My software of choice, ZoomPlayer, hasn't worked since.  Oh, it will eventually load any video you throw at it, but only after about five minutes of frozen computer.  Then it stutters until you back the video up, at which point it plays okay.  But god help you if you want to watch the video again immediately because nothing else will.  I've moved to my backup viewer, Media Player Classic which comes with CCCP, but only for viewing.  For the life of me, I cannot make subtitles go away in MPC, which makes screenshotting a little difficult.

So here's my question to y'all: what program do you use to watch stuff?  I used ZoomPlayer for at least a decade, I have no idea what-all is good anymore.  So help me out here, and maybe I'll have more lobsters on the face pictures!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:54 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 249 words, total size 2 kb.

1 I've used VLC Media Player for ages.  It gives you all the control you would want, is open-source, and has never caused me any problems.  Very rarely if you haven't used it in a while it will want to rebuild a cache and that can take a couple of minutes, but even then it's not going to hang your machine, you just have to wait before your video plays.

Posted by: David at June 13, 2018 10:41 PM (JMkaQ)

2 After years as a diehard fan of the CCCP/MPC combo, I finally gave up and went VLC a year or so ago. It Just Works.

Posted by: GreyDuck at June 14, 2018 07:32 AM (rKFiU)

3 Potplayer at potplayer.daum.net.  Plays anything thrown at it, and no CODEC anarchy.

Posted by: c6 at June 14, 2018 11:06 AM (E2Tnj)

4 I install Potplayer (I see I'm not the only one) and then K-Lite Codec pack just in case.  K-Lite will install Media Player Classic as well, which is a light-weight fallback option if you ever have trouble.  I keep VLC around for playing disc-based media, although I don't like VLC's control scheme.

Posted by: Ben at June 14, 2018 02:23 PM (osxtX)

5 CCCP/MPC-HC here. Never had trouble making subtitles go away. (Right click on screen, go to subtitles in the pop-up menu, turn off the subtitles channel.) Although I used to have a setting where doing a screencap didn't copy the titles even if they were on. No idea what that was.  

Posted by: Mauser at June 15, 2018 09:53 PM (Ix1l6)

6 Mauser, if that worked I wouldn't be asking for player opinions.  However, the "subtitles" tab is grayed out, no matter what renderer I have running.

Posted by: Wonderduck at June 16, 2018 10:39 AM (POEh5)

7 Try when stopped, Options>Subtitles>Misc>Ignore embedded subtitles?  

Posted by: Mauser at June 16, 2018 04:53 PM (Ix1l6)

8 The main reason I moved to Potplayer from VLC was its very early support of HEVC and HEVC2.  Now that I've used it a while, I find it much more intuitive to do things with subtitles and other settings.  I am optimistic that the new/better/maybe not proprietary/ encodings will be supported early also.
One minus is that it's hard to find or print the keyboard shortcuts.  I need that, since I have way too many softwares (sic) to remember many of them.  And if I double key or drop a book on the keyboard, who knows what are the consequences.  In this case, right click is your friend, keyboard shortcuts not so much.

Posted by: c6 at June 16, 2018 11:42 PM (sgFu4)

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