What is the best program/app you have installed?

About VLC and Pot Player. I see some people here state that VLC inlcudes all the necessary things most users need and that is the reason why they use it. It's true, however Pot Player also includes all those necessary things and on the top of that also includes a tons of other things if someone wants more customization, so there is a zero point to choose VLC over Pot player. Pot player is simply best video player, period.

As for JoeShades question to why most people use VLC. I don't know if VLC is secretely paying tech sites to promote it, but I think it's most likely because VLC has bigger history than Pot Player which is new player comparing to VLC and this makes VLC more popular, basically it's popular because of it's name. But if you're techy and like customization and willing to try different player, hands down Pot Player has it's crown there. I think tech sites should check this player to see it's greatness.

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cereberus said:

Most people just want to load a video, play it, pause, rewind, restart, adjust brightness, use subtitles and have it just work.

VLC ticks all the boxes and people have used it for years.

To me, this is like a tumble drier that has 20 settings for different fabrics (a lot of sorting).

In reality most people use 2 settings - low for (not exclusively) ladies delicates, and hot for everthing else.

Basically, VLC is robust and does what it says on the can.

That is why people use it.

I still live good old notepad, and people keep saying use notepad++ etc. I do now and then as its column select feature is handy but for most text editing, you can't beat the simplicity/reliability/familiarity of notepad.

Although I hate the phrase, sometimes "Less is More".

All these basic features are available even in Windows pre-built video player and in any most modern players. VLC is popular because of it's name and that's it. If you're not looking for more features than those basic features you stated, you don't even need VLC player, just stick with your Windows player.

cereberus said:

What made VLC popular over native Windows packages was it codec support to play a wide variety of videos unsupported even now by native Windows apps.

That is why people started using it and it became popular.

This. What made VLC popular was it could play damn near anything and you didn't have to hunt around afterdawn for the latest ffmpeg and divix codecs, or install 5 different media players (realplayer/quicktime/WiMP/etc.). that made it worth its large size and clunky interface.



My top 5 I can't live without:

Firefox
Winamp (yeah. even after all these years it still whips the llama's ass...)
KeePass
Notepad++
7zip

I do a lot of video editing and processing. Best apps? Well, my most frequently used, anyway...

FFmpeg (from the command line). It's open source and the working heart of almost every open source editor out there. But from the command line (or a batch file) you can do so much more than the options most editors provide access to.

Movie Maker 2012. It may be old, but it's the best/quickest way I know to locate edit points to the nearest frame.

Audacity for the soundtrack work.


And my media player? Well, it just gets used for a quick preview of the finished work, or to ckeck on work in progress. All I want is something that opens quickly and plays adequately. For proper viewing I cast to my TV. The built in Movies app is as good as anything for a quick look. I do have VLC as well and I use it when I need to capture a snapshot from a video, or to play a DVD (or ISO of a DVD).

CountMike said:

VLC can also stream from internet directly.

So can Pot player and do other more things VLC can't.

cereberus, maybe in the past VLC had that advantage with codecs that made it popular, but right now it's only it's name that makes it popular. That is simple truth. Time when there was a problem with codecs is long gone. All modern players include all necessary codecs nowadays.

By the way, in the past, when it was problem with codecs, not only VLC was shining. Media Player Classic was also very powerful media player with all necessary codecs able to play video files and it was even lighter than VLC.

Perhaps the biggest difference between VLC and PotPlayer is that VLC is open source, PotPlayer isn't.