

VLC has been downloaded over a billion times - m_for_monkey
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/stats/downloads.html

======
fierarul
I cherish the VLC.app for iPad that was pulled from the AppStore! It's just
great to copy a movie in the app folder and know it will play in VLC without
any conversion, etc.

It's actually the reason we stopped taking the laptop while away for the
weekend. I just put a movie on the iPad for VLC and we are good to go.

Edit: But the new VLC on OSX is horrible. Had to revert to the older version,
mostly due to the way on-screen-display changed.

~~~
xyzzyb
Try hosting your video files on a Plex media server paired with the Plex iOS
app.

No need to copy files to the iPad, Plex streaming works great even over 3G.
You can register your server with myPlex then sign on Plex clients to make
getting to your video collection super easy.

Custom video categories are fantastic for keeping track of programming
screencasts. I just setup my Plex with Peepcode, Destroy All Software, and
Railscasts categories and am very pleased with the setup. If I start watching
a video on the Roku box on my TV, I can pick up where I left off on the iPad
or my iPhone whether I'm at home or not.

~~~
derefr
That doesn't really solve for the parent's use-case of

> It's actually the reason we stopped taking the laptop while away for the
> weekend. I just put a movie on the iPad for VLC and we are good to go.

though. You'd need to bring something to run Plex _on_.

~~~
xyzzyb
Plex runs on a computer at home. You then stream that computer's media over
the Internet on the iPad/iPhone using the Plex app. To make things super-easy
you can register your home Plex server on myPlex and sign into it using myPlex
on the iPad/iPhone.

Bam! No need to bring a computer OR move files to the device. You can even
stream over 3G with pretty decent quality.

~~~
rytis
Some people go where there is no 3G/WiFi coverage. Sometimes it's also
financially not feasible to do this (think roaming costs).

Example - a ferry trip from UK to France. No 3G for about 1.5hrs, or in other
words - no 3G for a average length movie.

~~~
niels_olson
Try a month in Japan. Not even the same basebands. You want Internet? Get
yourself a new device my friend!

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ElliotH
There's a lesson in how to make a product in VLC's success. It has a horribly
unfriendly interface, and is certainly not pretty, but it doesn't matter -
Whatever media file you point it at, you can feel confident that VLC will play
it, without hassle.

~~~
why-el
The interface might not be the prettiest, but I don't think it's "horribly
unfriendly". Can you contrast it with another player? I have been using vlc
for a long time now and although I just switched to Mac OS, I can't say that I
find other players on the platform particularly appealing. But again I think
it depends on what you do it. In my case its usually either in minimized mode
or playing a movie on full screen mode, making my contact with its UI very
limited.

~~~
krupan
mplayer, for example, is just as capably at playing just about any media
format, but is definitely far more user-unfriendly than vlc

~~~
sasha-dv
I disagree.

Regarding user-friendliness they are about the same to me. Can you point out
something that I maybe missed that makes mplayer "definitely far more user-
friendly than vlc"? (not rude, just curious)

edit: missed a word

~~~
mbell
Let's start with the fact that mplayer is a command line only interaction
program, if you want to discuss real usability, which GUI for mplayer are you
using?

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praptak
If you value all the the time you saved by skipping "unskippable" DVD crap in
VLC, please consider donating to this amazing project.

~~~
lmm
Doesn't it just use mplayer's libraries for playing DVDs? Seems like they
would be a better target for donation (particularly since most efforts to
support new formats e.g. bluray seem to happen there)

~~~
obtino
Both VLC and MPlayer use ffmpeg as one of the many decoding modules. The
ffmpeg module (libavcodec) decodes many of the codecs out there.

~~~
vibragiel
And this is what ffmpeg have to say about donations:

 _Want to donate to FFmpeg? Well, theres no way to do that currently. Luckily
we dont need any money. But there are many not for profit organizations with
noble goals that do. Select one of your choice that you trust and agree with
their goals and instead of donating to FFmpeg, send your donation to them._
<http://ffmpeg.org/>

So yeah, donating to VLC directly seems like a good choice.

------
NathanKP
Every time I see the VLC website I have to laugh, because I coded it a few
years ago back when I was still doing general consulting. It has changed a
little bit but it is still nice to be able to look into the code and still see
some of my old stuff in there. And yes.... I know some of the markup is
terrible. :P

~~~
mparlane
Were you paid? Or part of a "help a free project" endeavor ?

~~~
NathanKP
Yes I was paid. It wasn't much, but it was a good learning experience.

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laconian
VLC's success is truly a testament to how awful the first-party media player
solutions are. People know that sparkly, zoomy UIs on DRM-ridden underpinnings
are just lipstick on a pig. VLC isn't pretty but it _works_.

------
rachelbythebay
At least one of the Santa Clara county DAs uses it to play back 911 calls in
court. That orange cone on his laptop was unmistakable.

Conclusion: VLC is everywhere.

------
afterburner
I've always been impressed at what VLC accomplished under the hood, but the
usability and configurability of Media Player Classic always pulls me back.

------
gaving
I used to love VLC, pity they ruined the OSX version.

MPlayerX all the way now and I don't look back.

~~~
gulbrandr
Why is MPlayerX better than VLC on OSX? (Sell it to me)

~~~
orta
Personally I've found the keyboard commands to be easier to remember in
MPlayerX ( I watch a lot of streams so its dealing with networks ) than for
VLC.

------
cema
VLC is a great product. Has consistently been among the top media players for
the big platforms for quite a while. (Despite occasional slips like the recent
changes on OS X, still one of the best.)

I have, as others mentioned too, noticed a certain reluctance among the non-
techies to download and install VLC. Even so (or maybe especially so), I
promote it whenever I can.

------
vasco
No Linux stats. That's too bad! I would really love to see how they would
compare to mac and windows download counts.

~~~
liotier
About 25% of Debian users who submit to the Debian Popularity Contest have VLC
installed on their computer : [http://qa.debian.org/popcon-
graph.php?packages=vlc&show_...](http://qa.debian.org/popcon-
graph.php?packages=vlc&show_installed=on&show_old=on&want_percent=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1)
\- that includes servers, so the actual proportion of Debian desktop users
with VLC is much higher.

------
Erunno
I'll just add another data point. After the release of VLC 2.0 I was slightly
dissatisfied with the new interface on OS X and used the opportunity to try
out a couple of alternative players. In the end I stuck with MPlayerX because
of short startup time and the minimalistic interface. But it was only a short
love affair. The keyboard controls are pretty much non-existent, it can't open
DVD menus, it only shows half the available duration of some of my music DVD
rips (dual-layer?!?) and I have some occasional weird timing issues with
regard to subtitles (image and subtitles suddenly not in sync). In the end I
returned to VLC and all of my issues disappeared.

So kudos to the VLC team for producing such a great product (despite some
questionable interface decisions). I'll take a player which "just works" over
the pretty and shiny competitors every day.

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Knoopi
These guys killed the MediaPlayer market for the bad.

It is one of the apps making knock my head on the table. It is so terribly
poor in UX.

While the appearance is IMHO seems to be heavily "inspired" from existing
players (e.g. Quicktimes controls overlay) without any charming twist, it is
implemented ridiculously poor.

Boys, a cursor that hides when you try to click the playhead!? Ridiculous. The
playhead is so idiotically tiny that this crap product turns into a Aim &
Click game.

Yea, it's free but this is for no good as it kills any efforts to make
something better. This is such a pity.

------
diminish
I am using VLC on linux from time to time, together with others. it is good to
know it plays almost everything with a simple UI.

Congratulations to the team. for 1 billion downloads. you rock.

------
Gravityloss
You don't need to hunt any plugins or codecs. You install a monolithic package
and everything just works. If something doesn't you probably only need to
upgrade.

Saves a lot of time.

------
SeanDav
VLC used to be a nice simple program that just did what it said on the tin.
Now much more bloated with really slow start up. I use GOM player mainly
(Windows)

~~~
pmr_
You mean the media-player player that is violating the GPL?
<http://roundup.libav.org/issue112>

------
program
I know that it's a fallacious statistic but here is the VLC all time OS market
share (rounded):

Windows: 89.38%

OS X: 10.27%

Other: 0.35%

~~~
hackermom
I wonder how many percentiles of the Windows number comes from Windows' re-re-
re-re-install-ish nature. "Dang, my FPS is low, I gotta "format Windows"
again."

~~~
RobAtticus
I haven't had to reinstall Windows since upgrading to 7, and didn't really
reinstall that often with XP either. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think
this has been a big issue in quite a while.

~~~
mparlane
I had a problematic driver state, where hibernate stoppped working. I put up
with it for more than a year. Then I bothered to reinstall win 7. And I am
amazed at how useful hibernate actually is in my day to day life! Also
pressing the touchpanel and deactivating the wifi module use to kill the
machine :|

I blame Dell for this issue though, not win7.

------
corkercsuite
I've downloaded it at least 10 times over the years ...

------
tuxguy
VLC is awesome, but SMPlayer is awesome *2 :)

------
danso
This is an incredible number...I didn't believe it at first but it makes sense
given the cumulative version downloads.

But except for other techies (fellow students in comsci/comp. eng), I ran into
very few people who ever used VLC. They just put up with WMP/VLC/iTunes.

Now with Netflix/Amazon/iTunes, I've found myself rarely ever needing another
video player. Not that these commercial entities are "better" than what VLC
offers, they're just easy enough and provide enough content that I no longer
feel the "need" to go to VLC...but that's also because I'm older and have less
time to watch things overall.

~~~
keeperofdakeys
The trouble with these statistics is there are some rather variable gaps of
time between the releases, which makes it hard to gauge growth without doing
more research.

------
hackermom
If you want something smaller, faster and tons more efficient for OS X, I
_highly_ recommend MPlayerX instead. It's everything VLC is, and more, with
none of VLC's bloat.

~~~
st3fan
Or just install Perian. Which installs most popular codecs system wide.

That means things will work fine in any app that uses the OS X APIs to render
video.

Including QuickView .. really nice to be able to just hit space bar in the
Finder to see a quick preview of a movie.

~~~
grecy
The developers just announced the next version of Perian will be the final
version. <http://perian.org/?eol>

