If you run Windows, using Media Player Classic - Home Cinema with madVR[1] will give you much, much better quality.
VLC handles some large video files - or file types - very poorly in my experience, too.
VLC is great, because it has an excellent standard of video quality, and it's easy as heck to use and set up for others, but for people who really care about optimal playback, it isn't really the best choice.
---
I think the main allure of VLC used to be that the tortuous labour of finding and installing codecs was suddenly moot. Using MPC-HC requires a lot of painstaking effort, especially once a codec stops working all of a sudden for some reason.
VLC is very Apple-esque in how it does everything for me and gives me an ease of mind, but with no guarantee that I will get the highest quality. And MPC-HC is very Windows-esque in how it requires a bunch of tweaking and pulling out hairs, which will eventually result in superior quality, but all in all perhaps an inferior experience and enjoyment, because it takes jumping through so many hoops to just get there.
Moving on from VLC to MPC-HC is very much like moving on from using primes in typography to curly quotes; it might be more aesthetically pleasing, but most of all, you kinda wish you could just unsee the difference and quit pursuing the folly of proper typography. These days, I can hardly stand reading books with justification, which unfortunately is quite a large majority of them.
It's a blessing and a curse, and I'd properly just recommend most people to find a video player similar to VLC in how easy it is to use, all while providing superior video quality and performance.
If you're watching a movie or TV show, I recommend that you watch it on Netflix or Blu-ray, if the option is available to you. That's what I do. :)
If you run Windows, using Media Player Classic - Home Cinema with madVR[1] will give you much, much better quality.
VLC handles some large video files - or file types - very poorly in my experience, too.
VLC is great, because it has an excellent standard of video quality, and it's easy as heck to use and set up for others, but for people who really care about optimal playback, it isn't really the best choice.
---
I think the main allure of VLC used to be that the tortuous labour of finding and installing codecs was suddenly moot. Using MPC-HC requires a lot of painstaking effort, especially once a codec stops working all of a sudden for some reason.
VLC is very Apple-esque in how it does everything for me and gives me an ease of mind, but with no guarantee that I will get the highest quality. And MPC-HC is very Windows-esque in how it requires a bunch of tweaking and pulling out hairs, which will eventually result in superior quality, but all in all perhaps an inferior experience and enjoyment, because it takes jumping through so many hoops to just get there.
Moving on from VLC to MPC-HC is very much like moving on from using primes in typography to curly quotes; it might be more aesthetically pleasing, but most of all, you kinda wish you could just unsee the difference and quit pursuing the folly of proper typography. These days, I can hardly stand reading books with justification, which unfortunately is quite a large majority of them.
It's a blessing and a curse, and I'd properly just recommend most people to find a video player similar to VLC in how easy it is to use, all while providing superior video quality and performance.
If you're watching a movie or TV show, I recommend that you watch it on Netflix or Blu-ray, if the option is available to you. That's what I do. :)
[1]: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228