I bet those people who want minimal installs with low package counts are seething right now.
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Now they’ll have to choose between keeping the low package count or having the functionality they had previously. Kinda serves them right for focussing on such a meaningless metric.
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Yes we are. Yes We are.
Thinking of ditching VLC entirely and going with MPV and Haruna, no matter how limiting they might be.
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Over the past few weeks, Arch has split the firmware and vlc, which I wonder is it the start of a move to an openSUSE style of packaging. That is having more smaller and atomic packages instead of one big one. It has the advantage that the individual packages can be upgraded, leading to potentially smaller updates with less to go wrong. And of course if something does go wrong, you can downgrade only the broken bit. You have higher package counts though.
On the other hand, maybe they’re only going to split the two of them.
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I certainly hope that this is the case. Go back to the roots of Unix philosophy. Keep it simple and focused on one task.
On a side track, does Linux also share the same philosophy? Or there is no philosophy w.r.t Linux.
Amen! It’s amusing to encounter such people who place importance on such things! 
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I think a number of folks keep conflating seeing X number of ‘extra packages’ with meaning ‘X amount of extra space’ .. when in reality it is simply the former.
Just like the firmware thing .. while I appreciate being able to remove components I do not use … users would do well to recognize that in that and other similar cases such differences do now afford the ability for such removals but do not equate to any extra space being taken up.
That and maybe its not terrible that this situation, for whatever reason, is having folks begin to recognize VLC is only seen as the ‘best player’ for general consumption (a utility to play videos on the desktop) on crappy proprietary OSs.
FYI: vlc and mpv pretty borked for me
edit/whichever library weirdness happened it did not effect Showtime, and that’s my go-to anyways
VLC recently split into a bunch of smaller packages in arch so you have to install the necessary plugins. I wish there was a warning or something, as all of my mp4 videos suddently stopped working 
Since I use gnome I don’t like vlc-plugins-all as it installs kde wallet and a lot of kde dependencies, so I only added vlc-plugins-base vlc-plugins-extra vlc-plugin-ffmpeg vlc-plugin-x264 vlc-plugin-x265 vlc-plugin-notify (there was a vlc-plugin-gstreamer too but I’m not sure if it’s really needed.)
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Well, that’s the way Microservices do. Splitting a monolith in small packages named Microservice-Package has the advantage that you can fix issues in separate Microservices often driven as (Docker-)Containers by deleting a buggy Microservice replacing it in that moment instantly with the updated new Microservice Container.
Only problem. The change in strategie by VLC didn’t come to notice properly as I use it also and are registered for the newsletter of VLC. That is not very professionell in my opinion, as it should not be a big thing to send a News-mail to users who have adopted that Newsletter.
Anyway, that’s how IT-stuff will be handled more and more these days. Away from legacy monolithic architecture to containerized Microservice-packages serving an app together and are capable running almost in every environment.
What is limiting about mpv? I use it on all my systems, never got let down.
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Someone above actually provided an example - streaming/casting with mDLNA.
But it seems even that can be done with an extra package or two.
Above I linked macast software that is built on mpv and whose main purpose is DLNA.
There is also at least one plugin for regular mpv;
https://github.com/chachmu/mpvDLNA
Its a somewhat niche use-case .. but it appears it does not require VLC either.
So we still have a big blank for the ‘what exactly can VLC do that other players cannot on linux?’.
That is except make playback worse or even nonexistent without the user needing to go and manually adjust output/hw-accel settings.
Oh, this is excellent. phonon-qt6-vlc now depends on libvlc.
I can finally remove vlc
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And soon a number of applications, like dolphin, will cease depending on phonon at all. 
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/phonon-mpv/-/issues/1#note_283856
Yes, I think a lot of comfort functionality for mpv needs another package, I use thumbfast for thumbnails and ModernZ, the successor of ModernX, for a better UI. I tried streaming years ago, but I have a different workflow (joyflow?) for watching videos. I prefer the player on the device with the TV attached, no streaming. Before wayland, I could just ssh in and to everything via CLI.
Still looking for a good replacement solution for this.
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I also had this problem. A great opportunity to check out some of the many other video players available. Right now I am happily exploring some of them, and uninstalling VLC I was surprised at all the dependencies that went with it. Being somewhat of a minimalist I’m not sure I’ll be installing it again, even though fixes have been found, and VLC is such a revered Linux app.
I noticed this and honestly thought it was just a me problem, like i didnt set something up right. i just downloaded vlc-plugin-ffmpeg and seemed to work fine.
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Blockquote There are packages like
vlc-plugins-all,vlc-plugins-baseandvlc-plugins-extra. Maybe the all-package will work, because base and extra are included? … Have to try out.
works, thanks
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Firstly there is no way to specify a buffer (in terms of seconds or minutes) or playing bit rate. Secondly its support for streaming/casting is limited, or even downloading online/stream content. Thirdly it is difficult to determine if it is using HW Encoding or SW Encoding. Finally customizing or tinkering with it, unlike VLC, is next to impossible.
With MPV most of the controls require us to master command line or keystrokes. With VLC that is not the case. We only need to right click or look at the UI to get these.
@dalto wont that be a problem? If we want to remove VLC entirely then libvlc has to go too. It is part of VLC.
Ideally we want to depend only on the DE provided video/music player. Not multiple players like mpv/vlc/Haruna/etc.
@cscs what is replacing Phonon? I was under the impression that it gives an abstraction layer for applications to use. Which is a good thing to have.
@killedbykato welcome to our forum. Hope you enjoy your stay over here.
@inuit welcome to our small universe.
libvlc has been broken out into a separate package. You can remove vlc and keep libvlc installed.
Umm…as it relates to KDE, VLC isn’t associated to the KDE project. The players associated with KDE are Haruna and Dragon.
The only reason vlc gets installed is due to the dependency that Dolphin, Gwenview and Okular had on it. However, since that dependency has been removed, VLC will no longer be included in new KDE installs of EOS. The media player we include by default is Haruna.
Of course, everyone is free to install and use whatever media players they prefer after the installation.
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