> On fact, with all due respect, I never understood why VLC was so widely praised.
For me the alternatives back when i first wanted a video player that could play various file formats were Media Player Classic (which worked only on Windows and relied on external codecs that sometimes didn't fully work), mplayer (which had annoying arcane commandline switches and weird shortcut keys), Totem (which used gstreamer which 90% of the time either didn't had the codecs i wanted or they were very buggy). More recently the only alternative seems to be mpv (which seems to be a mplayer fork that persists with the arcane switches and apparent hate of anything resembling a discoverable GUI).
VLC on the other hand is available on anything that has a display (or at least anything that has a display and i'd want to play videos on it - that is currently Linux and Android and sometimes Windows) and has a GUI that while might be a bit on the overloadedly bloated side, at least it shows everything you may (and often you may not) want to configure, with actual menus, categories, tooltips, etc. And when it comes to the most common aspect, playback of videos, it shows a simple and to the point UI with the play, seek, volume, etc buttons that you'd need 99% of the time (that admittedly most other players do too, except they don't do the 99% rest of the GUI that VLC does).
So, basically VLC is my preferred video player largely because 20 years ago i didn't had to read a tutorial on how to select the subtitle language (or something along these lines) and was able to play pretty much any video i threw at it without any extra fuss.
For me the alternatives back when i first wanted a video player that could play various file formats were Media Player Classic (which worked only on Windows and relied on external codecs that sometimes didn't fully work), mplayer (which had annoying arcane commandline switches and weird shortcut keys), Totem (which used gstreamer which 90% of the time either didn't had the codecs i wanted or they were very buggy). More recently the only alternative seems to be mpv (which seems to be a mplayer fork that persists with the arcane switches and apparent hate of anything resembling a discoverable GUI).
VLC on the other hand is available on anything that has a display (or at least anything that has a display and i'd want to play videos on it - that is currently Linux and Android and sometimes Windows) and has a GUI that while might be a bit on the overloadedly bloated side, at least it shows everything you may (and often you may not) want to configure, with actual menus, categories, tooltips, etc. And when it comes to the most common aspect, playback of videos, it shows a simple and to the point UI with the play, seek, volume, etc buttons that you'd need 99% of the time (that admittedly most other players do too, except they don't do the 99% rest of the GUI that VLC does).
So, basically VLC is my preferred video player largely because 20 years ago i didn't had to read a tutorial on how to select the subtitle language (or something along these lines) and was able to play pretty much any video i threw at it without any extra fuss.