[HN Gopher] VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS ...
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VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
Author : kirschner
Score : 409 points
Date : 2025-11-07 20:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fsfe.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (fsfe.org)
| cornhole wrote:
| I met that guy during a gsoc mentor summit and it inspired me,
| out of spite, to never install VLC on any device I own
| tequila_shot wrote:
| oook, but why?
| jetru wrote:
| Thats funny, I met him during GSoC too over a decade ago, and
| he's been on top of the open source game.
| leoh wrote:
| I vouched for this post because I have corresponded with him
| and he engaged in an in unnecessarily condescending way. What
| are you referring to by GSOC?
| giobox wrote:
| https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/
| dest wrote:
| Same. Maybe it's the open source ecosystem that forced him to
| be overly self confident, to fly above the cognitive noise.
| magnaton wrote:
| Same experience here and upvoted accordingly. I stopped
| using/recommending VLC all the way back in 2012 due to Mr.
| Kempf's appallingly dismissive/aggressive attitude to
| carefully-expressed constructive feedback from multiple users
| after a regressive UI change (my handle here was "sillyrat"
| and then "silly-rat"):
|
| https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=98182&p=3281.
| ..
|
| TL;DR: they decided to force the playlist to stay open all
| the time, thus killing "mini-player" mode; reaction to this
| was, unsurprisingly, uniformly negative (but expressed
| politely); Mr. Kempf's response was to attack VLC users; I
| did an end-run around him by opening a bug ticket so other
| developers would be made aware of the problem, and Mr. Kempf
| _banned_ me for doing so; my ticket was approved and
| addressed by other developers, fixing the issue; Mr. Kempf
| tried to back-pedal pitifully.
| lmf4lol wrote:
| He is French. Cut him some slack ;-)
|
| /s obviously
| flr03 wrote:
| I had a quick chat with him at a conference in Munich and I
| thought he was pretty chill, but I think it was 15y ago.
| alex_duf wrote:
| well deserved
|
| I've heard he was working on an extremely low latency gaming
| system: Kyber
|
| Anyone has any recent news on that subject?
| lucketone wrote:
| VLC is definitely one of the best projects. Congrats!
| fcksilvalment wrote:
| One of the few honorable techies who didn't sell out
| leoh wrote:
| He's pretty obsessed with making money off his Khyber thing
| afaict
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| why is that a problem
| khamidou wrote:
| Seems like Kyber is dual-licensed AGPL and proprietary, seems
| like a pretty standard way to fund an open source project.
| goku12 wrote:
| That's not what a sell out means in this context. He refused
| offers in millions of dollars to sell VLC to possibly shady
| parties, thereby keeping it safe for people like us. Kyber on
| the other hand, is a dual licensed AGPL - commercial
| software. That's an entirely acceptable and respected
| practice in the FOSS community. That doesn't make him a sell
| out.
| wiether wrote:
| Even within people involved in the local market it is not a
| widespread thing, but for a year now he's been the CTO of
| Scaleway, one of the French cloud providers.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember crappiness before VLC. Such a useful
| piece of software. Well deserved. What a dude.
| ttoinou wrote:
| K Lite Codec Pack + Media Player Classic was great
| antirez wrote:
| So many hours of fun watching videos over the years, without the
| constant fear that some odd codec would make the experience
| impossible. Thanks, VLC!
| DANmode wrote:
| "If you insert a slice of bologna into the disc tray, VLC will
| _play_ it."
| echelon wrote:
| VLC was a big deal in the 2000s if you wanted to watch
| torrented anime. Operating systems didn't come with players
| with broad codec support and it was a legitimate nightmare to
| figure out what fly by night codec worked with whatever the
| bootleggers cobbled together to encode the video of the week.
|
| These days, operating systems already have rock solid video
| players with far less clunky UI.
|
| On Linux, video is already sublime thanks to ffmpeg and the
| dozens of available frontends.
|
| It feels like wrestling with 1998 in trying to use VLC these
| days. It's got a real WinAmp feel to it.
|
| But the real elephant in the room is that the lionshare of
| video is now being delivered by major media platforms like
| YouTube.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I remember having to install the K-Lite Codec Pack back in
| the day (college days) to be able to watch videos I would
| "acquire". When I eventually discovered VLC, it was like a
| breath of fresh air. I still use it to this day as my default
| video player, because nothing else comes close to the quality
| they have.
| da_chicken wrote:
| I'm the opposite. I started out using VLC, but once I found
| the codec packs (K-Lite being one of the last) I
| immediately started using other, more user friendly media
| players.
|
| The problem with VLC is that the interface consistently
| feels... both imprecise and ridiculously granular.
| Everything just behaves _weird_. It felt weird in 2002 and
| it still feels weird in 2025. Like they cribbed the design
| from a DivX player, and haven 't thought about it since.
|
| VLC seems bound and determined to not let you interact with
| a video without pausing it, then opening the menu and
| hunting for option you need. Yes, I _could_ set up my own
| interface, but that 's not an excuse for not having a bare
| minimum of functionality that matches modern user
| expectations. Besides, configuring VLC to have the
| interface you want is itself not an easy task. Like, they
| have interface presets. Why isn't there a preset interface
| for "make this match YouTube"?
|
| Just looking at what they chose to make be default key
| bindings is just bizarre to me. Half the things they have
| bound to single key presses are things that have never come
| up for me _ever_ , while several things I want to use
| frequently are double or triple key combinations _or not
| available for binding at all_. All the default adjustments
| like skipping ahead or adjusting speed are all _so
| granular_ that you have to hit them 10 or more times to
| actually accomplish anything. Just a completely alien
| interface to me. This software feels like it was built to
| solve media problems that I have not encountered since the
| late 90s when video tracks and audio tracks were more
| frequently out of sync from the producer.
|
| What using VLC has taught me over 20 years is that the best
| way to play media with VLC is to open the software, begin
| playback of the media, and then _under no circumstances_
| attempt to interact with the software again.
| LtWorf wrote:
| > But the real elephant in the room is that the lionshare of
| video is now being delivered by major media platforms like
| YouTube.
|
| Youtube is dubbing videos with AI for no reason whatsoever if
| you play the videos from the website these days.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I'm still curious how they thought that was remotely a
| thing anybody wanted.
|
| The cynic in me says some PM rolled out it out because they
| had an internal metric to hit.
|
| I know a lot of people who are bilingual (or trilingual)
| and they utterly _loathe_ it.
| LtWorf wrote:
| The only explanation I can give myself is that Americans
| can't comprehend the idea that a single person might
| speak more than one language.
|
| It's pretty funny considering how google claims that
| their hiring practices make them hire only the most
| intelligent people on the planet.
| lukan wrote:
| Can't you just deactivate it?
| LtWorf wrote:
| No idea, but also why is it activated when I've been
| watching english content on that account for several
| years?
| lukan wrote:
| I never experienced subs I could not deactivate. And why
| they activated it? Well, because they own their plattform
| and do what they want with it. (I think they have done
| worse)
| Insanity wrote:
| I'm one of those who hate it. I'm trilingual, but when
| watching something in any foreign language I just want to
| read subtitles instead of "dubs".
|
| It is of course worse when it tries to do so on a
| language I already speak.
| kakacik wrote:
| That's... a very subjective take to be polite and can't agree
| much. I enjoy VLC very much, install it everywhere even on
| TV, and couldn't care less about some OS/bundled players,
| codecs and whatnot. UI is great, clean, easy to navigate.
| Couldn't ask more from video player.
| invaliduser wrote:
| In the early 2000s the video field was flooded with fast
| paced releases of new codecs and new codecs versions, and
| there was codecs implementation to downloads right and left,
| and people were bundling them and releasing them with names
| sounding like a warez group. It was a little crazy to watch a
| video at the time.
|
| This was mitigated by vlc and mplayer, two video players that
| integrated most codecs as fast as they could, and it was a
| breath of fresh air. You just started them and any video
| would play, no codec issue anymore. MPlayer has not been
| updated for some times, and traction was lost, but VLC,
| although looking a bit old on the UI-side (and a little buggy
| on ARM Windows) is still here and is solid when someone just
| wants to watch a video on any platform.
| distances wrote:
| > These days, operating systems already have rock solid video
| players with far less clunky UI.
|
| Not my experience at all. At least colleagues using Windows
| always run into video playing troubles in online meetings
| unless they use VLC.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| >It feels like wrestling with 1998 in trying to use VLC these
| days
|
| What does this mean? I double-click and video file and it
| starts playing. What wrestling are you doing?
| cocoto wrote:
| The award is well deserved, VLC was a godsend a few years ago but
| I'm not sure what VLC brings to the table nowadays. All other
| players play videos just fine on Linux now. I guess VLC is only a
| thing on Windows because the default software is crap. On Linux
| almost everyone now use whatever is the default player or MPV for
| the nerds.
| rnewme wrote:
| > I'm not sure what VLC brings to the table nowadays Lack of
| backdoors?
| DANmode wrote:
| So, the same value-add as always!
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| I use it on my Android phone. Is there a better FOSS media
| player (or better any media player?).
|
| VLC also still (or at least recently?) provides APKs you can
| download to install on very old Android versions. I have it
| installed on a few old Android tablets (and by old I mean
| something like Android version 4).
|
| MPV everywhere else though.
| spookie wrote:
| MPV is on android too. But VLC is alright
| K3UL wrote:
| I might be wrong but I think the guys at VLC are still very
| important contributors to ffmpeg, which is still a big deal.
| They also (kinda recently) developed some really low latency
| tech for streaming called Kyber So bottomline the player might
| not be used that much (although on mobile the app is very
| popular still) but the tech they develop for it, is
| ho_schi wrote:
| Yep.
|
| VLC was not important on Linux. Because we have ffmpeg as
| foundation, used by mplayer and nowadays mpv. The later is my
| recommendation. Whether on the tty (awesome!) or on Wayland. If
| you prefer a native Gtk an interface is available, named
| Celluloid. In all these cases mpv is mighty, reliable, fits
| into the environment with a frugal interface.
|
| We've also players based on gstreamer but ffmpeg is more
| reliable.
|
| But the need for a reliable player on Windows, Android, macOS,
| iOS and tvOS is big. Because their default players suck. VLC
| comes with an awkward UI and the weird built-in stuff for SMB.
| But from a 2001 point-of-view it makes sense, LAN-parties are
| nice and back then they were everywhere. And Windows doesn't
| support WebDAV well.
|
| My favorite is mpv. But I'm still tankful that I've one usable
| player in my iPhone.
|
| PS: VLC also uses ffmpeg?
| 1bpp wrote:
| Yeah, ffmpeg's libav is responsible for its famed codec
| support.
| gyomu wrote:
| I used VLC until I looked for a backward frame step
| functionality. I then found this thread on the VLC forums where
| the maintainers explain (with bad attitude) why this
| functionality is technically impossible. Everyone points out
| that mpv supports it, but the maintainers double down and say
| they're Doing It Wrong and it shouldn't be possible.
|
| So anyways, I switched to mpv.
|
| https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=120627
| Barbing wrote:
| "I, like others, arrived here through a Google search looking
| for this feature. Reading this thread is one of the worst
| decisions I've made recently. I will never have this time
| back and I am worse for it."
| Springtime wrote:
| On Windows at least VLC has had better alternatives for the
| past 20 years, both feature and UI wise. I had frame-stepping
| hotkeys back in the mid-00s with Korean video players. These
| days I use the currently maintained fork of MPC-HC which
| similarly has this.
|
| On Mac it wasn't until the mid-10s that I found a decent
| player.
| naIak wrote:
| And which one is it. I'm using mpv currently.
| leoh wrote:
| Agreed except I have no idea what Jean-Baptiste actually does
| besides trying to run his little startup Khyber
| Thaxll wrote:
| Default player sucks and MPV is close to impossible to compile
| yourself. VLC is still a good solution on Linux.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Wtf, mpv is extremely easy to build yourself, with or without
| the mpv-build scripts. You just need to install the
| dependencies first, which is table stakes for building almost
| anything.
|
| Anyway, you should be able to install both VLC and mpv from
| your distro's repo, assuming your distro isn't weird.
| Building mpv is only something you'd do if you're hacking on
| it or need a bleeding edge build for some reason.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I still use VLC to this day on Linux because it's still as
| great as it ever was. I'm gonna have to install _something_ to
| play videos, why wouldn 't it be VLC?
| wiether wrote:
| As a Windows user, I never used VLC because I didn't like its
| UI and not having the "click to pause" was a big issue when you
| control a media center with a mouse.
|
| So I used Media Player Classic without any issues for years.
|
| When I moved to Linux Desktop, it came with VLC so I tried and
| forced me to use that damn "space to pause". But half my videos
| had issues playing. Being in KDE, I switched to Haruna. It's
| ugly, but I can play anything without issues... and I can
| "click to pause"!
| racked wrote:
| Have you tried SMPlayer? It's a lot like MPC
| lkramer wrote:
| I don't know, I still have issues with the default media player
| in Ubuntu not working for either video or sound. I'm sure it's
| solvable, but it's easier to just install VLC, so that's what I
| do.
| entrepy123 wrote:
| Public service announcement: VLC is on iPhone in the App Store,
| too. (Some people don't know this.)
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| I find it handy for streaming videos from my Jellyfin server
| with good subtitling support, then casting to a TV!
| ebb_earl_co wrote:
| How do you manage this? Just copy the stream URL from
| Jellyfin Web or...?
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Yup the Stream URL is a valid HTTP media!
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| I've been using it to listen to actual MP3s of the music I
| have. I can't find any decent MP3 player on iOS (incredibly
| ironic given the iPod was one of the 3 devices the iPhone was
| supposed to be when Steve Jobs first introduced it) and VLC is
| pretty good.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Foobar2000 is my go to on iOS. Works well just like the PCs
| version.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Android version is also the best I've found without ads,
| has a decent UI and plenty of advanced features.
| skydhash wrote:
| I'm using VLC because it's the only one that I know that can
| play opus. I chose the latter for lossy encoding because I
| have a few albums that are gapless and it's hackish to get
| mp3 to support those (other than single mp3 file and cue
| file).
| isodev wrote:
| Also available on tvOS and you can watch video files from your
| home NAS or just send them from your iPhone/iPad!
| wara23arish wrote:
| I remember using VLC and figuring out how to download subtitles
| and use them within it.
|
| I suddenly became the computer person of my family at 11 because
| of that
| Insanity wrote:
| I somehow forgot about this! But yes matching subtitle timings
| with video playback is a distinct "VLC thing" that I remember
| doing in the early 2000s
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Still really hoping his game/app streaming system Kyber
| eventually materializes! https://kyber.media/
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929602
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvosCplkCc
|
| Incredibly accomplished already. What gravy this would be though.
| homarp wrote:
| If you wondered SFS comes from the SFSCon, which is the South
| Tyrol Free Software Conference, SFSCON
|
| past winners: https://www.sfscon.it/awards/
| zvr wrote:
| It's a wonderful event -- so happy to see it keep growing year
| after year!
| nalekberov wrote:
| VLC is most beautiful software for me. They never spied on their
| users, never put any bloat. Thanks Jean-Baptiste Kempf and
| everyone involved bringing this beautiful piece of art to life!
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Jean-Baptiste is a hero! Just in case some of you don't know or
| remember, he has refused an offer to sell VLC for tens of
| millions of Euros because he didn't want enshittify it. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048.
| octaane wrote:
| I have benefited so much from the versatility and reliability of
| VLC over the years. Congratulations, a very well deserved award!
| dcassett wrote:
| Have used VLC for at least 20 years. Recently I upgraded an old
| Dell 9400 laptop that dates from around 2006 to Debian Bookworm
| (the end of the line for the 32-bit machines). It has a nice
| 1600x1200 display, but the Nvidia Graphics (Geforce Go 7900 GS)
| is poorly supported and mpv now requires --hwdec=no, making 720p
| videos barely playable. VLC now uses a fraction of the CPU as mpv
| does for video, which makes even 1080p videos playable. For some
| reason VLC chokes at the beginning of every video (tries to play
| before everything is ready), but by pausing the video and backing
| up to time zero it plays perfectly. All of this to say that VLC
| has saved the day as it frequently has over the years.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| Well deserved!
| dmix wrote:
| Years ago I remember complaining on HN that VLC didn't support
| remembering the position of the video you've already partially
| watched, when multiple other video players supported it.
|
| The only reply was someone saying you should contribute to the
| open source project yourself to fix it instead of complaining. I
| don't know anything about coding a multi-platform video player so
| I wasn't much use but not long after they released a version
| supporting it and I felt bad for complaining.
| wiether wrote:
| ngl: I was expecting a crazy success story where you started
| learning to code to add your feature and then you went on
| becoming a streaming expert at a FAANG
|
| But glad you had your feature!
| snowram wrote:
| Thank god not every post has to look like a LinkedIn story.
| preisschild wrote:
| Tbf you could donate money to someone who does have the
| expertise to do it.
|
| Free software is not "free" (as in free beer). People have to
| build and maintain it.
| HenrikB wrote:
| Another way to donate is to proof read documentation and
| report on typos, spelling errors, etc. Some projects have
| documentation in multiple languages - helping out in a
| language you know is another excellent way to contribute.
|
| Many projects have great communities, making it all fun and
| engaging.
| symlinkk wrote:
| He is a good guy for not selling out but let's be honest, it's
| just a thin wrapper around ffmpeg.
| mcraiha wrote:
| I think you mean libavcodec?
|
| But that is incorrect. VLC has even more supported features, if
| you do not believe me, check the source code
| https://github.com/videolan/vlc/tree/a33f33ddb0a9e0d26d779eb...
| shevy-java wrote:
| People like VLC. Personally I am a mpv-user though. For some
| reason the mental model by mpv (and before that mplayer) works
| better for me.
|
| On Windows, VLC is quite convenient though. While I also use mpv
| there, for an elderly relative I have simply used and installed
| VLC there, as the default GUI mode is more convenient for elderly
| people.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I use mpv but VLC is definitely better for people who prefer
| traditional GUIs, which is most people.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| Celluloid and IINA are "traditional" GUIs for mpv. They work
| fine.
| jedisct1 wrote:
| Well deserved. Congrats jbk!
| kvezKIiEVSeaZEq wrote:
| I tried to implement video playback into one of my apps,
| successfully using VLC. before that I did benchmark which of
| available players that are supported in .NET is the best, from
| perspective of cpu/gpu usage. also how easy it is to implement,
| if too many problems I stray away from it, unless it's really
| good. After successfully implementing VLC I realized that VLC
| uses 0.5% GPU usage when video is idle/paused, after video is
| loaded in player, even when user presses stop to "eject" media,
| the VLC uses 0.5% of GPU on my system.. I decided to use
| SuspendThread() from kernel.dll on Windows to suspend all VLC
| threads, then RestoreThread() to unsuspend them when I need the
| player, but after some time decided it had too many problems with
| that approach and it felt janky.. Then I read online why VLC
| would use 0.5% GPU when it's not rendering anything, and the
| answer was found on some VLC thread (forum) is that is a good
| thing, and it should be like that, and.. so it felt "like
| everything else in the world that's successfull", a superior
| product with detrimental flaw, in VLC case that is video player
| with least GPU/CPU usage, with the penalty that the window itself
| uses 0.5% GPU, so if user likes to leave apps running, like a VLC
| player with Seinfeld episodes running and minimized for when one
| wants to watch it, and another VLC with X-Files, and another 1 or
| 2 with porn, and 1 that is playing song in background, that all
| will use 2-3% GPU in the background, at all times. After that I
| had reason to use K-Lite codec pack, which has detrimental flaw
| of hideous installation process (custom installation, not
| "install typical", or "full installation" which installs bloat,
| and adds bunch of registry junk and assigns all known video and
| other media formats when I want just the codecs)
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