VLC: 2.0 or Not, A Disappointment

As tech-savvy users, we all have our own opinion of which is the better media player for playing all our media files.  Lifehacker has their favorites, but VLC also seems to be rather popular; it has the #3 spot on CNET Download.com's Top Downloaded Video Players list, and the #2 spot if you sort by downloads per week.

VLC is praised for it's support for a vast number of file formats, diverse OS support, and continuing development as one of the most popular pieces of open source software.  I have used VLC myself since the early days, where it had not even reached version 1.0.  However, I have since found better alternatives.

It all started back in 2009 when I was working on a slow netbook as my primary machine.  When this is the case, you tend to look for faster, simpler software to compensate for your machine's slow processor.  This generally works, but you need to know where to look.  After searching for a while for the fastest media player I could get my hands on, I found exactly what I was looking for, even if it had a strange name: Media Player Classic-Home Cinema, a player that advertised itself as being the "World's fastest media player".

I didn't take claims like these lightly, and so I put them to the test, with a 1080p video file-something that netbooks struggle to play smoothly.  My netbook did have a 512MB dedicated Radeon graphics card, so I was hoping that my days of watching stuttering 1080p video in VLC were over, with claims as extravagant as these.  Now, at the time, VLC did have hardware acceleration built in, but it was very early in development.

After I installed MPC-HC, the difference was stark, like night and day.  I could play 1080p videos smoothly without stutter, and not just on my netbook.  I tested the software on a Core 2 Duo T5450 based machine without a graphics chip and found the same results.  VLC stuttering, MPC-HC playing smoothly.

I decided to use MPC-HC as my primary media player for uncommon file formats from that moment on, and I never looked back-except for installing MPC-HC from within the K-Lite Codec Pack, which includes it as an option.  By choosing to install MPC-HC as an option when you install the K-Lite Codec Pack, you end up with the fastest media player combined with as robust file format support as VLC, if not better.

So now we come to today, with the release of VLC 2.0, a milestone.  After not using VLC for such a long time, I was excited to give it another chance, spurred on by their claims of improved performance on multi-core processors.  On my i3-2310m, this proved to be true; the stuttering playback was gone, whether it was due to my new faster processor or due to VLC's improvements.  But there had to be more to it, and there was.

Unsatisfied with such an improvement, I decided to compare the performance of VLC and MPC-HC using my CPU only-no GPU-accelerated playback with my Nvidia 540M.  I set the same 1080p MKV video file to play in both VLC and MPC-HC at the same time, in order to test their use of system resources.  While playing the video file in both players simultaneously, both players played the video smoothly, as expected.  However, upon opening the Task Manager, I saw this:

To reiterate, at the moment this screenshot was taken, VLC and MPC-HC were playing the same MKV video file, and both streams were playing smoothly.  I show the GPU activity in the corner to show that neither player was using the Nvidia GPU to take any load off the CPU.  What a difference!  VLC was using 12x the CPU resources that MPC-HC was using, and 36.34% more RAM!  Unreal!  Now I'm not going to make a huge deal out of the RAM usage because nowadays most of us have enough to make 160MB not really a problem, but look at that CPU usage!  

It's not hard to verify these results yourself, just download VLC and MPC-HC and try them out.  

MPC-HC is far more efficient in its use of system resources and can be installed in the K-Lite Codec Pack installer to provide a media player that is both faster and has more file format support than VLC.