Beat me to it. I haven’t had an unsupported file error in the decade I’ve been using VLC. Maybe one time I had to download something to support a rare file type
Something I don’t see a lot of people do but totally should is get a really long HDMI cable and snake it around the room. You can then hook up a laptop or hell even your desktop directly to the TV. Think my cable is around 20 feet and I got it off Amazon for dirt cheap. Works wonders when I want to watch something on Plex (a lot of smart TV’s have trouble with Plex)
20 feet is fine unless you want 4K 120 Hz and stuff like that. I'm which case 20 feet may also be fine with a passive cable, but a bit on the edge of where AOC starts to make sense.
As for 1080p and 4K30 I think 10 meters can work passively.
Edit: My in-head unit conversion was a bit off, 20 feet is probably a bit over what's sensible for 4K120. But it's probably fine for non-UHS HDMI.
This! 10meter hdmi cable came in really handy in my last apartment for connecting pc to tv while having the cable completely hidden all thr time. Now I would need like 20m cable and I would have to drill it trough walls. Just laptop and chromecast now. It’s a bit sad that I cant just open any game on my tv without carrying the pc from another room
My gaming PC sits on the other side of the wall of my living room. I’ve got HDMI and USB going right through the wall. Wireless keyboard and mouse on the coffee table. It’s worked great for years, and for couch gaming I generally use a Steam Controller or DS4 in Bluetooth mode.
My living room TV is smart but I don’t use any of those features and keep it disconnected from a network.
Happened to me a few months ago. Had a ticket for our District Attorney office, trying to playback a security camera footage from a parking lot or something. It would open, but, the person that was supposed to be seen would show up for a few frames and glitch out.
Turns out the cam system it came from uses some very proprietary codec. So the footage was effectively useless without their special sauce player/codec
I guess. I tried everything within reason to play it. VLC, mpv, windows media player etc. all with various degrees of failure. Even went down a rabbit hole of trying codecs from websites that looked frozen in time from the late 90’s, as it was an old cam system.
I’m working in live video and there’s a lot of proprietary codecs out there that vlc doesn’t play by default. Most of those are lossless/very high bitrate lossy formats designed to be encoded and decoded quickly for things like instant replays, so not something the average consumer would get their hands on.
I recently downloaded some YouTube videos that my dad wanted to play through USB with his Android based projector, as it doesn’t have the PlayStore and the videos didn’t want to play (and I knew they worked fine on my mac) I went quickly to its store just to find out VLC wasn’t there, and I didn’t have time to sideload stuff (I didn’t even know if it was possible), hopefully there was FX File Explorer and that one comes with a video player which was able to save the day.
I’ve had good experience using mkvtoolnix to mux video into an mkv with subtitles included. Not sure if mkv support is widespread, but as janky as the TV was with other formats, mkv worked great every time.
Installing MPC-HC during K-Lite Code pack as my primary media player has taken place of VLC for me this last year. I have been using VLC as music player only with some Winamp-like no-viewport UI lately.
Mp4 and mkv are container formats. Your comment is somewhat equivalent to “where are you guys getting text files that can’t be displayed, I’ve only ever seen zip files”.
The codec in the container is what needs to be played, and can fail to render correctly.
This reminded me of having to install a codec pack like klite or cccp as one of the first things on a fresh install. I’m glad that isn’t a thing anymore.
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