Revamp Your Video Experience: Unveiling the Secret to Enhancing VLC Playback Quality
If you are like most people, then you love watching videos, movies, and other types of media on your computer. However, have you ever experienced a glitchy, distorted, or low-quality video playback that just ruins your entire viewing experience?
If your answer is yes, then you are in luck because we have some good news for you. With VLC media player, you can significantly enhance your video playback quality and enjoy a much better watching experience overall.
Here is everything you need to know about how to revamp your video experience with VLC playback quality.
What is a VLC media player?
VLC media player is an open-source multimedia player that supports multiple operating systems including Windows, macOS, Linux, and more. It supports a vast range of multimedia formats, codecs, and protocols, which makes it a popular choice among users who want to play almost any type of video, audio, or streaming media.
Why Is VLC Better Than Other Video Players?
VLC media player is one of the best media players available for the following reasons:
Compatibility: As mentioned before, VLC supports virtually any media format, which means you can play any video or audio file without worrying about compatibility issues.
User-friendly Interface: VLC has a straightforward and intuitive interface that provides easy-to-use features that make the user experience more comfortable.
Customizable: The VLC media player is highly customizable and has numerous settings that allow you to adjust video playback quality, sound, and subtitle settings, among others.
How to Enhance VLC Playback Quality?
Now that you know what VLC media player is and why it is better than other video players, Here are some tips to help you enhance your VLC playback quality.
1. Increase VLC playback performance
One of the biggest challenges of video playback is lagging, choppy, or stuttering video, which can make the whole viewing experience frustrating. One way to improve VLC playback quality is to increase its performance by hardware acceleration.
Here are the steps to do it:
- Open VLC media player.
- Click on Tools, and then go to Prefernces.
- Navigate to the Input/Codecs tab.
- Locate the Hardware-accelerated decoding option.
- Set it to Automatic.
- Click on the Save button.
2. Adjust video quality settings
You can also fine-tune your video quality settings to boost your VLC video playback quality. You can adjust the settings by following the steps below:
- Open VLC media player.
- Click on Tools and then Preferences.
- Click on the Video tab.
- Under the Output section, Select OpenGL video output from the drop-down menu.
- Move the Video quality slider to the right to increase the video playback quality.
3. Install and Manage Video Filters
VLC media player comes with a lot of video filters that allow you to adjust the brightness, contrast, and other aspects of the video. Adding or removing filters can significantly improve your video playback quality.
Here are the steps to manage and install video filters on your VLC media player:
- Open VLC media player.
- Click on Tools and then go to Preferences.
- Click on the Video tab.
- Select the Filters option.
- Choose the video filter you want to apply from the list.
- Click on the Add button to add a new filter.
- You can also reorder the filters using the Up and Down buttons.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the VLC media player is a powerful multimedia player capable of enhancing your video playback quality. With the above tips and tricks, you can significantly improve your video watching experience and enjoy your media to the fullest. The great thing about VLC is that it’s open source and free, which means that you can access all that it has to offer at no cost.
You may think the colors are a bit off on a YouTube video. Or you might have failing eyesight, like yours truly, and think every video looks fuzzy, like if your screen was coated with Vaseline. VLC is here to help.
There are countless guides explaining how you can tweak your videos to enhance their looks, but they all end up demanding the recompression or transcoding of your files. This is a procedure that can take anywhere from five minutes to five hours, depending on your content and your PC’s capabilities. Why spend so much time, effort, PC resources, and electricity if all you want is to watch a video, but upgraded with better contrast and maybe more pronounced details?
Read on to see how you can apply VLC effects and filters in real time, as the video plays, for that purpose.
Effects and Filters
Although it can be used as an editing tool, VLC is, first and foremost, a media player. Thus, the effects and filters it has work primarily in real time.
This means you don’t have to pre-process a video but can enable and modify it as it plays on your screen to tweak it to your liking.
To access the effects and filters, with the video playing (or paused), right-click it and choose “Tools -> Effects and Filters,” or press Ctrl + E on your keyboard.
Hue and Saturation
Some videos may look washed out, others like moving splashes of color. In both cases, the Hue and Saturation sliders are your friends. You can find them, as every option we’ll examine here, in the “Video Effects -> Essential” panel.
After enabling “image adjust,” you can shift the full range of colors with the Hue slider. This will rarely be required, compared to the Saturation slider that regulates the richness of the colors in a video stream. All the way to the left, and your video will turn black and white, while at the opposite edge, it will make the video look like an old VHS tape.
Brightness, Contrast and Gamma
Can you see some grey block dancing in pitch-black areas of the video, or do lights and shiny white surfaces look to be like a dull grey? You have a brightness and contrast problem.
Tweak the two sliders until everything looks right. A quick “cheat” is turning the Brightness down until the darkest point of a dark frame looks as black as your screen can get, then increasing the Contrast until the brightest part (like a light or a shiny metal surface) looks the opposite, as bright as your screen can show.
If your whites and blacks look OK but somehow every frame feels washed out or, the opposite, every shape pronounced like a cartoon, tweak the Gamma value.
Sharpen and Film Grain
To people with perfect eyesight, the results of the following tweaks will look horrid. If, nevertheless, every video looks too fuzzy to you, enabling the Sharpen effect and increasing its Sigma value might make you feel like you’re wearing brand new glasses, boosting the finer details.
Don’t overdo it, or your video will turn to a late-Picasso in motion. Stay left of the first mark.
Film Grain emulates the annoying noise that was noticeable in analog video signals. The reason you might want it enabled is that the pixels it adds in flatter areas of a frame and help our used-to-detecting-motion eyes perceive more detail.
It might be an illusion, but try it out on a low setting, and you might find the result a surprising upgrade.
Case-by-case scenarios
Those simple tweaks will help you upgrade every video you watch in VLC – or at least tailor its looks to your liking. Every person is different, so what looks too colorful to one might feel like greyscale to another.
It’s not only a matter of personal preference, as each individual video is a different case. As an extreme example, colorful anime videos usually need a different set of tweaks compared to old Hitchcock thrillers.
It’s unfortunate that, at least as far as we know, VLC doesn’t offer an option to create tweak profiles and every change you make will apply either to the active video (if you click “Close” after the tweaks) or to everything VLC plays from now on (if you choose to “Save” them).
OK’s real life started at around 10, when he got his first computer - a Commodore 128. Since then, he’s been melting keycaps by typing 24/7, trying to spread The Word Of Tech to anyone interested enough to listen. Or, rather, read.
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