Gonna be real honest here, I would have taken that in a heartbeat. It’s an open source project, I could disappear with my money and the project could be continued from a different fork without ads. The only thing you’re really sacrificing is your reputation and with enough money I don’t care.
I moved away from VLC because of the somewhat boring UI. Then I used potplayer, then I discovered MPV - which is awesome because it’s so performant you can easily customize it.
But I think VLC helped pioneer the library that allows decoding and playing videos without the mess that were video codec drivers on desktop.
I tried to like MPV, I just can’t, potplayer lets me easily customize the subtitles so easily.
If I try to play 3 random videos in VLC, they all three will play perfectly. If I try those same three on anything else, at least one of them will be buggy in some way.
Yes you can argue there could be encoding problems in the video file of that buggy one, but somehow VLC just always works. Shit’s unbelievably good, so I won’t be switching.
I remember the first time I encountered the Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) media type which ultimately lead me to downloading VLC as it was the only player that could handle it at the time
Same story. I even remember where the files came from - ripped from Daft Punk’s Homework album (I had and have the physical CD)
I used to use media player classic. it seemed good until I used VLC which was already way ahead of it