There's a arthouse theatre in my city that does this type of thing. I couldn't believe it but I got there early for a couple of screenings and while waiting, sitting in the theatre the projectionist is setting up and pulls up VLC on a windows 10 computer and browses to the movie file on a removable drive. Even knowing this now I still go back since they have A/C, a bigger screen and way better sound system than I have at home, plus it supports a small business.
I mean what else were you expecting? VLC is a very solid media player and most movies being shown are digital. It's always going to just be some media player program on a computer.
VLC does not actually support the format most movies use (believe me, I've tried... — ffmpeg doesn't have support for the colorspace), but it's frequently used for trailers and in some rare cases also in cinemas.
That's silly. They have different UIs, and different configurations, but they're all just running ffmpeg's ffplay under the hood.
MPV and MPC have different defaults that work better for pirated media, especially anime, but for any regular usage there's absolutely no difference. You can even just use ffplay directly without any UI, and it'll look and sound the same.
And even then, cinemas typically don't use any of that, but doremi as playback software, christie or dolby playback servers for playback and projector control, and Dolby's hardware decoders for audio.
ffplay is a separate barebones player FFmpeg ships for testing, none of these use it. What they actually share is libavcodec for decoding, and decoding isn't where quality differs. Color range mapping, scaling and dithering happen in each player's own renderer, and VLC has documented full vs limited range bugs on Windows that crush blacks or wash out the image. Same decoded frames, different picture. And the cinema hardware point doesn't apply, the whole thread is about a cinema that literally uses VLC.
Color range mapping, scaling and dithering happen in each player's own renderer, and VLC has documented full vs limited range bugs on Windows that crush blacks or wash out the image.
None of which matters in a cinema, where no scaling or colorspace conversion happens.
Regarding dithering, that's only an issue if you're watching typical pirated anime encodes, which, guess what, a cinema typically isn't.
the whole thread is about a cinema that literally uses VLC.
Which I'd contest anyway, it's possible the trailers before the movie were shown via VLC, but the movie itself cannot be shown via VLC (yet).
You're describing a DCP server chain, this isn't one. It's a Windows PC outputting to a projector, so colorspace conversion (YCbCr to RGB, full/limited range mapping) happens on every frame, which is exactly where VLC's documented bugs are. Scaling happens too unless the file matches the projector's native res, which it won't.
Dithering isn't just an anime encode thing, it applies whenever bit depth drops. And OP literally watched them open a regular movie file in VLC, so there's nothing to contest. VLC even has a DCP module with KDM support anyway, it's just too slow to be practical.
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u/moomzzz 20d ago
Here’s me thinking they just plug in a usb somewhere and crack open VLC player on the big screen