One of my least favorite features of VLC (tied with network stream interruptions killing the playback rather than reconnecting) is that VLC guesses your audio hardware's sampling rate itself (rather than using the hardware's self-reported rate), and resamples even audio-only files that match your hardware's self-reported rate. And every time you seek in a file, VLC's guess of the hardware sampling rate is thrown off, causing VLC to start pitch-shifting the sound just enough (usually just barely, but sometimes up to 1 semitone) for you to notice and start doubting your sanity, if the audio pitch actually changed or if you're hallucinating things. There's a long-running bug report at https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/14287.
I think PipeWire does something similar to synchronize multiple audio devices without a shared word clock, but I haven't tested how much its rate analyzer drifts when starting/stopping playback or in steady state.
> tied with network stream interruptions killing the playback rather than reconnecting
So I'm not alone in hating this! How come this was never fixed?
I didn't want to switch from MX Player (Android), which worked quite well, for ages, but finally gave up because with MX Player you have to go look for some codecs.zip every (major?) update. (must be related to the licenses)
On top of VLC not being able to reconnect to the source, it also doesn't show the title of the video. So every time the stream dies I have to remember which episode I was on.
Exactly the same thing happens with mpv if you shift the audio manually. I experienced that recently. After shifting, whenever I go forward or backward it gets out of sync + the performance decreases ( without the shift going forward or backwards is instant)
I have experienced this with IPTV on Kodi, but I've only ever noticed it on the BBC News countdown tune, sining a semitone up and down. AFAIK that's using ffmpeg
I think PipeWire does something similar to synchronize multiple audio devices without a shared word clock, but I haven't tested how much its rate analyzer drifts when starting/stopping playback or in steady state.