[PatK]

Reports of Dell denying warranty claims on your speakers if VLC is installed. Dell claims VLC has been boosting audio beyond safe hardware norms, while the author of VLC denies this and gives an explanation of what is transpiring, meanwhile some Dell customers are left cold.

http://en.community.dell.com/support-for...92918.aspx

VLC author rebuttle

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7205875

Slash users pipes in.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/02...blames-vlc

[TugboatBill]

Why would anyone buy a Dell?

[PatK]

It's thin edge of the wedge, if Dell can get away with this nonsense.. will all players be subject to this? The next thing you hear is XBMC on a computer voids this or that and it spreads like wild fire to manufactures who want to opt out of warranty claims. But more importantly it switches bad hardware design responsibilities onto software engineering, then further shuffles it down the road to 3rd party software installations.

People don't buy Dell, it's what they are given to take home

[DJ_Izumi]

That 12dB pre-amp in WinAmp is no different. This is something that can't end well for Dell. :X

[Prof Yaffle]

Presumably, using really large fonts breaks the screens as well...

[bluray]

Why would anyone buy a Dell?

I owns gazillion of Dell PC's at home and work, and I haven't have one die on me all these years. It's good PC's in my book. Of course it will void the warranty when one choose to install non-Dell software that ultimately break it. It's normal that Dell will not fix your speaker if they found out that non-Dell software (VLC) broke it. I almost guaranty that if you told other manufactures VLC broke the speaker, they will void the warranty the same way as Dell.

When it happen one should be smart enough to simply un-install VLC before he/she call their tech support.....

[tential]

This would be like saying "Because you can change the EQ on itunes to +12 that if you have itunes on your PC your speakerse are void!!!!!"

It's quite ridiculous. Only thing thouhg is VLC does make it REALLY easy to boost volume up (and I thank them for that it's so annoying when you get a quiet porn errr i mean video."

Anyway, it's screwed up but I don't even buy dells anyway. And if that was their warranty I wuold just say I don't have VLC.... Lets be real they're not going to really look. I've done crazy stupid things with my products and companies have always accepted my warranty/return.

[teeedubb]

If only we could punish manufacturers for installing their crap-ware on PC's...

[jjd-uk]

Simple, clone HDD as it comes from Dell, if PC goes faulty then clone HDD and remove VLC, if PC won't boot use another PC to restore the original fresh from factory clone to the HDD.