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VideoLAN has released version 3.0.0 of the VLC media player for Windows, Linux, BSD, Android, and macOS. The new version is billed as enabling hardware decoded playback of 4K, 8K, and 360-degree video (in a demonstration video, VLC 3.0.0 is shown playing 8K 48fps 360-degree video on a Samsung Galaxy S8).
3.0.0 adds support for (not exhaustive):
- Network browsing of distant filesystems (using SMB, FTP, SFTP, NFS...)
- External audio tracks (ac3, m4a, aac, dts...)
- 12-bit color and (10-bit) high dynamic range
- Chromecast (an open source implementation of the proprietary Google Cast protocol)
- 360-degree video/audio
- Ambisonic audio and more than 8 audio channels
- Audio passthrough
- Blu-Ray Java menus
- H.265/HEVC hardware decoding on Windows, Android, OS X, iOS
- AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) video, and Daala (elements of Daala have been incorporated into AV1). VideoLAN is a member of the Alliance for Open Media, which develops the AV1 format.
Linux/BSD default video output is now OpenGL, instead of Xvideo.
The 3.0.x branch of VLC will be maintained as long-term support versions and will be the last releases on Windows XP (with significant limitations), Vista, macOS 10.7, 10.8 & 10.9, iOS 7 & 8, Android 2.x, 3.x, 4.0.x & 4.1.x, and the last to run on compilers before gcc 5.0 and clang 3.4, or equivalent.
From VLC Android developer Geoffrey Métais's blog post about the release, which discusses why Chromecast support took so long to add, as well as other missing features that have now been added to the Android version:
Chromecast support is everywhere and VLC took years to get it, right, but there are plenty of good reasons for it:
First of all, VideoLAN is a nonprofit organization and not a company. There are few developers paid for making VLC, most of them do it in their free time. That's how you get VLC for free and without any ads!
Also, VLC is 100% Open Source and Chromecast SDK isn't: We had to develop our very own Chromecast stack by ourselves. This is also why there is no voice actions for VLC (except with Android Auto), [and] we cannot use Google Play Services.
Furthermore, Chromecast is not designed to play local video files: When you watch a Youtube video, your phone is just a remote controller, nothing more. Chromecast streams the video from youtube.com. That's where it becomes complicated, Chromecast only supports very few codecs number, let's say h264. Google ensures that your video is encoded in h264 format on youtube.com, so streaming is simple. With VLC, you have media of any format. So VLC has to be a http server like youtube.com, and provide the video in a Chromecast compatible format. And of course in real time, which is challenging on Android because phones are less powerful than computers.
At last, VLC was not designed to display a video on another screen. It took time to properly redesign VLC to nicely support it. The good news is we did not make a Chromecast specific support, it is generic renderers: in the next months we can add UPnP support for example, to cast on any UPnP box or TV!
Also at The Verge and Tom's Hardware.
Related: Stable Release of VLC 1.0 for Android
VLC 2.0 for Android Released
EU Offers Cash Bounties to Improve the Security of VLC Media Player
Google Won't Take Down Pirate VLC With 5M Downloads (Update: They Have Taken it Down)
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Sunday February 11 2018, @07:04PM
I suppose ffmpeg is the opposite of the simplicity you're looking for? And yet, I find ffprobe pretty useful for getting the details of a video file. And once I understood the parameters ffmpeg needed, and made a script, it wasn't so bad. Bit of a learning curve, yes, and there are some gotchas. Like, there's a bug in which ffmpeg's default audio settings fail to properly transcode if the source is 5.1 surround sound.
Which kind of mobile phone? I understand Google has made quite a push to make WebM (a container format) containing either VP8 or VP9 video, with either Vorbis or Opus audio, work natively on Android systems. Need Android 5 for Opus, and Android 4.4 for VP9. I did find that a recent version of VLC (2.5, I think) sort of supports playback of WebM with VP9 video and Opus audio in my ancient tablet running Android 4.1, but the tablet's hardware wasn't fast enough-- showed only one frame from the video while it played the audio. Really have to use something supported by the tablet's hardware, which means (sigh) H.264. Maybe VP8 would work, but I haven't tried it. Also, WebM works in browsers.
This is the script I'm using ATM, for transcoding mpeg2 ripped from DVDs, to WebM. (Using MakeMKV to rip the DVDs-- copy protection DRM crap, you know, otherwise ffmpeg could rip them.) Need a bit more script fu, like, a variable to hold the bit rates, and to grab that info from the command line, so I don't have to edit 2 places in the script when I want a different bit rate. The aformat parameter is to deal with the bug with 5.1 audio I mentioned above, -map 0 is to grab all the streams including the subtitles, then -sn is to skip the subtitles.
ffmpeg -i $1 -map 0 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 300k -c:a libopus -b:a 48k -sn -af aformat=channel_layouts="7.1|5.1|stereo" -pass 1 -f webm -y /dev/null && ffmpeg -i $1 -map 0 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 300k -c:a libopus -b:a 48k -sn -af aformat=channel_layouts="7.1|5.1|stereo" -pass 2 ${1%.*}.webm
The above 300k is still too low a bitrate to handle very dark scenes, though it does well on everything else I've seen. I find that a bit puzzling in that DVD is only 480 lines, while a 360k bitrate is good enough to handle 1280x720 video, but I suppose the additional data in going from 480 to 720 lines isn't that much. Perhaps I'm wasting my time with a DVD source and ought to work with a Blu-Ray source instead. Which means, if it's a popular movie, the easiest thing to do is just download a freaking torrent.
I haven't worked out how to get the subtitles, but WebM can handle them, with WebVTT, a text based format. A problem is, I gather that DVD subtitles are graphical in nature, already rendered into whatever font at whatever size the movie producer decided to use, so, have to OCR them. Or, I understand that there are websites that specialize in movie subtitles. Could download the text.