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Huawei's aggressive battery management on some of its newer phones can cause background apps to be shut down unexpectedly. This has led to one-star reviews for affected apps, such as VLC on Google Play. In response, VideoLAN has blacklisted these phones:
The negative reviews are a result of Huawei's aggressive battery management and tendency to kill background apps, which directly affects VLC's background audio playback feature. Huawei users on VLC's forums are well aware of the issue. It's possible to manually disable these battery optimizations and have the app function properly in the background, but VLC claims that people often don't know how to do that, so they blame the app instead.
The VLC team is specifically blacklisting the Huawei P8, P10, and P20, but users of those devices can still manually download the APK from VLC's website if they're interested in using the player; they're just being blocked from getting it via Google Play. Huawei Honor phones aren't affected. In a tweet translated from French, VideoLAN said, "Blocking normal Android functions is totally abnormal. In that case, why not kill all the apps, and keep the phone off, that would save even more battery!"
VideoLAN said that Huawei refused to whitelist VLC (to prevent the battery-saving feature from killing the application) while whitelisting "competitors". Later, the project got "an answer from Huawei", but the solution could take weeks to arrive.
See also: VideoLAN was right to ban Huawei phones from downloading VLC, but it's users that lose (archive)
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:01PM (7 children)
VLC seems to be getting worse on mobile. Right now, the current version is not able to continue playing when i replug the connector, but crashes. Atleast on my phone. It has worked fine before.
The most annoying bug is still the variable pitch bug, where VLC changes the pitch of the song, especially in the beginning. No fix even though that bug has been there who knows how long.
I have other players too, but unfortunately the playlist handling in others seem worse than in VLC. For example you can't search the songs from the playlist or the playlist dissapears on lock screen and after opening there's the song status-display on instead, and you can't choose certain song to be played next etc.
I just don't understand. There's about a million media players out there (desktop and mobile), but none of them are actually good. And before someone suggest i make my own or change some open source player, i do not have the skills or time. Sorry.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:11PM
I recently started using it on iOS and it is lackluster and difficult to use. Skips tracks for no reason, can’t toggle random play. Just bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:20PM (2 children)
Is "Preferences | Advanced | Performance | Time-stretching audio" ticked?
In automatic mode on my phone, landscape videos play as portrait and vice versa. F#$%!!!!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)
It is, i don't know why it should be doing any stretching though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:38PM
The pitch bug [videolan.org] you referenced is VLC attempting to sync playback to the hardware clock. It would be less detectable if, instead of a tiny pitch change, they used a timing change on faster hardware. Obviously they don't.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:40PM (1 child)
I put VLC on my Chromebook. I would call it the best of a bad bunch. It has done fine on the desktop and recent major versions have fixed a lot of the annoying bugs.
One interesting thing is that Chromebooks will soon support Chromebook apps, Android apps, and sandboxed Linux applications... and there's a VLC version for all 3.
I avoid playing videos on my crappy Android phone so I don't even have VLC on there. But I would not be surprised if the Android version is getting less attention than the Linux/Windows/Mac version.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:15PM
I installed the Android VLC on my Pixelbook. It works. But I can have a superior experience running VLC under Xfce chrooted with Crouton. The Linux VLC has better controls and UI. And it is native Intel code. I don't actually know whether the Android VLC is ARM code, or whether there is an Intel compiled version and the Play store would automagically select it.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 31 2018, @06:24PM
That I use it is because iTunes has always made me even _angrier_:
I have a couple tracks that I ripped with iTunes back when my ex gave me my very first MP3 player. That those tracks both exhibit iTunes' stale buffer bug is evidenced by short snippets of entirely different tracks appearing in them.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]