VLC is adding AirPlay support and will reach 3 billion downloads
VLC, the open-source video player app, is announcing two major milestones from CES today. The development team, Videolan — along with Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the lead developers — told Variety at CES that it'll be adding AirPlay support, allowing users to transmit videos from their iPhone (or Android) to their Apple TV.
The update could be released for the primary VLC app in "about a month," for free. However, VLC tells The Verge there's no specific release date yet.
[...] The second major milestone for VLC is that it’s closing in on 3 billion user downloads.
Here is the bug tracker for the 4.0.0 release.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @04:51AM (7 children)
But it's still not as good as mpv.
(Score: 2) by pbnjoe on Friday January 11 2019, @05:23AM (6 children)
In terms of abilities, yes, but I'm glad that both exist to cover everyone's use cases. Anyone can figure out how to use VLC without instruction and mpv has a ton of configuration options to really rice it and neat abilities such as the youtube-dl hook (which I use extensively). Both overlap in terms of what you can install them on and what they can play (most anywhere/anything). I keep both installed.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @03:08PM
I use mpv myself, because that's all I need. However if you want to play a DVD or BluRay I'm sure everyone would prefer VLC. The great libraries VLC create for other projects to use are worthy of a Medal of Freedom.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday January 11 2019, @04:41PM (4 children)
I just checked out mpv on windows. The build I downloaded requires you to run a .bat installer and includes a .bat uninstaller. Why would you use a .bat to install/uninstall. That's insane. That wasn't even common in the bad good old days. I'll be sticking with VLC for windows. I may give mpv a try on Linux, if I remember it.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by pbnjoe on Friday January 11 2019, @06:15PM (3 children)
Oh, interesting, I've only ever used it on Linux. That is a bad system, you're right. If you do give it another shot, be prepared to invest a bit of time into learning it. It's made to be used from the terminal and with keyboard controls, as it has only a bare minimum playback control GUI. There are "front-ends" made for it that give it a GUI such as SMPlayer, though.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday January 11 2019, @06:35PM
Interesting, as it was being compared to VLC, I assumed it had a native GUI. Perhaps, instead of double-clicking on the executable I unzipped, I should have done opened up the command line and entered mpv my.mp3 instead?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday January 11 2019, @06:40PM (1 child)
Ah, that did the trick. Interesting thing though, is when I opened the mpv executable the first time it just brought up a blank white box. After I played an mp3 file from the command line. I was able to open the executable, the box was black with a giant icon and instructions to drag/drop a file or url onto it.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by pbnjoe on Friday January 11 2019, @10:49PM
Glad it's working for you now. The correct behaviour is indeed the latter. Enjoy! If you stream videos pretty much anywhere [github.io], give the youtube-dl tie in a try as well. Cuts all the cruft so you have just the video. If you just want the audio, you can pass --no-video or give --ytdl-format= a number of an audio only stream, such as 251 on YouTube. That can be found by running youtube-dl -F $LINK. That way you can just stream it instead of having to download the file like with youtube-dl alone.