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)
Related Stories
Tom's Hardware reports
[VideoLAN Client] tends to have better codec and format support than most players out there, offering MKV, MP4, AVI, Ogg, MOV, FLAC, TS, M2TS, and AAC. It's also open source and free.
[February 5], we got the news that VLC 1.0 has finally been released as stable, losing the beta tag. VLC will continue to keep a beta branch for the braver users who want to get all the latest updates first and help the group behind the open source organization, VideoLAN, to discover and fix the bugs in the new versions.
[...]From the changelog in the Play Store is the following statement:
"This release fixes ARMv8 processors, Android 5.0 crashes, and minor improvements. The 0.9.x series is major release with hardware decoding and a new interface available in dark or white colors. It integrates DVD iso and menu support, an equalizer, playlist management, Widi [sic] screens support, and updated SD cards detection. Hardware acceleration is now enabled by default on 4.3+ and has better subtitles support. Software decoding has been accelerated too."
VLC 1.0 for Android can be downloaded[1] from the Play Store now.
[1] A blank page now. Google Search is no help.
Martin Brinkmann reports from gHacks:
VLC 2.0 is available for all Android versions 2.2 and newer, and [is] already available on Google Play and various third-party stores.
Major new features
- Video Playlists
- Download subtitles
- Network Browsing
- Pop-out window
- Other features of note
- Supports favorite folders and URLS
- The history, notifications, and control have been rewritten
- Faster decoding and playback for all video types
The EU is offering cash bounties to improve the security of the VLC media player. The VLC bounties are a proof-of-concept test to learn how to run future bounties via Free and Open Source Software Audit 2 (FOSSA-2). In this trial run, bounties which range from $100 for low-severity bugs and up to $2,000 for critical bugs are offered via HackerOne.
According to Wikipedia: "VLC media player (commonly known as VLC) is a free and open-source, portable and cross-platform media player and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for desktop operating systems and mobile platforms, such as Windows 10 Mobile, Windows Phone, Android, Tizen, iOS."
Much more information, as well as downloads, are available on the VLC homepage.
From TorrentFreak:
VideoLAN, the team behind the VLC media player, recently revealed that they turned down several tens of millions of euros to bundle their software with advertising. The same cannot be said of third-party developers cloning VLC for profit, however. An ad-supported clone discovered on Google Play has a staggering five to ten million downloads and breaches VLC's GPL license, yet Google refuses to take it down.
[...] Aside from its incredible functionality, VLC (operated by the VideoLAN non-profit) has won the hearts of Internet users for other key reasons, not least its commitment to being free and open source software. While it's true to say that VLC doesn't cost a penny, the term 'free' actually relates to the General Public License (GPL) under which it's distributed.
[...] Since VLC is extremely popular and just about as 'free' as software can get, people get extremely defensive when they perceive that a third-party is benefiting from the software without adhering to the terms of the generous GPL license. That was the case beginning a few hours ago when veteran Reddit user MartinVanBallin pointed out a piece of software on the Google Play Store.
"They took VLC, put in ads, didn't attribute VLC or follow the open source license, and they're using Media Player Classics icon," MartinVanBallin wrote.
Update: The app is no longer on Google Play.
YouTube, Netflix Publish First Videos Transcoded Using AV1
YouTube has uploaded about a dozen videos that were transcoded using the AV1 codec, which was introduced earlier this year. The test sequences are expected to give Google as well as developers of browsers, decoders, and encoders an understanding how to better use the new royalty-free codec. Netflix is also testing AV1 codec and offers everyone a video in different resolutions and featuring various color depth.
To date, YouTube has added 14 videos transcoded using the AV1 codec to a special playlist. The list includes various types of content, including a talking-head program, musical clips, action videos, and demo footages from RED and Blackmagic Design. YouTube says that this type of content represents a large share of videos hosted by the service, so it makes a lot of sense for the company to learn how they behave on various devices in terms of performance, power consumption, and overall stability.
At present, AV1 support is available only in those Chrome 70 and Firefox Nightly builds released after September 12th. Meanwhile, the test videos use AV1 for resolutions that are lower than 480p, underscoring the fact that they are meant to test decoders that, for the moment, are going to be anything but optimized. This is on top of the fact that at the moment there are no hardware decoders that support AV1, so everything is being handled in software by the CPU to begin with. Eventually the codec will be used for content in 4K+ ultra-high-def resolutions, along with HDR and wide color gamuts.
Also at 9to5Google:
Users on Chrome 70 and Firefox Nightly builds after September 13th can test it by making sure media.av1.enabled and media.mediasource.experimental.enabled prefs are set.
chrome://flags/#enable-av1-decoder
Once running a supported browser, users can head to YouTube's TestTube experiments list and select "'Prefer AV1 for SD."
Related: VLC 3.0.0 Released, With Better Hardware Decoding and Support for HDR, 360-Degree Video, Chromecast
Alliance for Open Media Announces Release of AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) Specification
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.
Related: EU Offers Cash Bounties to Improve the Security of VLC Media Player
VLC 3.0.0 Released, With Better Hardware Decoding and Support for HDR, 360-Degree Video, Chromecast
VideoLAN Blacklists Huawei Phones on Google Play
"Google, this is bogus as hell," Paul Vixie ranted on Internet Engineering Task Force mail list this week. The IETF mail list is where the people who create the internet's technologies converse.
The post was noticed because Paul Vixie is an Internet Hall of Fame engineer known for his pioneering work on the modern Domain Name Service (DNS).
And it is how Google was using DNS in its Chromecast Ultra streaming device that ticked him off.
[...] [Vixie] bought a Google Chromecast. But when he went to set it up, he found it doing something no device in his network is allowed to do: It wouldn't use his own, private DNS server. It would only use Google's public server.
Related: Paul Vixie: New TLDs a Money Grab, and a Mistake
VLC 3.0.0 Released, With Better Hardware Decoding and Support for HDR, 360-Degree Video, Chromecast
Paul Vixie on the Benefits of Running DNS Services Locally
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @11:26AM (4 children)
The real question is: does it convert %20's and %5D's and other crap in the URI field of the playlist to something actually useful? Or include a readable "filename" field?
Last time I checked, it was impossible to get human-readable filenames in the playlist window, and the feature request for it was either denied or ignored, I don't remember which. I tried to dig through the source code to see if I could implement it myself, but to no avail :/ It seemed that I'd need to get familiar with a large portion of the codebase to do it, and that'd require a sizable time commitment...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:55PM (3 children)
maybe if stupid freaking windows users would quit putting spaces in everything... of course you'd probably hear gabriel's trumpet if that happened.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by arslan on Monday February 12 2018, @12:39AM (1 child)
I dunno, the computer should cater to my preferences, not the other way around. Most users prefer to have space breaks between words (for English at least, not sure about other languages)... no wonder "The year of the linux desktop" never got anywhere
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 12 2018, @04:48PM
I'm thinking Germans may not care as much or at least be a bit more used to it. "rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" is an actual word, though obsolete. https://theweek.com/articles/463500/8-favorite-ridiculously-long-german-words [theweek.com]
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @03:00AM
I count a single space in the name of this file I just loaded in VLC: %E7%AC%AC01%E8%A9%B1%20%E3%80%8C%E5%A7%8B%E3%81%BE%E3%82%8A%E3%81%A8%E7%B5%82%E3%82%8F%E3%82%8A%E3%81%AE%E3%83%97%E3%83%AD%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B0%E3%80%8D.mp4
"Stupid freaking Windows users"? Get off of your high horse, you moron. An occasional %20 instead of a space is not *that* much of a problem, but as soon as you have non-English filenames, it's all line-noise. Unicode is 30 years old, FFS! Even browser address bars convert codes into readable characters!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:05PM (5 children)
One of the features that VLC has always lacked is the ability to auto-enable subtitles for foreign-language segments on DVDs. For example, if you watch the Game of Thrones DVDs on a normal DVD player, you'll get subtitles when people start speaking Dothraki or whatever. In VLC, you won't and you'll wonder why the folks at HBO thought everyone in their audience was fluent in a made-up language. VLC's bug tracker is sufficiently painful to use that I gave up trying to follow the status of this feature.
Maybe I'm the only person who still watches DVDs, but they're currently the only way of getting most things without DRM (DVD DRM is so completely broken that it's effectively nonexistent).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @03:47PM
You are not the only one who still watches them. I have thousands of them. In fact I have so many I rarely use streaming.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:58PM (3 children)
there's a file sharing website called thepiratebay.org, if you ever decide to quit groveling to your masters. nothing personal. just saying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @01:05AM
Don't forget the 7 proxies. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday February 12 2018, @03:30AM (1 child)
Usage caps. Limited bandwidth. Can get a lot of movies by making a trip to the library. Used DVD's are also cheap at the thrift store.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @04:15AM
Is it still a thing where people visit friends? [google.com]
Do you take with you a hard drive full of media so that your friends can make a copy?
Do you have an empty partition on that where you can copy his new media files?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:43PM (2 children)
I tried the Chromecast thing. I've been waiting for it for ages and I tried it earlier in the week when the announcement first came out.
Result:
- Could not find option with looking it up. Hint... Playback... Renderer... hope your Chromecast name just appears in a mDNS search of the local network (so presumably, it's doing an mDNS every time you go in that menu, or constantly in the background all the time?)
- Casts an MP3. It spun for a while. Came up with the most boring interface. Played it okay. Tried to skip... it just spun and never came back.
- The Chromecast then wouldn't switch or cast anything else, so I switched it off and back on.
- Tried an MP4... it showed the most boring interface again on the Chromecast screen... got the filename... literally never did anything else.
I gave up at that point. I'm not having that shit happen in the middle of watching a movie!
Hey, guys, there's a Chromecast SDK. You could just use a closed DLL to do the same properly and it might work enough for people to use it, which might prompt an open-source conversion at a later date. Isn't that what had to happen with DVD, Blu-Ray, etc. anyway?
At the moment, it's just a way to stop the Chromecast working, requiring a reset or a long timeout to get it back.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Sunday February 11 2018, @01:58PM
Chromecast is shit. I know it is not the same, but amazon fire stick actually is very useful..
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday February 12 2018, @12:43AM
Huh? I just use the Home app on my android to cast/mirror screen and launch VLC on my android device. I don't see a big deal with that, once VLC starts playing on my android device, the screen shortcuts seems to work fine. Sure its not an app native cast but its works and not a big hassle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:53PM (1 child)
VLC is that player that will keep hammering the gpu despite the video being paused and minimized by rendering a still frame I think.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @03:15PM
Sounds like it might be mining some crypto.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday February 11 2018, @01:19PM (4 children)
Kinda odd, when I use the in-application feature to check for updates it says there are none and that I'm using the latest one. Yet it's not 3.0.0 but rather 2.2.6. Guess it will require some kind of stand-alone-update.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Sunday February 11 2018, @02:00PM (1 child)
I think updater only works on minor versions. I may be wrong but I had the same issue when they went 2.0.0
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday February 11 2018, @02:08PM
That sounds familiar, I think I had that issue before to. So it might very well be the case. But it just feels like a missed opportunity on their part not to have it included or to say something like "there is a new major update available that requires a manual installation".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @06:01PM (1 child)
get a big boy's OS and use it's package manager to update every package on the whole system, instead of manually updating each app like you have nothing better to do.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @08:17PM
Does that 'big boy' OS include systemd? Maybe someday the package manager will get around to updating to the latest version. I have a few dozen packages I have to 'keep on top of' because the main repos have not upgraded in 2 years for those particular packages.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Sunday February 11 2018, @02:53PM
snap install --classic vlc
this will allow it to use the /dev/dvb/* devices, the one *really* useful feature when you have no TV and just a USB decoder.
You may have to "snap remove vlc" first, but I was nicely surprised this worked out of the box.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday February 11 2018, @03:03PM (2 children)
My issues with 3.0.0 were subtitles mysteriously turning off (near the beginning of a video, not the whole time), and the end of video chapters cutting off some milliseconds (noticeable because the audio transition is too abrupt). There was a crash or two on opening some files but it wasn't reproducible.
Let's hope 3.0.1 lands fast.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @03:35PM (1 child)
oh?
vlc can be a media-server from which a google-chromecast-dongle can be directed to pull/stream media from?
how about for vlc to be a virtual display, playing and decoding media that can be mirrored to/by a miracast enabled receiver
(plugged into a TV's HDMI or present in it already)?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday February 11 2018, @03:42PM
https://geoffreymetais.github.io/features/vlc-30/ [github.io]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @03:51PM
I am liking the new bluray menu support (looking at you john wick with your 200+ chapter options, you sly folks). Which means KODI should have a decent implementation soon.
Just make sure you set JAVA_HOME correctly. I had to set mine as the JDK installer does not set it on my box for some reason.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Sunday February 11 2018, @04:34PM (2 children)
If this has been added some time along the way, I'd appreciate pointers in how to access/use it.
It seems that using VLC to transform a source to another 'construct' requires knowledge of codecs, containers, etc.
As it now stands, it seems like I have to do a whole lot of trial-and-error. Select source. Select destination file. Choose transformation parameters. Transform. Test on local system. Copy to another system (e.g. mobile phone). Test on mobile. Does not play. Ugh. Repeat.
What I would love to see is a way to point at an existing file and say "whatever settings it takes to make that kind of a file -- get and use those for my output." Then, I could just point at, say, a CD as my source, specify a pathname for the destination, and hit "Go".
So, as long as I have at least one file that works on my system, I could use that as a prototype to make other files of the same format. Say, that instead of creating an .mp3/.mp4 I wanted to make an ogg vorbis file? Or a FLAC? As long as I can find at least one file that works on my target system(s), I should only need to refer to that file and I would be all set.
Bonus: Maybe offer an interim step where I can could tweak the derived/loaded settings and (optionally) export those for later re-use/re-import.
Is this already supported? If not, is there a simple[ish] way to do this?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @07:13PM
So transcoding? There are plenty of dedicated solutions for that, some come with such tunable presets.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Sunday February 11 2018, @06:39PM (6 children)
This thing sounds more like a fucking OS than a media player. Should change the logo to a stopped-up kitchen sink overflowing with shit. Why does the media player need networking client code built in? Why does it need to be a chromecast server? Java vm internal for blu-ray menus? Can I just have an application again? Same with web browsers, whole OS just to do something mundane.
This is what you get when people say the OS no longer matters. Applications become their own operating systems with millions of lines of code to navigate a neglected maze of cruft. That cruft is simply the result of stagnated OS design which was left behind in the name of progress for building abstracted virtual machines on top of the cruft aka web and cloud. It has as stranded us with 30+ year old OS design philosophies and creating mountains of unnecessary code to work around issues which should have (and were: plan9) been fixed decades ago.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @08:14PM (5 children)
Network support is one of the things that has been in VLC since the early stages of that project. The idea was beefy server that can transcode -> low end box with frame buffer. Think nice high end box circa 2001 and a crap laptop from that era.
These days yeah it is not needed as much. But there was a point in time where decoding mpeg2 in realtime was a strain for many boxes out there. Plex vs KODI is the same sort of thing. Where Plex has a network-centric model where the 'big box transcodes' and the end nodes (usually rasberry PIs) are simple framebuffer players. KODI which Plex is based on is on the other hand the client is full blown client on all boxes.
Java is needed as the bluray spec calls for it. Don't want it? Do not install java and the player will fall back to the old path and just show the first largest video in the topic list (does not work always). This is also BTW one of the first open source projects with menu support for bluray. That has been under construction for 4 years. Sony did not exactly make it easy.
creating mountains of unnecessary code to work around issues which should have (and were: plan9) been fixed decades ago
If you read the announcement for 4.0 they are throwing out older OSs lower than and including Vista. The 3.x branch has been under construction for at least 3 years. All by volunteers in their spare time. So I think I can cut them a bit of slack on the time frame. It is not exactly their full time jobs...
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:18PM (4 children)
No, my point is the team is forced to build a bloated application to work around the cruft. That is what I have a problem with.
And as for bloat in the application itself, it tries to really be a kitchen sink. Don't get me wrong, it's a great program and I use it as my media player of choice. But it has a lot of excess features thrown in that I wish were separate like blue ray support and streaming servers. Just give me a compact, stable, sleek player that can handle any codec and source with good hardware acceleration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @11:31PM (1 child)
Can't you just compile it yourself and not enable those features you don't want? Or just use mpv or go even more minimal and use ffplay directly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @12:39AM
This will be the year of the Gentoo desktop!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @03:10AM
Unfortunately, that's the age-old problem of "one person's cruft is another's core feature". At least it doesn't read email [catb.org] yet... I think.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Monday February 12 2018, @07:28PM
How is it bloated? Because it's not yet another mplayer clone? Sure likes like mplayer is what you actually want here.
VLC isn't just a player, it's a goddamn video swiss army knife. Where many (particularly Windows) users would have one program to do conversion, a different program for playing optical media, a different program for viewing network streams, a different program for local capture devices, a different program for sending network streams, a different program for ripping...I just go "Oh, I need to do something for video...I'll use VLC." Instead of installing and keeping track of twenty different bloated pieces of garbage, I get to install a single compact utility that just freakin' works. If you only ever use one feature, then sure, it's "bloated" for that feature. But that's because it's NOT just a media player.
The value of VLC is not that it plays video. The value of VLC is that it can accomplish pretty much any one-off video tasks you might have. Girlfriend asks how to rip a DVD? VLC. Need to stream your desktop to someone over the network using entirely your own infrastructure? You only need one piece of software -- VLC. Guy at work asks for help transcoding a video? Give him VLC. Don't have any software to capture stills from your webcam? Sure you do -- VLC. People ask me for help with their computers all the time, and if that question includes the word "video" my answer is probably going to be VLC. I don't have to Duck it, I don't have to learn a dozen or more tools for four or five different platforms, just three letters answers all of it: VLC.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday February 11 2018, @09:11PM (1 child)
hurray!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:34PM
Now we just need vsync/gsync/freesync capable displays (shitty 1366x768 laptop user here).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by zzarko on Tuesday February 13 2018, @12:04AM
In previous versions, I have tried numerous times to instruct VLC to display subtitles in black space below the video, but it was always complicated and unintuitive, and that was the main reason I didn't use it as main video player. Can someone confirm if this is solved or not in 3.0?
C64 BASIC: 1 a=rnd(-52028):fori=1to8:a=rnd(1):next:fori=1to5:?chr$(rnd(1)*26+65);:next