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
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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.
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)
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: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 11 2019, @04:01AM (8 children)
To use VLC, you don't need to learn any arcane chants, incantations, learn a ribbon, understand much about sound, understand crazy licensing, or even buy the developers a cup of coffee. It just works, as advertised. They deserve their success.
(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.
(Score: 1, Troll) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 11 2019, @05:30AM (2 children)
That the competition not only sucks but swallows is no excuse.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @12:44PM (1 child)
What's the difference between Love, True Love and showing off?
Spit, swallow and gargle.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 11 2019, @01:40PM
However there is real risk of contracting oral herpes, which can lead to throat cancer.
But it's only fair, as all the other gents permit me to blow my load in their own mouths.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by zemm on Friday January 11 2019, @02:26PM (1 child)
I tried VLC on Android a few days ago and generally like it but every time I start it I need to tap Sort -> Date, and then Sort -> Date desc. Is there any way to specify the default sort for videos on mobile? Why does it not remember the last sort between sessions, is this a bug or am I just weird that I don't want to sort alphabetically?!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 11 2019, @06:42PM
Heh, this reminds me of the CMS system we had at work, were it sorted alphabetically every time.
It was sad that everyone in the group that used it, had, as part of their process, click date twice, every time they used it.
Its like, what kind of person working on a project cares about the most alphabetical builds? They want the most recent ones!