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• http://www.videolan.org/streaming/
• http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/str eaming-howto-en.html

I wonder how long it will take for the codec to be implemented in VLC...

For those of you who don't know, the "Google Video Player" is apparently a browser plugin based on the VLC media player.

VideoLan Client (bad naming, but it can both receive network streams and originate them) http://www.videolan.org/ They even have precompiled clients for most popular OSes and distributions.

all you need to do is use a user-loyal player in stead of a broken one

*cough*VLC*cough*

DeCSS is integrated. With VLC I play DVDs from many different regions on my un-hacked DVD-ROM drive.

no need for region coding DVD... just use VLC :) (http://videolan.org/

Just use VLC
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

I know because I am in Canada for christmas and we got a couple of european DVD's. Of course no DVD player in the house would play them and the only computers with a DVD-drive were running Windows and would also not play them.

But VLC were installed in a few minutes and worked with a charm.

And a few people realised why I was wearing my "no CSS" thinkgeek T-shirt :-)

That aside, this is just more good news for Apple. If this bugs you, get a Mac. The new ones with Intel will be able to dual boot Windows, Apple has said, so your usual excuse about not being able to play games doesn't work anymore. Use OS X for work and switch over to Windows for the games, all on hardware that doesn't look like crap. Watch DVDs with any operating system, as long as you use VLC.

Just in case one has been living under a rock for the past few years, CSS, the DVD encrypting scheme has been broken a long time ago.

On a general-purpose PC, including Macs, BeBox and whatnot, DVD region coding can be bypassed any old way, for example using VLC. RPC1 or 2 don't serve any purpose anymore.

Or they'll just play it on VLC.

I'm curious, what Google software bundles VLC?

AFAIK, VLC is not (yet) illegal. It was some time ago when I installed the Google video plugin, but I think their EULA mentioned VLC. Link + another link.

Secondly, if Google becomes a monopoly in its field (which it definitely is striving for), would you support them bundling a particular media player, making it harder for others to compete?

I don't follow how bundling some open source software makes it harder for others to compete.

Well, you can always include VLC, like Google does (IIRC). Of course, that's not the best solution because it only deals with the lack of a media player, and who wants 12 different copies of VLC installed by all these different applications? I think the long term solution would be better software packaging with proper dependency management. Oh, by the way, from what I've heard almost everyone has broadband in South Korea :)

The VLC features documentation states that VLC is able to read WMV under (Open|Free)BSD

I totally agree. "Mainstream" media players these days totally suck ass. They are so bloated and ugly that it makes me want to die.

If you use Windows, I _highly_ recommend Media Player Classic. It's interface is based on the old school MS Media Player 6, which was as simple as it gets. It's small, fast, light footprint, but tons of option and keyboard controls if you want.

VLC is also pretty good and available for many different platforms. I dont like it nearly as much as MPC, but, the nice thing about it is that it will play about 99.9% of all media files you will ever download, regardless of whether or not you have the codec installed. This is the only time I use it in fact - when I dont have a codec installed for some random type of file. Some people love it as their main media player, it's just a matter of taste really.

I believe both have built in support for DVD playback as well. However, as I have a regular DVD player for my TV, I've never actually tested it.

http://developers.videolan.org/libdvdcss/

It is located in France.

Until the DMCA becomes global. Even then they still wont stop anyways so it doesn't matter.
http://www.videolan.org/eucd.html

Software -- By far the worst offender. CenterStage just plain didn't work with my ripped DVDs (a series of VIDEO_TS folders on a share). Matinee didn't seem to work either. I wasn't going to bother with MythTV (way too much hassle on OS X). There really is a stunning lack of passable frontend software for the Mac. It's a shame, really.

One thing I'm puzzled that VLC doesn't do is provide a hotkey for skipping DVD chapters forwards and backwards. I went looking and found this changeset, which if I read correctly is a patch to a branched version of the 0.8.1 version of the code. I'm afraid it doesn't help me much, though, because I don't know how to obtain the branched version to patch it. It shows, though, that someone was willing to put the time in to develop this feature. I wonder why it hasn't found its way into the official code base?

for a streaming server, you may want to consider a streaming server like VideoLAN's VLS. :-)

You'd think so, wouldn't you, but not for a while now! Videolan themselves recommend VLC for streaming, rather than VLS, which hasn't been much developed recently. The streaming stuff has been folded into VLC (plus lots more!).

"Try to install it on Linux and you realise the advantages of a commercial platform onto which you simply install binary application packages."

Always been one of my favorites on any platform.

I agree from my own experience. In fact, I find files (or discs) that either work strange or not at all on other media players (such as Windows Media Player or WinAMP) run just (or very close to) perfect on VLC. The capability to play VCD, SVCD, DVD, DVD (with menues) was a feature that I also found make the player even more flexible.

Does anyone here have experience with VLC for running your own streaming server? Also, anyone know if they are going to add capability to play RealPlayer files? I find RealPlayer as a major bloatware and RealAlternative (no offense, just from my experience) looks too much like (and as featured limited as) the original media player in Windows 95/98. For a good reference here's a full table of all features available on all the various Operating Systems that VLC works with. Very good product and highly recommended!

I`ve been looking for an open source video server for Linux that can send TV/video/audio to my laptop etc.. does such a beast exist?
Peercast or Videolan would probably be a good start.

I never had much luck playing most videos in windows until I downloaded the ACE mega codecs package off a DC++ user. Its a nasty hack but once its installed you could play almost every format ever conceived.

I wish there was a linux equivalent.

In my experience (as a recent convert to FreeBSD+KDE for my main desktop) the video codecs available are a little immature and just need some polishing. They remind me of what it was like watching videos on windows about 4-5 years ago. That is to say it can be hit and miss quality wise. Codecs in windows are pretty bullet proof now, and even poorly encoded videos display quite well.

For video I use vlc and mplayer...its my experience that if of those programs can't handle a video very well, the other one will. They even play obscure formats like matrosky or whatever its called. Also, the mplayer mozilla plugin works beautifully for me.

For audio check out BMP (beep media player, based on xmms but uses gtk2 instead of 1.2) or audacious (which is a new fork of bmp now that bmp development is dead.) These programs are a decent reproduction of the winamp interface, and even support most types of streaming. The only type of streams I haven't been able to get to work are certain asx encapsulated wma streams, and I think thats cause of some drm bullshit.

Some ppl get a hardon when they talk about amarok for audio, but I tried it and didn't care for it. An audio player shouldn't bring a p4 to its knees, but thats what amarok did to me. Too bad because it looked pretty good from what I read.

http://www.videolan.org/, takes care of most things I need to watch (It's a bitch to install on SuSE, though), though many porn sites cater to their users' needs and offer MPEGs instead of WMV9s anyway, interestingly I never encountered a porn DivX. The other complaints I'll regard as humorous, alright? :-P

BTW, I still have a WinXP in dual-boot, it's just for gaming and it isn't the one coming up automagically...

I've learned if nothing else works vlc will just work fine.
It's missing some usability but it has all the codecs built-in and it actually played everything i didn't get to work with others (on windows as well as linux).

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

But after hearing all the fan-boys on this and other sites, and doing a fair bit of research into Mac OSX, I figured it was time to try out a powerbook.

After a few months of using it exclusively, I can't stand working with Windows or even KDE/Gnome now. A stock OSX Tiger install is incredibly useful (Exposé, Spotlight, iLife, Dashboard, and all that BSD goodness through Terminal.app). But after installing a few amazing (and free) utilities, it's the closest to desktop utopia I've ever been:

• QuickSilver - The most useful app I've ever used - hard to describe, but think of it as a command-line interface to the GUI (some use it as just an application launcher, but it's so much more).
• Fink - A BSD Ports implementation for OSX - think of Debian and Gentoo meets OSX - thousands of F/OSS apps just a command away from installing
• XAMPP - Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl in a simple to install and run package.
• VLC - video watching without having to worry about installing dozens of codecs.

Never thought I'd say it, but I guess I'm one of the fan-boys now.

I still have a Windows box for gaming (although I have to admit there are far more games available for OSX than I imagined), and a few Linux boxes for serving, development, routing, etc. Although I now have all my development stuff running locally on my powerbook, so the linux boxes are less useful these days.

My message to people on the fence about switiching: give it a shot. It's not perfect, but it's leaps and bounds ahead of anything else.

This article makes alot of good points. You blind zealots just cannot see it objectively anymore.

The biggest point to me is the new software installation. If I want a new MP3 player for Windows what do I do? I get on the net and search for 'winxp mp3 player', right? Regardless what what piece of crap site I end up at I will be able to download install.exe or the like that I can simply double-click. THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE EXPECT!

Now that uncle Bob wants a new mp3 player for Linux he will most likely do the same thing, right? So he gets on the net and searches for something like 'linux mp3 player'At this point he will be lucky to end up at a site he can download a binary from. Even if he is lucky enough not to be staring blankly at something like this: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-fedora.html or this http://downloads.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.8 .1/rpm/fedora/fc3/vlc/, I can almost gurantee that whatever packaage he downloads will have additional dependency requirements.

If he was zealous he spent awhile searching around for something like xorg-x11-XFree86-glue-Mesa-libGLU-4.4.0-2 . . .

But now uncle bob is rebooting back into Windows . . .

This article makes alot of good points. You blind zealots just cannot see it objectively anymore.

The biggest point to me is the new software installation. If I want a new MP3 player for Windows what do I do? I get on the net and search for 'winxp mp3 player', right? Regardless what what piece of crap site I end up at I will be able to download install.exe or the like that I can simply double-click. THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE EXPECT!

Now that uncle Bob wants a new mp3 player for Linux he will most likely do the same thing, right? So he gets on the net and searches for something like 'linux mp3 player'At this point he will be lucky to end up at a site he can download a binary from. Even if he is lucky enough not to be staring blankly at something like this: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-fedora.html or this http://downloads.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.8 .1/rpm/fedora/fc3/vlc/, I can almost gurantee that whatever packaage he downloads will have additional dependency requirements.

If he was zealous he spent awhile searching around for something like xorg-x11-XFree86-glue-Mesa-libGLU-4.4.0-2 . . .

But now uncle bob is rebooting back into Windows . . .

• Open Source !!!
• During installation you can select to install Mozilla/Firefox plugin
• Has been implemented with a variety of successful profesional projects

I've found that, for anything other than WMV files, VLC does it for me. And usually for WMV files as well.

A lot more Mac software seems to be multi processor aware than Windows software

I can asure you there are more multiprocessor aware windows programs (Anything using more than one thread) than there are mac apps in total.

H.264 is dog-slow to encode but the Apple H.264 encoder used by the Quicktime encoder is MP-aware, with this, the speed will nearly double.

The opensource H.264 encoder is also multithreaded (Or MP-aware in macslang). Multithreading isn't rocketscience anymore.

http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.9/
Don't forget libdvdcss ,vital for playing DVDs on linux . *WARNING* may be illegal in the USA ,

Both Xine and VLC are based on the mplayer code. In Linux GUIs, Xine is the clear choice (mplayer beating it out for consoles). Many of my Windows friends extol the virtues of VLC, but it leaves much to be desired in its Linux implementation.

http://videolan.org/

A player and oh so much more.

Also, next time try Google. Really.

VLC is a great, cross platform media player. I run it on Windows and it works well - it actually performs better than WinDVD on my laptop. It will play a number of file formats as well. I think it is also open source.

Ever heard of VLC?

I really want to put the biggest IDE hard drive than I can find into my TIVO

While I do know someone who just finished putting 2 400GB Seagates into their Replay box, I take a looser approach. DVArchive is a Java client that uses uPNP to impersonate a Replay over the network. So any attached disk storage with a CPU that can run Java appears as a virtual ReplayTV and can be used to store and stream shows. I have a 1TB media server that does double duty for audio and ReplayTV, and a HTPC with 500GB that serves up basically nothing but RTV content and its own video captures. Because RTVs are so network friendly, and can be controlled easily from any web browser, I find I tend to treat them more as loosely coupled capture cards that happen to be in a fancy box more than anything else. The drives within the ReplayTVs themselves? Kind of like a local temporary storage cache. MediaMVPs or modded XBoxes make good front-ends if you want to avoid the HTPC route. With VideoLAN you can stream right from the Replays, through DVArchive, and over the net. Of course, you're going to need a really fat pipe, so I usually convert into XVid and serve up using Media Center - it can do some intelligent bandwidth throttling based on the client's pipe.

http://www.videolan.org/

Parent post is incorrect. MPlayer and VideoLan will play both QuickTime and Windows Media format streams/files.

they are all out of stock

Hmm. You're right, the 80 hour model is out. Some of the other models seem okay. Then again, maybe DNNA has stopped manufacturing them in advance of their HD/Escient launch.

the way I can use wifi with Tivo and how it handles programming over the web

Replay has built-in ethernet which is trivial to plug in to a wifi bridge, what are the extras that Tivo offers here? I was swayed from buying Tivo because I heard its shared shows come with DRM that's just annoying.

Also, you may or may not have seen DVArchive - it makes the Replay visible as a uPNP device and you can control it from any Java-equipped device. I use it in combination with VideoLAN to transcode and stream some shows to some friends in Europe.

Also, DVArchive on PC/Mac/Linux runs a central web server that lets you control any and all networked Replays and DVArchive boxes. One new thing I really like is that you can also see, stream, and copy with the Replays from a modded XBox running XBox Media Center.

Yeah, it's really too bad that a general purpose PC can only be used as a DVR. Imagine if you could use it to play all different kinds of video files (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) that some people get from teh Interwebs (http://thepirate-useyourimagination-.org/brwsearc h.php?b=1&d=200). When I think of all that CPU sitting there unused, I just wish there was a way I could use it to deinterlace and scale the video better than the projector (http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/about.htm). It's a real shame that there's no way to filter and soften artifacts, make gamma correction or do other post-processing (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow). I mean wow, what if you had something that could do that to even make DVDs look cleaner and more accurate (http://www.theatertek.com/forums/showthread.php?s =6486412abf926166ef4d7dc0be10c450&t=4392). If you could do that, you may even put some of them on your hard drive if that wasn't impossible (http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/ dvd_rippers/dvd_decrypter.cfm). Even if there were a way to keep movies on a hard drive, you still wouldn't have a way to remove the ads, trailers, french soundtracks and other crap (http://www.dvdshrink.org/why.html). Gosh, I keep thinking too that with a projector in the home theater room and everything, it's too bad there's no way to play video games on it (http://www.mame.net/).

Not to troll or anything, but I like my program to be able to go fullscreen without having to spend $30 or whatever on a license, thank you very much.

My favourites? mplayer, VLC, XMMS (although XMMS2 is much-needed)

*munch*

VLC should be able to play it (and just about anything else you might throw at it).

The vlc player alone has nice streaming support, but they also have separate streaming server

Here is another good solution. This might be helpful also.

I don't understand your question - I'm an employed software engineer, not a buzzword tracker:

"I'm working on a system integration project for my CIS capstone. One of the systems we are integrating is a Windows MCE PVR."

What's a "CIS capstone"? Dictionary.com defines "capstone" as "the crowning achievement". So what's a CIS and why will it be your "crowning achievement?"

What's an "MCE"? Is this a product related to Windows CE that I've not heard of yet?

One of the topics that came up implementing a movie on demand or rental system using an existing online content provider.

Talk to someone in distribution at the movie studios. Find out who they've partnered with anyone who's already doing this who you could sublicence content from, or (if you represent a big enough company), if they'd be interested in working with you to provide the content directly.

But the question we have run into is, are there any? Is the only option for online video content (TV shows, movies) P2P and BT clients?

Peer 2 peer networks like Gnutella and BitTorrent are methods of distributing data. You could get them to handle an encrypted payload and then do the Digital Restrictions Management once you've got the payload. You can allow users to copy DRM'ed files freely - but they won't be able to play them until they've been electronically licenced.

For distributing large files, BitTorrent can't be beaten for scalability, although for small-scale distribution (or in a controlled environment like a Local Area Network where line speed is the bottleneck), BT is going to be slower than a central server (especially if you go with a custom multicast solution). For an off-the shelf DRM package, the most complete is probably going to be Windows Media (DRM aside [because I've never used it], the Windows Media codec provides superb quality video).

Is there no company out there that handles licensing and provides DRM'd content?

As end products - Movielink for one (as others have mentioned), there's also CinemaNow and a host of others that can be easily found (although it's unclear which one's best and if they're all legitimate).

(If this is for a TV-type solution, check out Coolstreaming - streaming P2P television [with a 1-2 minute broadcast delay] has arrived to some corners of the world and is steadily growing in popularity. Although, of course, if you're on a LAN [like in a hotel or something], VideoLAN in multicast mode is going to be a better streaming TV solution).

Oh please, *none* of those three! Why doesn't anyone apart from P2P'ers use XviD/DivX with MP3 sound? Is it just the stigma? No, instead we have to put up with crappy Real/WM/QT video and sound. In fact, why don't they go with H.264/MPEG-4 AVC? It's the future of broadcast television and offers amazing compression. I've just started playing around with x264, and it blows away even XviD! And it will only get better with time. I'm sure the commercial developers have already got a better H.264 implementation. The only problem is that everyone has to install VLC for now. Oh well, just another media player to download, right? And you never know, people might actually like a simple player instead of the all-in-one media *centres* that the other media players have become.
</rant>