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VLC 0.8.6 Released
h2g2bob writes "VideoLAN yesterday released a new version of VLC media player. A shout out goes to ffmpeg for many of the codec improvements." From the blurb: "Building on feedback from the 29 million downloads of VLC media player 0.8.5, we bring you version 0.8.6 with many bugfixes, as well as a couple of new features we think you will truly enjoy. Most prominent are probably Windows Media Video 9 and Flash Video. Other important changes are improved H.264 decoding, better Windows Unicode support, a Fullscreen controller, and Apple Remote support for Mac OS X."
Slashdotted before First Post!
9th Post retards!!
Slashdotted already?
I realize Flip4Mac exists for this, but does the new VLC implement Windows WMV9 DLLs for the Intel OS X version?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
I guess I'll have to wait a bit before I can try it.
This program is cross-platform and this build has Windows- and OSX-specific features. Why is this under Linux? Just because it's open source?
Scorta futuere amo!
> "a Fullscreen controller"
Woohoo! I've been a tad frustrated with the lack of control while in fullscreen. I suppose I could memorize all of the keyboard shortcuts, but I use several different viewers between the Mac, Linux and Windoze...it just gets too confusing. I can't wait to try this out!
http://nightlies.videolan.org/ is still online
Ok, it is time that you all stop covering software releases. You /.'d a college; now cut it out. My porn is of a greater urgency than your reporting.
Unfortunately, I don't have much to say there.
:(
But yay!
VLC is a great piece software that probably play more format then many other media players combined.
I applaud the VLC team for making a new release.
Too bad it seem to be slashdotted.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-RMS
http://mirrors.optralan.com/videolan/vlc/0.8.6/
How is this news?
A media player goes from version 0.8.5 to 0.8.6 -> FRONT PAGE
WTF??
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Is flash video essentially just a container format like ogg or quicktime? Can I play videos from youTube by just copying and pasting the .swf URL into VLC?
IIRC youtube embed their player in the flash, so will VLC just ignore the bytecode and present a menu to access the embeded media?
For bug fixes I could see a 0.0.1 increase but don't new additions and features generally come with a 0.1.0 increment at least? Maybe the devs are too scared of developing a true 1.0 version? =)
Since it's using ffmpeg to decode WMV9 instead of using Windows DLLs, both PPC and Intel Macs enjoy native decoding of the codec in question. No wrapper, no drag.
Incidentally, it looks like the new version is finally available in Universal Binary as well as Intel- and PPC-specific builds. And it seems to load subtitle texts automatically from the get-go without mingling with the preferences settings (yes, I confirmed this by trashing the existing preferences file). I say job well done for the VLC developers.
Serving time in Aristotelean prison for violating laws of physics
- VideoLAN primary mirror - France - Download (HTTP)
- VIA Centrale Reseaux, École Centrale Paris - France - Download (HTTP)
- Twente University - Netherlands - Download (HTTP)
- IRCAM - France - Download (HTTP)
- Université de Strasbourg - France - Download (FTP)
- Cr@ns, ENS Cachan - France - Download (FTP)
- Providence University - Taiwan - Download (FTP)
- Endpoint Corporation - Sweden - Download (FTP)
- Optralan - USA - Download (HTTP)
- Brno University of Technology - Czech Republic - Download (HTTP)
- Brno University of Technology - Czech Republic - Download (FTP)
- Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná - Brazil - Download (FTP)
(These are all Windows downloads. Remove the filename and last directory from the path to explore other download options.)This flies in the face of science.
Is there an official torrent of the releases hosted somewhere reachable?
"Words of wisdom: drop that zero and get with the hero" -- Vanilla Ice
On windows platform, when I play h264 video files the cpu usage is considerably less than other players. Especially in comparison with mplayer-classic using ffdshow. I usually encode all my home-videos using x264 and use VLC player for playback. VLC player uses minimal cpu and video quality is awesome. Thanks guys!
Installed 0.8.6 and when I go to fullscreen, I can't find any new full screen control. A big part of the reason I use MPC first and use VLC as a backup, is the much more usable interface on MPC in full screen mode. VLC still has none AFAICT.
And most importantly it will play all your pr0n torrents if you are running OSX. (Comes with free cloth).
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I use VLC player for playing all my videos under Linux, both standalone and as a firefox plugin (in conjunction with the MediaPlayerConnectivity Firefox addon extension).
The only downside I find is that actions are a bit laggy compared to frame-based players. For example, if I hit pause, it doesn't pause instantaneously.
Also, and I'm not sure if it's a limitation of being a packet-based player, but I wish it wouldn't close the video right after it's done playing. I prefer the last frame to stay on the screen.
P.S. For those using VLC under XGL and get a weird green-tinted bar at the top of your videos, change the Video output module to "X11 video output". You'll need to toggle the Advanced Settings checkbox.
http://www.filemirrors.com/search.src?type=begins& file=vlc-0.8.6-win32.exe&action=Find
.fr one. worked fine.
I used the
VLC is a very significant piece of software, not just for Linux users (for whom its especially significant) but for anyone who watches a lot of movies or other media files.
This version introduces a number of new and long-requested features, beyond what the point-release number upgrade would lead you to believe.
In many ways, I'd say that a new release of VLC is probably more significant than the latest "marketing department" release of Quicktime Player or Windows Media Player.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There doesn't seem to be any video out (other than a sometimes flashing screen) on Vista. 0.8.5 works fine when I uninstall/reinstall though. Anyone else have this issue? I'd check their forums, but... /.'d
-Michael
It's nearly indistinguishable from the fullscreen controller in QuickTime Pro. Its corners are slightly less rounded, that's about the only difference.
a full day late on this one ...way to go guys. nothing like bleeding edge news a day late...
go away
How am I supposed to install this? ... done! install procedure. If I wanted hassle/compiling I'd run linux
First, no zip. Second, (after using winrar) the install instructions are several pages talking about DOS command line. WTF timewarp 1995? just gimmie the install double click OK, accept, next, next, OK
Does anyone know if the support for Matroska files improved? I had to resort to using the Matroska plugin for Windows Media Player to play some file I was given. The video kept skipping in the action parts and randomly stopping in other places (on only certain files).
:(){
Is it just me, or does it make NO SENSE that this is a point.point upgrade? I don't care who you are, 0.0.1 upgrades are for things like bug fixes, small new implimentations, slight library recompiles... fuck: a new ICON. NOT major format additions, a UI overhaul, and a boatload of additional features!
I can understand the concern for version number inflation (Netscape 4 -> Netscape 6 was idiotic, same with Winamp 3 -> Winamp 5), but let's not be overly humble to the point of confusing users. Version Number Deflation looks just as silly.
I remember a time in which anything under 1.0 meant that a program was practically unusable and ONLY for elite users. But I've started to see a trend in the OSS community towards NEVER releasing a 1.0, as if 1.0 means that you're now an evil commercial entity that must be punished. No, 1.0 means "finished to the point of usability and beta tested to a certain level of solidity". Obviously, the finer points of this can be debated and are up to the descresion of the developer, but at a certain point, COME ON! When you've been working on a reasonably small audio player for over 4 years, and haven't even reached your 1.0, this tells me one of two things 1) You don't know how to code, and probably should find a new line of work, or 2) you're using numbers under 1.0 as a symbol of you're elitist OSS community status.
Seriously, I've tried VLC... it crashes sometimes... not as often as Windows... not as often as MPlayer... it's been above a 1.0 for YEARS now, just fucking call it what it is, and cut with the ritualistic, elitist, OSS symbolism bullshit.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Does anyone have a full changelog for the new version? I can't get to the site at all.
:(
Hopefully, this version fixes the occasional crashes I see. And maybe, just maybe, they won't shuffle the playlist by default (or will make an option to turn that off). I hate when I queue up a bunch of episodes of something, only to have them shuffled out of order because I forgot to disable shuffle
Or else, does anyone know how to make it default to off? I couldn't find any option to get rid of that behavior in the documentation or configuration files...
> Gack, good! One of the best things about VLC is that there is no annoying "control" eating
> screen space when you go fullscreen. The keyboard shortcuts remain fully functional, so use those.
MPC interface is vastly superior, there is nothing on the screen until you move your mouse, then a nice control bar slides up, that works miles better than the lame one separate one in VLC. Especially since it works really well in MPC when you just click the positin bar anywhere.
Anyway still nothing in VLC, moving mouse does nothing. Pushing F does nothing.
To answer my own question. Change history details show that the interface I was looking for is only in OSX. That is why I couldn't see it. The story blurb led me to believe this was a multi-platform feature.
I use VLC here at home to play the videos Quicktime won't, and I have a copy on my USB drive so I can also play videos and listen to AAC files on the Windows 2000 machines at work that I don't have admin permissions to install anything else on. Thanks for making a great player, a cross platform player, and a portable player. Software the way it ought to be.
Anyone know if they've fixed softsubs in this version? I try to like VLC, I really do, but when I can't read half of what the characters are saying, and poor unicode support (finally fixed!) makes any unusual character unreadable anyways well... DirectVOBSub under windows is just so nice. So, have they fixed 'em?
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
I use VLC on every computer I've got, these days: Seeing as win32codecs don't work on PPC, SPARC, and MIPS, I'd have an awful sore lack of video and audio support without ffmpeg and VLC. I used to use codec packs on Windows, but ffmpeg is capable enough to do without them, now.
Does FLV play completely? In v0.8.5, it didn't and I had to go back to v0.8.4. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
How about trying CNET for VLC, it's there with reviews and all and it downloads in just a few seconds. The Devs put it there when the VideoLAN website became overloaded this morning.
I'm just stopping by to point out that the new FFMPEG codecs included with VLC are dreamy. Fullscreen video looks twice as good as it used to. And having Apple remote support in fullscreen mode is fab. Truly an excellent release.
I've rebelled against the dot-notation for version numbers. The first version of one of my Open Source Software projects that compiled, ran, and did something useful got version 1. The next release got version 2. And so on. A tweak to a Makefile moved it from 5 to 6. My users should expect every version to be reasonably stable and tested on my end. If you want bleading edge, grab it from CVS. As a rule, major new features have minimal effect on the existing code paths, so bugs only have a chance of showing up when you use a major new feature. I keep a regression test suite that runs via ``make test''. My users understand taht nobody needs to fret over whether to use version 0.9923-rc3 or version 2.1-beta9; the highest (dotless) number is always a sure bet.
a little bug seemed to have been introduced. When playing DiVX movies, the brightness is very low. And the screen seems pixelated.
reel interesting, thx for posting moron
how many fucking variations can you make of such an universal theme??
VLC is a nice player. It's also stuffed to breaking point of unlicensed technologies.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:xNqwBL1srrQJ:w ww.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html+vlc+mirr ors
Good thing European courts invalidate software patents by the dozen when they are brought before them (which is the reason they aren't).
The day I change to VLC will be the day that VLC's support for formatted subtitles is on par with that of Haali Media Splitter.
My only issue with VLC is still there, why cant the slider go where you click it, instead of randomly skipping in the direction you click. Why cant you click ahead to whatever part like every other media player ever?!? And why cant i get keyboard media key support. Those are my only 2 complaints though, and i use VLC as my primary player, so thats pretty good.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Does anyone know the difference between these osx versions?
vlc-0.8.6-intel-2.dmg
vlc-0.8.6-intel.dmg
Reading subtitles is usually why I need to pause, but I hit the spacebar...the OSD pause icon immediately displays in the top-right corner, but the video continues a bit longer no matter how fast I release the spacebar. I think VLC is playing whatever is left in its buffer before it pauses.
That feature alone makes it my default media player. VLC rules.
I currently use MPlayer for my media (and Ogle) but haven't installed VLC yet (missing dependencies), is it worth installing?
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
I tried to use Videolan on Ubuntu, and I must admit it is VERY clunky ...
This might be offtopic but could we get a separate Open Source section on /.?
It seems that everything related to OSS is filed under Linux these days...
VLC still doesn't support multi-part RAR's... Then again, neither does any other windows based video player. So... VLC stands out from the crowd because... why? I have it. I've used it. I hated it. The video playback looks like crap half the time. I'm sure there's a setting somewhere that I could change to fix that right up, but why? Every other video player I have plays the same files just fine.
I just don't see the point in using VLC if you're a Windows user and already have WMP 10/11 and MediaPlayer classic installed. Now... if it supported multi-part RAR's... you know, the chosen format of the "video transfer scene," then perhaps it would be worth trying to sort out the configuration. But since VLC does nothing I want to do that other programs already do the same or better, why bother?
Wow, somebody must have had a case of the Mondays...
But yeah, since you said so with swear words, I guess every full-screen controller is dark translucent gray with white/very light gray text and controls, fades quickly into view when the pointer is moved, uses the same visual symbols in the same places in the same rounded-corner rectangular layout, has a white-outlined rectangle with a little white circle in it to drag your current place in the video. Yep. Coincidence.
Can someone point me to a way to view what other people are watching in VLC? It's my job.
Dwight Shrute.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Bitching about multipart rars? Grow the fuck up.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
What is he doing here ? Being a moron and doing some blatantly obvious trolling. Oh poor baby downloaded the linux source and can't figure out how to "Click-> next -> next ->" on windows xp. I wonder why....
like with windvd for dvds, but would be nice to have 1-2x playback with pitch normalized sound for avi's:)
1.9 Downloads a second!
But I think your post was waisted on the _only_ one user that has downloaded the source
http://www.videolan.org/stats/downloads.php
Why apple got the luxe of the full screen controller and not windows? I don't know about linux...
I've been running VLC 0.8.6 (on OS X) for just under an hour, and it's only crashed 3 times so far!
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
A lot of FOSS projects have v1.0 phobia, it seems. Not sure why that is, if they think that releasing a 1.0 version will cause all the developers to pack up and move on to another "new project," but I've seen it a lot.
If VLC were a commercial product, it would probably be at version 3.0 by now, at the very least.
Actually, in many cases you can convert the version numbers from "FOSS project format" to "commercial software marketing department format" by shifting all the decimal points to the right one place. So 0.8.6 would be Version 8.6, etc.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
.. although I wish there was some care being taken about the interface. Most of my comments are about the Mac version, but some of them should be relevant to other versions as well.
1. The OS X version shows the video with controls in the same window as the video, but ALSO shows a separate controller window. This is redundant. All the necessary options should be able to fit into the video window.
2. There is a stop button that afaics just closes the video window. Why the need for this redundant option?
3. Skip buttons have been combined with the fast forward button in almost any interface by now. Just do that in VLC as well.
2. and 3. gets rid of three redundant buttons in the interface.
4. The equaliser is not important enough to warrant a button of it's own. The menu is fine.
5. There is an awful lot of so-called "unbreak me" options. Options to make things work if your system is somehow weird. Just check this automatically. I know this can be a lot of effort from the programmer, so I can understand a Free Software project not doing to much about it. Nevertheless, there are too many weird options that clutter up the interface.
6. The preferences window has a "Reset All", "Cancel" and "Save" button. These are completely out of place in a program in OS X. Instant apply and a reset button would be better.
Except with libraries*, version numbers are whatever the authors of the software want them to be, and there is no widespread agreement on what they mean. The fact that OSS projects tend to increment minor and sub-minor versions a lot is a symptom of the lack of agreement, not a result of elitism. It's hard enough to get everyone on an active project to agree that it's time to cut a release, much less what number to give it. During the development process various strawman numbers will have been tossed out, mainly as placeholders, but when it comes time to actually assign it a number, calling it "1.0", or even incrementing the minor number, will bring forth a torrent of complaints from people who think that a 1.0 version must contain their pet feature or have their most hated bug fixed, and that the upcoming release therefore doesn't qualify.
Because there are no clear guidelines, there can be no winners in these debates. The best you can hope for is that somebody just gets tired of arguing. Not only that, the developers generally care much less about version numbering than the users do, so they simply don't want to waste time arguing about something that doesn't matter. It's just easier to increment the minor or sub-minor number and avoid the whole flame-filled argument.
[*] Libraries are the exception, because there is an objective, well-defined criterion for which number to increment in a library version. The major number is incremented when the new release completely breaks compatibility, meaning that apps built with the old version of the library won't link and run with the new version. The minor number is incremented when forward compatibility is broken, but backward compatibility is retained, meaning that apps built against the old version will run with the new version, but apps built with the new version won't run with the old version. The sub-minor number is incremented when the new release maintains compatibility.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Basically, you'd need a trojan on their computer, monitoring them. Or to catch them downloading the video to begin with, although even then, they could just bring it in on a CD/DVD.
Or you could do it the time-honored way: look over their shoulder and see what they're doing.
That said, I don't see why you'd need to know, exactly. If they're a criminal suspect, you can find the video files on their hard drive or external media, same as with any other player.
Why was this posted under Linux?
I think we need some other subcategory's for these software releases
i used to love vlc... it could play anything. but then i found a few movies it couldn't play. someone reccomended media player classic. not only does it play the stuff vlc can't, but it runs faster and better, as well as giving the coveted controls at the bottom of the screen while in fullscreen mode. the new version of vlc gave me a few errors, and despite what he said, there were no fullscreen controls. so i promptly uninstalled vlc. media player classic
www.americanjapan.com