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VLC Hits the Device Market
JoeBorn writes "VideoLAN has long been known as a mature open source project for video playback and transcoding on the PC. Now, Neuros and Texas Instruments have sponsored a port of VLC to their next generation open set-top box. The idea is to allow developers to easily create interesting plug-ins for recording and transcoding applications for the set-top box which will automate functions previously requiring a PC, like formating recordings for a portable player or streaming to another device on the LAN or the Internet, etc."
Have they made it accurately display subtitles in different positions yet?
I know giant fighting robot anime that I watch look like crap in VLC when compared to MPC+CCCP, and would hope that VLC would fix that before they start porting it all over the place.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
Everybody needs a little Vendor Loving Care.
I have a funny feeling there will be nothing open about their implementations.
Maybe it's the way Tivo hijacked the Linx kernel?
Maybe it's the media conglomerates ceaseless efforts to charge for every-single-viewing opportunity and location combination.
Maybe it's the media conglomerates long history of discouraging private use at all costs.
Or maybe it's the media conglomerates long history of discouraging the right of resale at all costs.
It's important to note anyway you look at it it's a win for open source projects. The re-use isn't very palatable, but hey some good with some bad.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Can we now have ads that can "link" to perform actions?
A good example is... When I see an ad for a new show starting next Thursday, I want to press a button (or soft button) and say "record that show". Same goes for PPV. There is tons of money in this for advertising. Linking televisions ads to websites, programs, or anything else related to a PC is the future, but I am too lazy to try it. Will this be the ticket?
I finally updated my sig, but now it's lame.
Damnit, another cold war?
Will it be really open?
Open enough so that I can modify its software circumvent those pesky broadcasting flags and record whatever I want, even American Gladiators?
If so, we're on to something.
Not to poo-poo what looks like an awesome technology, but we're all free culture varmints around here and we're well-acquainted with the reality that the more useful things a media-playback appliance lets us do, the harder Big Media will work to bury it.
Here's hoping that once this box is ready, it's still legal to buy one and plug it in.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Sweet!
:D
Could not resist.
But having tried a couple of the "bring your files from your computer to your tv in another room" devices, this would be a great advancement.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
You can help - and make cash - Bounties! for bootie!
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Um, I use VLC on an HP Pavilion 8670C with Windows 2000, and it hasn't crashed yet. Maybe there's some other reason it's crashing.
VideoLAN has long been known as a mature open source project...
CrashyMcSpew is "mature"? I humbly beg to differ.
This "bra bomb" of yours had better work!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
TiVo actually supports this when a provider marks ads accordingly; you will on occasion see a little '(Thumbs Up Icon) To Record' banner atop an ad for a new television show or a TV movie. (Some ads, like those for a new SUV or whatever, also occasionally have 'Thumbs Up For More Information' banners, where you can get an informational video about the product.)
However, most ads do not have the appropriate flags.
--Rachel
Girls?
Seriously, I think it's cool that they're building gadgets with VLC but the news here is that an open source project like it - hosted in SourceForge and no doubt started to scratch an itch - has actually paid off in a financial sense for the people who put the effort into creating it. If that's the case then it should be publicized. It proves that it doesn't take a corporation the size of RedHat or MySQL AB to make a living out of volume or "support contracts".
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
"VideoLAN has long been known as a mature open source project for video playback and transcoding on the PC"
Wouldn't a 'mature' video playback engine be expected to have acceptable subtitle support?
I just think something like mplayer would be a better choice.
I'm sure glad FreeBSD got hijacked by someone with class.
(yes, I know you can't hijack a willing aircraft)
VLC is great for no-hassle playing of video files, but its support for softsubs sucks ass, and its inability to seek very well is pretty clunky, too (it likes to skip randomly across the file) :/ I used it at first, but after watching enough anime, I had to go with CCCP + zoom player or I'd have gone crazy.
My only problem now is groups who label the subtitle tracks something weird.
Just an FYI:
I ahven't had any iossue with VLC in over 2 years;which is about as long as I have been using it.
I am using it on a home brew win2k system.
It's a Celeron with 2 gigs of ram and an nNidia card.
Maybe you ahve an issue with your codecs, or your registry? or maybe I'm really lucky.
Or you are watching something with odd features.
good luck
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
this is definitely great news. VLC has become my media player of choice for both Linux and Windows and hell even in NetBSD. i'm looking forward to seeing how it performs with some new devices. in particular, it'd be nice to see a mobile version for Windows Mobile and other mobile OS's. However it'll be tough to beat TCPMP. but for those looking for the least bloated media playing software loaded with all your typical codecs, VLC is definitely the way to go. any Linux users out there know why VLC won't play files over a folder shared on a Windows machine though? it doesn't know how to read UNC paths I believe.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
VLC is excellent overall, but their subtitle support is horrendously broken. Subtitles show up in ugly fonts, and are sometimes unreadable. Worst of all, half the time the subtitles from the last segment of dialog will stay on the screen and *overlap* with the next segment of dialog, making everything totally unreadable. Subtitles will also disappear if you pause, and then restart the video. The bugs go on and on...
there are a lot of patents that VLC implements that the market generally says other people own. For the most part, the patent holders don't go after personal downloaders, however I would think that this company would have to pay for quite a few licenses if they want to sell this.
I'm on the Mac, and I find MPlayerOSX to be more stable than VLC, and that's saying something. VLC does get markedly better with each "letter" release, however, and nothing can compare to it's ability to Just Open Stuff.
It's important to delete your old preferences from time to time, as if you overtweak the advanced settings you can really bung things up.
I haven't met any software video player that can cope with a poorly torrented video or badly scratched DVD without ARFing (that's Abort, Retry, Fail? to you kids), but my knowledge of CD drives tells me that's more to do with the hardware controller getting flustered. One thing analog tapes still win on, if the tape is in one piece you can read it. No checksum bullshit.
Actually I find it quite stable on W2k and Ubuntu.
I do find it can't handle sound on some shoutcast TV broadcasts, or rather it works fine on w2k but not Ubuntu.
I don't think they quite get the GPL implications here. It's great that the code will all be available on the VLC site or somewhere, but anyone who ships hardware using this will have to offer source code on demand. I don't think saying "you can get the source from sourceforge" strictly satisfies the GPL requirement does it? It's may sound reasonable, but with more companies embracing FLOSS it's not a good time to start bending the rules.
They've hard coded a few black foreground text and controls on whatever background you have, so if your background is black, you get black on black, which is of course impossible to read/decipher. May not matter for "the device market" though.
It's not the Windows version. The OS X version is also very crashy, and a lot of the preferences don't do anything.
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A neat thing about VLC (for nerds anyway), that may not be well-known, is that you can ssh into your Linux box and watch movies as ASCII art on the terminal window. See http://www.linuxactionshow.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=1466 . (I see you can do it in Mplayer too according to that page.)
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Get your hand off your penis and start typing with both hands please.
Yeah, but you have a Tivo, why watch ads?
(mostly kidding. Though I go to great lengths to avoid ads, and have for literally decades at this point [multiple VCRs before Tivos], I still seem to see most ads and get references people make to ads... and I was going to refer to the Press Thumbs Up feature if nobody else did.)
Might these be Cable set-top boxes that are no longer going to be needed? They should have done this long ago to make the set-top box indespensible. Yet, they are like so many companies that do it when they are on the way down. Sad.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
With my experience with the OLPC XO, it seems that VLC is a bit of a resource hog, at least out of the box. The various XO forums generally seem to agree with me. However, Mplayer works like a charm.
Unless there are IP issues or some magic setting I need to change to make it work properly, it seems silly to use VLC for a set top box to me.
It's also still unable to seek properly in a lot of mkv files, and doesn't support their chapter functionality. I stopped using it on OSX when Perian (ie Quicktime Player) started supporting MKV (including chapters), subtitles (including styled ones!), etc. It's become my strong preference.
Please help metamoderate.
My ISP here in France already offers that. I have a port of VLC able to view the TV-over-DSL channels streams on any computer of the house, record, transcode on the fly and so on.
But is ther a Thumbs Down button for 'never show me this ad/program again'?
I've really tried to liked VLC. Everyone talks about how great it is... but it's interface is pretty poor. The deal breaker for me, however, is the fact that it does not (and will not EVER, according to the developers I've seen talk about it) play files directly from RAR's.
Their "excuse" for the lack of an extremely important feature (to me and many others, anyway) is that they don't want to support piracy. Well, just like the FOSS community always harps that BitTorrent is used for legitimate traffic, well so are video's distributed in RAR's. Yes, the majority of video's in multi-part RAR's are illegal video... but then again, so is most of the BitTorrent traffic.
To leave this feature out of VLC is ridiculous. Before anyone tells me to add it myself: I have offered to submit a patch and it's refused based on the grounds above.
VLC is pretty useless to me, since I have no desire to unrar all of my video. Not only does it waste time, it also wastes space.
Fortunately, XBMC is pretty stable under Linux now, at least for watching/streaming video... as such, it's the best media center/video player out on the market right now. It does everything VLC does, except it does it properly and works. In fact, XBMC does just about everything "right" when it comes to video watching. MythTV, VLC, etc... can learn a lot from the XBMC project.
The French ADSL operator Free has been doing this for years. The set-top box is called a Freebox, VLC is used to receive several channels and I heard that the latest version can use it as a VCR. Of course they made their own GUI and didn't release the sources (as I am aware of)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I have an OSD so I'm all for Neuros getting involved and bringing VLC to the platform, as it should fix a few of the shortcomings of the current video player, which out of the box won't play most QuickTime movs and streaming WMV files. However, I also get the feeling that VLC has been moribund for while: 1.0 was tentatively announced a couple of years ago yet there hasn't been an update from 0.8.6 for far longer, and there are bugs that have been unresolved for as long. I've started playing with media servers on my local network recently and I'm trying to put something together that works across my assorted Macs, Linux machines and TVs, and VLC seems to be potentially the best desktop player, but there are so many things that it doesn't do properly yet, such as stream discovery. It looks to me like Neuros et al are going to push development forward. It will remain be seen if their improvements and fixes find their way back into the current VLC source tree, not due to any attempt to restrict access to the code, but rather if there is the will from VLC's current developers.
If VLC is considered "mature" for an Open Source project, then that's a pretty damn low standard of maturity. Is Open Source held to a completely different level of user expectations than proprietary software or something?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Vlc is a great freeware. The only problem is : 1- Bad basic skin ( I never seen a so poor skin before VLC ) 2- Bad support of some subtitles ;(
God, I could shoot all of you "this and that doesn't work properly"-crybabies. It's OPENSOURCE ... you don't like the way it works ... change it.
VLC is the first player that I didn't need a ridiculous codec pack for. It was the only software that properly played DVDs from different regions for me. And god damnit it's free as in "you're free to leave if you don't like it". Now I use Linux and there are good alternatives. For Windows on the other hand ... not so much. I'd still rely solely on VLC for playing back everything just because I don't want to infest my system with dozens of outdated decryption routines and scrap codecs that corrupt my registry.
This app is in version 0.8.6 for years now. And when was the last time a pre-1.0 version got such a broad user base? You're all nerds here and if you complain about VLC then grab your reference books and start coding to make it work the way it should. What are you waiting for? For Rupert Murdoch to buy it as his next step toward a unified replay solution? Screw you guys, start hacking for a change.
I find VLC highly lacking in several departments. It's gotten so bad that I switched back to WMP on Windows, while I've been using xine and mplayer under Linux after short forays into VLC. At least the default user interface is worse than what gmplayer has, and I've found some "amusing" issues with video playback, e.g. broken seeking in WMV (fails to display correctly until the next keyframe comes along).
The UI and configuration is an exercise in magic numbers, trying to play a DVD routinely requires more mouse clicks than mplayer requires keypresses to play the same disk with audio routed to a custom ALSA device, VLC has forked its own versions of DVD playback libraries, can't use external codecs, and the list goes on.
Seeing as it's meant to go into a consumer device, that pain and suffering may be a design goal however, and maybe VLC with all its restrictions will do well in a severely limited device.
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