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."

Comments

subtitles

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

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.

Re:subtitles

[houstonbofh]

I would not be surprised if Ti and company fix this. That would mean the code comes back and it fixes it for all of us.

Re:subtitles

[JoeBorn]

Luckily VLC decided to drop wxWidgets entirely (which they say was causing a lot of issues) and rewrite the UI in Qt4 for the upcoming version. It's not perfect, but it's already a big step up. The Neuros device will use its own UI based on Qt4 FWIW. Remember the device will be a TV + remote control living room type device, so it's expected to be full screen and remote navigable, so the UI will be quite different from the PC version.

technology has never been the barrier here.

[spazdor]

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.

Re:Like Tivo Hijacked Linux?

[tpgp]

Its nature was NOT about keeping people *snip* from locking down the hardware that it ran on.

I'm afraid you're wrong; the purpose of the GPL was to allow the user to take back control of their systems; the GNU manifesto, predating GPLv2 even states:

As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes.

Re:Like Tivo Hijacked Linux?

[jedidiah]

Tivo certainly violates the spirit and intent of the GPL.

The fact that there was some weakness in the way that
RMS tried to make them "play nice" doesn't alter this.