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VLC 0.9.9, The Best Media Player Just Got Better
Matt Asay points out a recent update to VLC as they narrow in on a 1.0 release. Already a favorite of many, the open source project has made great strides in recent history towards really solidifying the position as best-in-class. This update, 0.9.9, fixes several display bugs and sees some definite performance improvements. "If you've yet to try VLC, do so. Whether you just want to play media files or also want to convert them, VLC can handle just about anything you throw at it. When all other media players fail, whether on Windows, Linux, or the Mac, VLC will almost always deliver. You can download VLC media player 0.9.9 here. It's open source, but that's not why you'll want to keep using it. You'll use it because it's better than its proprietary peers — by a long stretch.
Color me skeptical.
I am sorry, There will be that one feature that someone needs that it doesn't do that someone else handles or handles better, so for them the other program will be better.
Besides saying your the best only makes you look like a jerk.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
0.9.x seemed to me as more of a 1.0 release.
VLC is an OK media playback application. I, for one, never understood why someone would prefer it over using mplayer. It's got all the nice libavcodec improvements first, and is the perfect example of unintrusive UI design (note that I'm talking about the CLI-only `mplayer`, not `gmplayer` or any other graphical front-end).
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
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Using "your" for "you're" and accusing someone of bragging when a third party says it's the best also makes you look like a jerk.
Slashdot is starting to get like usenet. My first step every time I get on usenet is to filter out all the spam about porn and shoes. My first action every time I get on slashdot is to filter out which stories are mistakes, FUD, or slashvertisements. It seems like the firehose system has drastically reduced the signal to noise ratio.
Find free books.
...that doesn't allow you to arbitrarily (without regard to the original aspect ratio) re-size the playback window? I had to roll back from version 9.whatever to 8.whatever when they added that bug. Someone thought it would be funny to have enormous chunks of screen real estate taken over so the playback window could show black bars around it.
VLC has been a non-starter for me because I can't use better performing codecs for high definition content. The internal codec doesn't approach the performance of several other codecs. I'm sticking with Media Player Classic for my XP system. It's a much better player.
By the way, does anybody else feel like the story's headline looks like it came straight from Digg?
You'll use it because it's better than its proprietary peers
It's also the only player I can't get to output properly to spdif on any computer I try it on. It's the _only_ player I can't get to output to spdif.
It did work on the versions a few years back, but those are useless with current codecs and containers so that's no help. For the past umpteen versions it has output nothing but looping sound. If anybody knows the magic to fix that I'd be thrilled. But Mplayer Classic HC and ffdshow does the job pretty well so it's not a big deal.
It's kind of annoying to have to keep a copy of VLC 0.9.x and 0.8.6i around - have they fixed the mp4 issues that were introduced with the 0.9 series yet?
#DeleteChrome
"VLC: Best media player for jerks!"
The enemies of Democracy are
in fedora I use mplayer. In vista/xp I use VLC. WMP and WMPC would crash occasionally no matter what, and never seemed to load all codecs properly. Arguing which one is better is like driving a car in reverse and blindfolded...it just doesn't make sense.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
VLC peaked at version 0.8.6. This was the last version to use the "correct" user interface on windows. That version was a very easy to use interface that looked like it had been designed after 1995. The 0.9 and forward versions have a poorly designed interface that looks like they ripped off the Mosaic interface for Win 3.1
VLC has an amazing GUI (Especially at full-screen mode) for OSX, and the linux version isn't far behind. I don't see why VLC for WIN32 has to be so awful, considering that Win32 is by far their largest audience.
VLC hasnt added any significant functionality since 0.8.6 so while I'll check out recent releases, until they fix the awful interface that is on all the 0.9.x series, I'm sticking with that. Yes, I am aware that 0.9.x is skinnable, but there is no true "classic" skin for the 0.9.x series.
moox. for a new generation.
Eh, VLC is okay. I've found it to be more processor intensive when decoding MKV's than Media Player Classic - to the point where the old PC i repurposed as a media center can play 1080p movies just barely smoothly in media player classic, but it chokes if i need to use VLC (media player classic has options for choosing an audio stream but never actually shows more than one stream! grr).
I also HATE that VLC doesn't let you click on the frame to pause. Nothing happens when you click on the frame, so why not pause! Having to navigate to the little pause button every time is lame.
ALSO hate that even in full screen, the progress bar stays small, so I don't have much resolution when i want to skip back a little.
So yeah, best player ever? meh. It's nice, and i love all the transcoding features etc. is has, but that's not media playing, that's something else. As a media player, VLC is just ok.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Whoever wrote that must be either female or a eunuch. Real men know it's not a media player until it has frame advance.
I love VLC, but until some major changes are made it's not a media player it's a I'm-to-lazy-to-configure-my-other-players-to-play-this-rare-vid player.
Oh yea Umm being a spelling/gramar nazi is more of jerk.
I've always had bad experiences with VLC on Mac, no matter which version. Converting videos to mpg, mp4, or anything else I try results in unreadable files.
While I donno if others are experiencing the same issues, it's disappointing that it's been consistently unreliable for me.
VLC lately has had some big audio issues. On OS X as well as Ubuntu it hijacks the audio preventing access for other programs (flash, iTunes). It is quite annoying and I hope they've fixed it in this release.
We are the people our parents warned us about.
Agreed. The new user interface for full screen mode in Windows is terrible. I will actually use it in 'maximum window' mode instead of full screen just so I can get the full-width slider bar. Trying to find a place in a two hour movie on a two-inch slider bar in full-screen mode is ridiculously difficult.
THIS. VLC may be capable, but I find myself using it as a last resort. While Media Player Classic is more-or-less on par with VLC in terms of playback compatibility, I prefer it almost exclusively for the UI. VLC looks like shit on Windows.
I think I speak for most of the community when I say "shut the fuck up, you illiterate retard."
Have they fixed their long-standing issues with styled subtitles? Many, many, many anime release groups specifically warn not to use VLC because it has issues with external subtitles, and specifically, SSA/ASS subtitles.
Which is another reason I use mplayer. (mencoder is the first reason)
Did they make a better desktop icon yet?
I tried 0.9.9. I had to downgrade back to 0.8.6d to get H264 video streaming to work. So, if you use that feature - don't upgrade.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
"Better", not "Prettier"
oh wait this is slashdot... guess i got confused
anyways different players have dif. strengths
zoom player is my choice for couch use
I'm going to list out what I don't like and who knows, maybe some ./ers can tell me the solutions and I'll become a fan.
1.) Repeating. VLC uses the clunky "A to B" strategy and one can not just check a "repeat all" check-box.
2.) Shoutcast radio lists. Right-click + Open-Folder on a folder, does not work and if you double-click on a folder, it opens the first station in the list and starts playing it. (ug) Also, you have to click "Title" twice if you want the channels in alphabetical order after opening up a folder. (ug)
Well, it may be the best "overall" media player, but I've found it's not better than mediocre in any area. I ended up having three or four media players, and just using one based on what I'm watching/listening to.
About all I used VLC for is my TV Tuner because I didn't feel like getting MythTV set up, and along with a command line channel switcher, it worked fine.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I've suffered many more bugs with 0.9 than I ever did with 0.8.6 -- I too keep a copy spare.
0.9 just doesn't seem as robust. I wonder if they've fixed the no-video-for-a-few-seconds-after-opening bug, which seems to be more prominent on slower systems. Also, if I repeatedly speed up and slow down playback I can frequently never return playback speed to 100% and choppy sound results. Is that so hard to fix?
I guess like proprietary software vendors, assumptions are made about users' system specs and common usage requirements.
Does it play my blu rays yet?
I too absolutely hate the new QT interface and I want them to bring back the ability to use the wxWidgets interface that was used in 0.8.6 releases. Apparently the wxWidgets interface of VLC is no longer maintained, therefore they dropped it in the 0.9 releases. Because of this I still continue to use 0.8.6 on my machines. :(
This space is not for rent.
Ogg Frog is designed by a professional software engineer with 36 years of c++ experience, 12 years of embedded experience, and over 2 years of mental hospitalization, so you know it's the real deal. VLC is a project by some French college students.
Ogg Frog.
Does anyone know where or if it's even possible to find a binary of vlc 0.9.9 for gutsy gibbon? The one in ubuntus repositories is very dated.
I will say that VLC did just recently play a DVD that none of the other DVD players I have (mplayer, xine, etc...) wouldn't even touch. Heck the other players would crash and burn badly - even lsdvd had troubles with this one DVD - the Dark Knight.
What I don't like about VLC is how there is absolutely nothing intuitive about what combination of codecs will work on a transcode. With a recent example, I could get MPEG2 video to encode into a mpeg container or an avi container, but I couldn't get any audio to go into the same container at all. Using mpga would crash the program where using mp2a would go through the motions but you would end up with no audio in the output.
If you find that you need "support" of any sort for VLC, good luck with that. I have found in many cases that the forums are unmonitored and the IRC channel folk ignores people with real questions.
I just don't think that VLC deserves the title of "the best" in anything.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Recently I tried to play a DVD, and vlc crashed on me after a few seconds.
I thought maybe I needed the latest version, so I downloaded the latest at that time v0.9.8a, and while it seems they have finally made the subtitles look better, it crashed too.
Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player had no probs playing it.
I also never managed to get VLC to remember the deinterlace setting I pick (I tried the various filter and stupid obscure config stuff found on google and still it didn't work).
Overall I have a bad impression of VLC. Best to only use it if the other players can't play it.
p.s. if you are using Media Player Classic, avoid the haali media splitter crap. It causes crashes and instability[1], especially if you are using it with other stuff like windows movie maker (which someone found out the hard way - not me fortunately).
[1] http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/codecs_and_filters/haalimediasplitter.cfm
Many years ago it was the first player (the first I knew of course) that could playback about anything without crying about missing codecs. Since this time its one of the first things I install when setting up a new computer. Maybe there are better players out there, but VLC is lightweight and simple, and I dont care about the UI anymore when watching fullscreen.
I'd love to use VLC legally in the US, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen any time soon.
VLC FAQ
What the hell does this, and why?
What insane reasoning do you use to stick a video file inside a RAR (or any other compressed archive for that matter?) Jamming a compressed file into a compressed container usually results in a file size increase. I would stop complaining that VLC doesn't support something insane, and try to justify why that behavior is in any way valuable and -not- insane.
I've finally settled on a Windows combination that has both significant geek appeal and even more significant wife-acceptance-factor (though really, that's not much of an issue since my fiance has a geek mindset, too):
All of this for really not that much cash. The PC was almost a grand a year ago when I bought it but of course you could get the same specs for much cheaper now. I wanted a dedicated machine because I knew I was much less likely to mess that up than my primary machine. SageTV was $80. I donated $20 to the LM Remote Keymap people because it was such a useful tool. I just wanted something that would work and could play blu-ray/hd-dvd (that was before BR won). And one that I wouldn't have to spend hours on due to quirky hardware problems because I'd built it myself.
I also needed something beefy enough to handle HD mkvs and whatever else might come out in the next few years. My old repurposed machine started to skip a bit on the HD.
So there you have if, whether you cared to know or not. Just posting this because it might help someone else who has gotten really sick and tired of trying to cobble together various apps and front-ends and wireless keyboards and mice and just want something that works reliably and smoothly while they're sitting on the couch with a remote.
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The only way to go Comrade!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Not really. You certainly don't speak for the part of the community that knows the grammar rules but still makes a typo now and then.
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VLC here is used only to preview partially downloaded movies, and anything else. His interface is ugly, poor, really sucks a lot. Media Player Classic have a much better and usable GUI
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Split archives much?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Mplayer, XBMC (built on MPlayer). And Rars were (are?) the best way of distributing things over usenet or DCC. If a piece fails, you just get that piece. While it annoys me to no end that people still use it on bittorrent (since it's already chunked).
VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player was good up to the 0.8.6 releases and after that it took a bit of a tumble in design and lost popularity because of its tendency to crash or freeze at any minor error or corruption in the media files.
Media Player Classic Homecinema stepped in and took the reigns after that. This player includes internal decoder filters for MPEG-2 (DVD), MPEG-4 (XviD, DivX), H.264 (Blu-ray), and VC1 (Blu-ray) along with audio decoders for AC3 (Dolby Digital), DTS (Digital Theater Systems), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), etc. It also includes native support for MKV (Matroska) and AVI (Audio Video Interleave) file formats.
The most important feature of MPC-HC is the hardware accelerated DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) decoder filters for the H.264 and VC1 Blu-ray codecs allowing this player to leverage ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards to handle the work load with complex 720p and 1080p movies. The difference in CPU usage goes from 70-100% on software decoding with dropped frames to 5% on DXVA decoding and no dropped frames, of course this is relative to the CPU being used.
DXVAChecker is the best tool to use to determine if your video card and latest drivers support hardware acceleration. It will list the list of video streams that are accelerated such as MPEG2, WMV9, VC1, H264 along with DXVA1 (XP DX9) or 2 (Vista DX10) for the version along with the resolution such as 720x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080 that is supported.
FFDshow Tryouts is another codecs to look into is that is based on libavcodec and ffmpeg-mt (multi-threaded) and handles pretty much all audio and video codecs in software using CPU decoding and includes a lot of filters for audio 2.0->5.1 up-mixing, real-time AC3 encoding for surround sound, noise filtering, and video filters for noise, sharpening, and subtitle support.
CoreAVC Pro codec is the most efficient software and hardware nVidia CUDA accelerated H.264 (Blu-ray) decoding. In hardware CUDA mode it users ~15% CPU to perform decoding and in software mode it users 50-70%, relative to the CPU being used of course. This codec a bit more efficient than FFDshow in software but a lot better in CUDA mode, nVidia video card required.
Haali Media Splitter is the preferred splitter for MKV (Matroska), MP4, and AVI files. This is the recommended splitter for these file formats over the internal splitters that usually come with the players.
MPlayer Media Player is also a complete alternative that now has hardware acceleration support for nVidia video cards with the latest SVN releases.
That wasn't a typo. That was the typographic equivalent of an abortion performed with a weed-whacker.
In Vista, VLC is the only program that will use my TV/video capture card. As it's an older card, I have to use an XP driver for it. Media Player, et al just gives me a black screen and no audio. DRM, perhaps? Anyway, VLC is the only program that uses the card normally.
Likewise, in Ubuntu, it seems to be the only program able to use the "/dev/video0" device (that's the same card). Everything else -- mplayer included -- chokes on it. So, anyone who has had trouble using a TV card in Windows or Linux would be well advised to at least give VLC a try.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Agree about the interface.
the Windows version looks like a VB application from 1994.
YUCK!
I'm a 2000 man.
Your and You're aren't typos...
It's how files are packed on Usenet. It's not for compression, it's for splitting into multiple volumes. It's the de facto standard.
I'll use VLC when they add some sort of full screen controls to seek within a movie, as WMP and WMPClassic has. Until then, having to get out of full screen just to seek to another part of the video is obnoxious.
I really do want to like VLC, because I'm so damn tired of Quicktime Player. Help me with two problems and I will become a devoted fan:
*1 Somehow=viewing them using WMP9 @:
I can see the fnords!
Actually, when you know the rules, they are. It can't be considered an "error of ignorance" if you are not ignorant of the rules. I often type the wrong word, then glance back over my post and immediately fix it. I have similar problems accidentally typing "an" instead of "and." I see it as my fingers working a bit too independently of my mind.
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Media Player Classic was great, but it's no longer updated and has several security flaws that are un patched.
There's a current and very good fork called Media Player Classic Homecinema, you just needed to do a very small amount of research.
While I think mplayer is a great application, I've found VLC to be much more stable. Mplayer regularly crashes on me and can't handle some of the video files VLC handles without problems.
Granted, I think the mplayer interface is nicer and the command line for mplayer is great. I highly recommend both players.
If anyone understood how RAR files work they wouldn't ask for VLC to be able to play them as if they were video files.
JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP IRRIGATE
Many of the "content release teams" will make their official releases in multipart RAR format.
Apparently, Usenet is now for the "1337".
The end result is that even if you get such releases via BitTorrent, there's still a good chance they're distributed as multipart RARs. A video player that can play such files lets you view the video in its "seedable" form.
Of course, I just simply stop seeding such content much earlier than I normally would. If someone wants me to seed, they should make it EASY for me to seed by having the "seedable" form equal the "viewable" form.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
There's a difference between the wife-acceptance-factor and the fiancee-acceptance-factor.
No, they'd ask for VLC to seamlessly play the video files inside the RAR files. Split hairs much?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Maybe it's resolved since then, but if VLC wasn't concerned about its users then I wasn't going to waste more time on their behalf either. Album art downloads tend to do Google searches and download the first image returned. For at least some releases of VLC, this gets triggered for videos as well as audio. The end result is, every time I watch a video that I have on my local network, VLC advertises the fact that I am watching it. To the largest data mining company ever, Google. Unencrypted for anyone to see.
I posted a question to VLC forums, they seemed very unconcerned about this.
Somehow I enabled album art download. I don't remember doing it, but I am told it is off by default in every release so I did it, as opposed to VLC doing it automatically, so it's not necessarily a big deal. but I don't remember turning it on and had no way to know it was on until I got "out of disk space" errors and went looking for things to delete.
Anyway, more details here and read for yourselves.
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=55288&p=182407
I've used it for a while. I could never figure out how to direct the output to one of the two audio cards in my [Windows] PC? Also, I have a USB-connected D/A converter, and I never was able to get VLC to send the audio data to that.
VLC is nice. But I am forced to copy any movie I want to play to my local hard drive. It absolutely cannot handle playing over a LAN, at least not wireless ones. Where Quicktime will play a movie without skipping a beat, VLC will badly stutter, freeze, and otherwise be really annoying. I've played around with various buffering settings, and nothing seems to help. (At least for 0.9.8. I'll try 0.9.9 later today, but I can't imagine that they've fixed this yet.)
[offtopic]
No matter what shell you're using, someone has to write the tab completion scripts. Maybe it's easier done in ZSH, I don't know... but ZSH alone doesn't do magic.
Which is a shame... someone should look over the completion scripts that are out there, figure out what sorts of things they need to do, and standardize a way of storing that sort of completion information in a section of the binary itself. That way the shell could just read an ELF section of whatever program it's going to run instead of having to write completion scripts for each program out there.
You could even imagine designing a program that would display a GUI representation of the command line options for a program by reading this information automatically.
I am designing a shell and this is a feature I want to include... I like the tab-completion feature Bash, etc. can offer on command arguments, but the feature has to be organized in such a way that the programs themselves will supply the completion data...
Bow-ties are cool.
It still crashes when using x264 for streaming video on Windows...
It's not that shit like this is surprising but a FUCKING WARNING FIRST would've been nice. Now I have to stop everything I'm doing on a main workstation (because CS3 and other filmmaking software runs like shit on my SuSE boxen). To reboot a machine that otherwise wouldn't have neede it. After I save 20 apps' worth of work, instructions and notes.
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Not vxWorks. WxWidgets, the former WxWindows, a cross-platform GUI toolkit.
I also use 0.8.6 for the same reason. And also because .mkv format playback is slow on 0.9.*, and normal on 0.8.6 on the same hardware.
Another problem I notice is that some of the keyboard shortcuts don't work. You can find out what they are from the preferences menu. Sometimes, I'd like to skip back a few seconds, but the shortcut assigned to that skips back about a minute. The one that's supposed to skip back a minute goes to the start of the movie. BROKEN.
No, not the KDE Mplayer, but this guy? http://kmplayer.en.softonic.com/ I used it briefly but it seems like it has too many customization options for the average user, but many advanced users rave about it. They have a forum here and it seems like the place to go for latest info and downloads.
Or are all codecs finally included again like they used to be? Can't believe I have to re-compile VLC just to encode Xvid directly.
People are asking for a better desktop icon??
It's much better than Quicktime on MacOS. Much. Better. I always give it Mac people. Sure, if you want to type and you're on a *nix box, it's mplayer (but it has drawbacks too .. the -ss/-pos stuff is madness, and the position output during playback is very strange notation.. just simple hh:mm:ss would be best, maybe plus timecode if present?).
But, if you want a major complaint about VLC, which will make me switch to OSX mplayer (since I just learned about it) ... VLC *cannot* play two files at a time. If you want this, you must copy the VLC application. You can't even run it again as separate instance ..AFAIK.. maybe a commandline option? So. WTF??? A word processor which only opens *one file* at a time?
Major design flaw, IMHO.
Enough to send me elsewhere after many years of VLC.
It seems everyone misses the point of this player.
Did you know you can stream VLC content to a) the screen obviously b) the network and c) to a file in another format? (and probably more)
Did you know you can create custom GUI's for VLC?
Control it via http?
Plays DVDs,Capture Cards,Network streams and files? (and probably more)
I always thought they used the mpc engine as the player and just added on the rest of the goodies.
I figured if VLC couldn't play it, it wasn't worth looking for alternatives.
Right now VLC (on XP) is streaming cable TV to my network. I'm currently watching that stream on my Linux box. I use an Ipod touch to control VLC from a (customized) http interface. I use Prism to display the same http interface for mouse control.
Sure i could use MythTV, but I enjoy the tinkering. ooo I might just have to go make VLC to some DVRing.
Thanks VLC
I have used VLC for many years, and am happy to see them finally put out an update. I love VLC because it will play just about anything - DVDs without a separate decoder installed, xvids, MP4s, Quicktime movies, and so on. It never fails.
However, it has plenty of bugs, and the user interface needs a lot of work. Integration with other applications like IE or Acrobat Reader is problematic. Often have problems playing videos on your second monitor as well, though supposedly that is fixed in this release.
IMO GOMPlayer has the best user interface out there; you can customize mappings functions like fast forward, rewind, multiple volume controls... lots of functions that you can map quite easily to customize it to how you use it. The problem with GOMPlayer though? It needs you to install codecs for just about everything.
The perfect media player for me would something like the customizable user interface in GOMPlayer combined with the extensive codec support included in VLC Player.
That's my 2 cents anyway...
...I've never had much luck on the converting part. Most often what I'm trying to do is convert a MPEG-4 video to MPEG-2 with AC3 audio for DVD burning. Despite following several handy guides on the web, I have never gotten acceptable results (or even got it work most of the time). The summary here states that VLC is the best for playback (I tend to agree) and converting (I don't agree, and even VLC's "Transcode Wizard" has stated that it's not really meant for conversion). Anybody have better luck with this, or have a guide on the web that really works?
:q!
I'm surprised that this isn't listed as one of the improvements anywhere.
That was what made Miro a PITA. Miro is based on VLC for playback support. It is now going to be USEFUL for me! Fantastic.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
VLC has an amazing GUI (Especially at full-screen mode) for OSX, and the linux version isn't far behind. I don't see why VLC for WIN32 has to be so awful, considering that Win32 is by far their largest audience.
Thanks for that comment. It was very mysterious that there were so many negative comments on VLC, but nearly all were from Windows users. I use VLC and MPlayer on Ubuntu, and find them both excellent in performance and with good - but different - interfaces. They can handle every DVD and video file I throw at them, and their interfaces are quite nice in their own ways.
So how exactly does the VLC interface differ between Windows and Linux? Does the Windows VLC really suck that badly?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Just wanted to second, third, fourth... n-th this sentiment. VLC's UI is atrociously unusable (particularly in full-screen mode).
Having spent some time over at the VLC boards, the attitude there generally sucks. Questions seldom get answered in any kind of helpful way, and too many of the developers have made it clear that they see users as being nothing more than peons and "whiners". I know it can be a hassle running an open-source project and dealing with users' sense of entitlement, but there are loads of people who manage to do so without acting like a dick, so there's really no excuse.
It's a shame because VLC is a great program for the most part, though the documentation is pretty sub-par -- the example that the parent gives is something that should never happen.
VLC blows and we all know it. Mod me down?
Story takes a dive in credibility right there. VLC is good, yes, and sometimes it will play a format you can't get anything else to play. But from a video perspective, the interface is clunky and unintuitive. Especially on a Mac with the ridiculous file-open-close buthchery it uses.
I'll upgrade to this version, but VLC is never my first choice to play multimedia content (I mentioned Mac OSX but I more often use Linux or Windows). Will this version win me over? We'll see, but I doubt it. I'm in no rush. The sheer hyperbole of "better by a long stretch" has left me underwhelmed. The author maybe did VLC a desservice with that language.
You think the OSX gui is amazing? I hate it. I'm forced to use it from time to time for HD content and I always dread the experience. Opening a file is the most common thing you can do, and it's not the easiest thing to find in the menu. Don't even ask about closing a file.
Its a video player....who the hell looks at the GUI?
You click the video to start it , go to fullscreen and then press Space for play/pause if you need to go to the can.
What else do you need to watch Dr Who and spank the monkey? (as separate activities or together)
So you're not too dumb to know the rule, you're too lazy (or dumb) to read what you wrote? Grats.
Nope, just human.
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Then I started trying to play HD content, blury rips, VC-1 coded movies, etc. It has all kinds of problem, from lack of support for some audio codecs, to crashes, garbled video etc.
Then I discovered XBMC, and its become my player of choice. I don't particularly like its interface* but it works fantastically.
*its too media center oriented, it would be great on a media pc, but its not so great as a desktop application.
Instead of polishing your knob in an article about how good you are, why not just TELL US what features makes the product so innovative than say 0.9.8, or 0.9.7, etc..
In terms of the poster's 'I'm the best' position, I'd say they fall flat in that regard as well.
1. For windows nothing can beat Media Player Classic. Nothing. It has just enough GUI to do what it was designed for, to play videos. It has all the configuration you'll ever need in the background, and if you don't it generally works out of the box for 90% of the things you want.
As for codecs, you have several options on how to get all the needed codecs, and you can bet that a large number of them support DxVA (where applicable) out of the box, which means you have a fast low overhead media player that plays pretty much everything you throw at it.
For Linux, that's a different story. Linux's equivalent of DirectShow(The decoding pipeline for media content) is gstreamer, but it suffers from a serious lack of adoption. We have Totem, but lets admit that if there's anything you need outside of the totem defaults, you're screwed.
The alternative is to use all-in-one-package media players. The obviously suffer in that if the codec / format / playback feature you're looking for isn't supported by the player, the whole stack becomes useless. But, this is sadly exactly what you're stuck with. Our options are: VLC/Xine/Mplayer and gui variants thereof.
VLC is fine, but its never had specifically good support on my hardware, and there are -many- videos that fail to play where other players can.
Xine is why software developers should never be put in charge of UI design. The UI stinks so badly, that the only time I ever open it is when all other players fail to play properly.
Mplayer is probably the most codec compatible player out there, but then again, there's no GUI for people to interact with. Unless you're a keyboard/command line nazi, you'll most likely decide that there's no point in Mplayer without one of its many available front-ends. I've tried a few over the years, and the only one that (finally) met my happy path requirements for > 80% of the time was SMPlayer. It is a great frontend to Mplayer, and gets my thumbs up. It keeps the complexity of selecting appropriate devices within the preferences if I really care to tweak them, but the out of box experience is also pretty good.
For anyone reading this post who is actually a contributor to these projects, PLEASE try to focus on supporting a pipelined system like gstreamer, or writing codecs that can be plugged in willy nilly instead of monolithic all-in.
I think a real winner on linux would be:
1. A user interface akin to SMPlayer, in terms of its toolbars, layouts, config (in general)
2. A container/codec glue that is well understood and powerful enough to support codecs, overlays, user input, etc.. I think gstreamer is this tool, but maybe it needs work on the input side of things *shrugs*
3. A set of simple codec/container implementations with simple APIs so that they can be plugged into any pipeline without gratuitous hacks. Ideally, these implementations could be interchangeable and upgradable without requiring recompilation of their glue layer
Ack, that's about it.
Bye!
Hell, MPC can do it, and has been able to for quite some time. VLC seems reluctant to do so; why?
"I also HATE that VLC doesn't let you click on the frame to pause. Nothing happens when you click on the frame, so why not pause! Having to navigate to the little pause button every time is lame."
you could try hitting the spacebar. it's big, easy to see, and pauses playback.
I'm sorry, what?
The KMPlayer (Windows)
SMPlayer (Linux)
Who cares about audience, which platform do you think contributes the most developers.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
If you have stretched the window it'll still snap back to the old size when another video plays/the video repeats. Even if you were in full screen it'll scale back to windowed.
I heard that would have been fixed in this, shame that it still isn't.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
mplayerc was the best player even though it hasn't been maintained for over two years. Now development started again.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Are you kidding? You have three ways to open; drag and drop support, apple+o and traditional pull down. Close is apple w or apple q depending on options.
moox. for a new generation.
FYP.
Hi, congratulations on your first post here on Slashdot! And, man, what a burn! You really got me there... Except you really ought to read what I post before you try to "fix" it.
I do have to say, though, you may be entirely correct that nobody will use the shell I'm designing. The way I figure it, the people who still want to use a command-shell are mostly die-hards who don't want to see it change - and I want to change it in ways that go beyond new mechanisms for supporting tab-completion... So I know what I'm getting into. My project may never go anywhere beyond my own systems.
But as I was saying, you misunderstood the feature we're discussing. The problem with the current approach to shell tab-completion (of programs' command-line arguments) is that these programs (neither the binaries themselves nor the distro packages in which they're provided) don't publish information about their own command-line arguments in a way that an automated tool, like a shell, can extract that data. So the information is usually maintained in a separate database - like the "bash-completion" package - not part of the shell package, not part of the tool's package, but something separate which must be kept in sync with the packages one has installed.
The feature we're discussing is a way for the tool itself to publish information, to the shell, about what kinds of command-line options it uses. There's all kinds of ways this could be done... For instance, the existing bash-completion mechanism could be used - but packaged differently so that each time you install a package containing a tool, it would add the necessary "complete" invocations to a startup script run when bash is invoked. This sort of approach is possible without any revolutionary changes to the shell - all you need is the right infrastructure and policies as part of your Linux distribution to make each individual package responsible for maintaining its own "bash completion" entries.
Now, what we grown-ups were discussing when you stuck your nose in was another method by which these "unrelated executables" could themselves publish information about the arguments they accept - by encoding that information into the structure of the executable ELF file or via another metadata mechanism. The shell, then, when confronted by "tar ^I", would go find "tar" on the path and see if it provides any information about the arguments it accepts. Maybe the shell would pull some data out of a field in the ELF file, or from an xattr attached to the binary, or from another file with a related name - you know, whatever works... In a proper programming language this sort of feature would be called "reflection" - the ability of calling code (in this case, the shell) to get some information about the module it's calling (in this case, tar or any other program run from within the shell) programmatically.
The key idea here is to decentralize the management of these completion lists. Tab-completion information for "tar" should be provided by "tar", not by "bash-completion", not by "fish" - it should either be either a part of the "tar" binary, a part of the "tar" package, or part of a package recommended by the "tar" package. And whoever maintains the "tar" package should maintain the tab-completion data as well, to keep it in sync with new versions.
Bow-ties are cool.
VLC is great and much work has been done to it. There is one very annoying flaw that has made many I shown it to not want to use it. When pausing it will first finish playing what ever is left over in the buffer before actually pausing. It will then wait to rebuffer before unpausing. This issue becomes even worse when the buffer is increased to help with network streaming through file access. Trying to pause a scene in an exact spot by rewinding and timing how much will be lost to the broken pause function can be aggravating.
When I mentioned this to the developers back in version 0.7.x I was basically told that is exactly how all other players work and it was "working as designed".
To test this change the file input caching to one second or higher to really see how it can be annoying.
What is up with their logo? My best guess was that the cone is meant to represent that it's still in beta -- under construction.
So assuming this is correct, do they get a new logo when that's no longer true? I know I could just change it myself for my copy but that's a pain, and - it is, imho, one of if not the the ugliest logo of any program I use regularly.
If it's not correct, why would a video player use a traffic / construction cone as it's logo? What's the meaning behind it?
This is not meant to be inflammatory - I honestly don't know what they might have been thinking.
Seems like a lame feature request to me. I can understand not wanting to implement that. VLC already has a problem with feature sprawl (or as someone else called it an identity crisis). It's already a streaming client and a video player and a transcoder/converting tool. Why does it need to be a de-archiver as well? Bloat bloat bloat. The developers should be focused at this point on increasing its performance on Win32 if anything (at least according to the general sentiment of the comments here and pretty much everywhere online).
I guess someone could always fork the project to implement archive-extraction-before-playing if they wanted it badly enough, though. So all is not lost.
JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP IRRIGATE
I have used WinAMP for exactly this purpose; my DJ friend does Karaoke using a laptop. We first set up the Video Window to be detached, set the window to always be open, and also set the window to start full-screen. Once its positioned on the second monitor, it will always stay there, and your controls and playlist will be on the main monitor.
To get all of our video formats to play, we install FFDSHOW, and add AVI and MP4 files to the Directshow filter plugin of WinAMP.
Agreed. It promotes stupid user behavior.
Best Windows playback stack:
*Media Player Classic (Guliverkli2 NOT Guliverkli, Homecinema is ok)
*ffdshow tryouts (NOT ffdshow)
*Haali Media Splitter
Mac:
*Perian
VLC is ok, but it lives in its own world. It won't add playback capability to Front Row, Windows Media Center, and others. On Mac, it's nice to have VLC around because Perian isn't quite there with subtitle support.
It'd just be another plugin. If it wasn't being used, the dll wouldn't be loaded.
And it'd be handy for multi-part archives. If I have 6/8 parts, I'd rather just drag part1.rar into VLC as opposed to extracting with WinRAR, ignoring the error, breaking the operation, and playing a truncated file.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
This is in case you get a corrupted download, you can redownload just a part instead of the whole thing which is very important for video which are typically large downloads (anywhere from 175MB for a 30min tv show to a 40GB Blu-Ray rip). This is how every single thing I get on Bit-torrent (private tracker FTW) is packaged.
So, in the IPTV/CATV VLC is still seen is the gold-standard. It's funny when you work with vendors like Moto or others that they all tell you to use VLC as a way to diag or troubleshoot their equipment. The only issue I still have with it is that the OSX version still can't play Mutlicast MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 content. The Windows and Linux version do it just fine :)
Obviously, you know her and I don't. My point was just that sometimes a woman is more flexible when the knot is still not tied than she is afterward. It's not a condemnation of women in general or your fiancee specifically. Men often dress better and keep their apartment neater around women before they are married, and end up sitting around the house in boxer shorts once the honeymoon is over.
LOL. Complaining about the uppity attitude of the pirates, now there's a moral high ground which I thought was uninhabitable.
Of course, I just simply stop seeding such content much earlier than I normally would.
Take that you damn pirates!!! After I leeched your content I thwart you by seeding only the one measily copy.
vxWorks is a small footprint, Realtime Operating System (RTOS) used in many networking devices. See that Motorola Surfboard over there? that newer-model WRT54G? yea, vxWorks.
Is there any way to switch channels in VLC without retuning? I have all my frequencies, program information, etc in a list I load via telnet VOD interface (it's streamed over the network - exactly what VLC is designed for), but retuning takes a few seconds - which drops the video on the client end and is extremely annoying for channel surfing. Also, is there any way to extract the OTA EPG without resorting to messy (e)grep/sed/awk of the VLC log? Thanks
Posting anon because I've moderated on this thread.
normally i would agree, but the problem is that the people who would download from you were (probably) not the ones who created the torrent. by ceasing seeding you have harmed the torrent creators by helping prevent their content from reaching downloaders, but you have also harmed downloaders for the same reason. we should try to think of a workaround that will benefit the community as a whole. i recommend creating our own torrents of files in viewable formats, modifying vlc and releasing a fork that plays videos in this multipart rar format, or both.
It maybe the Swiss Army Knife of the video files but I will NOT consider it the best until it can properly render subtitles from an MKV file, or any external subtitle file.
One would think two years and [G/g]od knows how many petitions someone in there would work on it but all they have said is "it's not a high priority"
So I say screw them. I'll stick to Perian/Quicktime on OSX and Media Player/CCP on XP.
VLC is generally good, but something that's constantly annoyed me about it is the way it always seems to get the track lengths wrong, and it's still not fixed. I'm playing a 4:14 song right now and it says it's 7:32. Grr.
With all this typing you've done on Slashdot, which probably won't change the code for you, you've done at least that much typing on a bug report, feature request, on on the VLC forums, right?
WalMart.
Its customers expect media play to work out of the box.
The Linux PC with a BLu-Ray drives and a gray market codec is in a shipping container on the LA docks - and there it will stay.
It can't be imported, it can't be stocked, and it can't be sold.
VLC always had problems with decoding quickly enough. Some of the PCs were old, but not that old. GOM, on the other hand, rarely tells me I'm missing a codec (as Windows Media Player is prone to do) and has zero decompression issues.
so any misgivings i have about using it have disappeared with the new 0.9.9 release. It's da bomb yet again.
REAL programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
VLC is a really good project, and they've done a lot of great work. But for a project of this scale they're critically understaffed. They have millions of Windows users and they're in desperate need of more help to make the Windows port solid- it's not been in too great of shape since they ditched the wxWidgets GUI for QT.
My sincere apologies if you'll have them. You are right. Not only was I wrong, I was being a perfect asshole about it. Am I glad now that I posted cowardly!
Moreover, your ideas sound great. I'm sure you can do without me, but I'll be watching your home page and Slashdot journal for updates. Please post them. You may, after all, be wrong about the die-hards not being open to change. At the very least, I'd hope this gets integrated into the more established shells.
If you visit their home page you'll find that they do have a new logo for 1.0. I don't know that the bulldozer is an improvement though.
!loof lirpA
Eh, no sweat - I was snippy in return so we are thus karmically balanced. :D
I suppose a good first step to the whole tab-completion thing would be to get a distro to run with the idea, using the bash tab completion system as a base. That would mostly just be a problem of establishing and implementing policy, as opposed to a technical problem of implementation. (Actually I wouldn't be too surprised if there are distros out there that do this - though on the other hand the GUI is more emphasized these days than the shell, so possibly not) The author of the "fish" shell observed that, while it's nice that various shells support the use of this kind of tab-completion information, the support is useless if it's not turned on, and it's off by default...
From there, even if the information wasn't stored in a way that's optimal for other shells, still the information would at least be there, and package maintainers for other shells would be able to access it...
I tend to approach a lot of these things with the perspective of "If I were starting over from scratch, how would I do it?" It's a nice way to look at things when your goal is to make something new - but it's not always a practical way to look at solving a problem and getting people to embrace the solution. Sometimes it's important to make good use of what you already have before trying to make something new that's better...
Bow-ties are cool.
Thank you for this comment.
I cannot tell you how many times I've seen someone reply to my objection of multi-part RAR posts with "RAR compresses better so it takes less time to download."
Then I have to point out to them, "The file you posted is already compressed video. It's 98mb in size. Your RAR files in aggregate are 99mb. Stop the insanity!"
Of course the response is, "Well yes, but everybody can decode RAR." Augh....
I think many people thinks the MPlayer is the same Windows Media Player Classic. MPlayer is something else (www.mplayerhq.hu), and it is the best media player. VLC is the second best. I don't know about WMP Classic, I just don't like it.
While I use VLC a lot, the UI is still clumsy compared to other Windows and X-Windows players. You have to tell it the difference between a DVD and audio CD; the UI changes between audio and video; the gaziline advanced options can be problematic; klunky. Also the region free ability has been broken for a while now. I have to use DVD43 and another player to watch Region 2 (France) DVDs. It used to work, but some where it just stopped. Frankly, they still have a long way to go.
I've been using VLC for years with no crashing or other problems (on XP). The only problem, which just came up when I started watching higher res with a new monitor, as that it was jerky with 1080p mkv. So on reading this thread I tried mplayer (media player classic) on the same files: it doesn't work. Gives an error message. Then I tried the newest version of VLC. Works right out of the box, and the 1080p mkv quality is now excellent. For me, that's all that matters.
If you luck into a build of mplayer that works for you right away, or if you enjoy compiling your own software or finding and configuring codecs on your own, then I'm sure it's a great player. If the new version of VLC runs well on your hardware and OS and you want something that's ready to use as soon as you download and install it, then VLC is for you. From the number of fans of each program, it's obvious they're both pretty good.
Streaming not working at all from version 0.9. Version 0.8.6i was the last version that worked. I have tested all versions on windows trying to receive the RTP stream on localhost.
Yeah, VLC is okay. Undoubtefully very useful piece of software, and covering needs for the most, although it has its share of somewhat serious drawbacks (for me), which recently have diverted me to MPlayer for Linux and/or dynamically linked FFMpeg and ffplay.
1. VLC embeds FFMpeg library, effectively freezing codec support and optimizations across a version. Since FFMpeg is patched quite frequently and none of these patches make it into a VLC release, because of the embedded FFMpeg snapshot, all these FFMpeg advances are no good in VLC, until next release. Excluding people who compile VLC of course, and can patch it themselves.
2. DVD playback image quality IS MARGINALLY WORSE than Windows Media Player 10 for instance. That is a very easily spottable fact. It may be that VLC configures mpeg decoder to use less sophisticated decoding settings, which result in suboptimal playback quality. Fire up the same mpeg stream in VLC and WMP, and you will most certainly spot the difference with your eyes.
3. The settings dialog is a bit too messy, and even where it seems to have gotten better, it lacks either proper documentation or sufficiently explanatory tooltips (i.e. context sensitive help)
4. All Gnome users are forced to use the QT interface, since QT is now the only one VLC uses, because some smart VLC developer has decided GTK was not goog enough perhaps. Or maybe simply he was Norwegian or German, and a big fan of KDE or QT. Either way, VLC developers may not have heard about user interface uniformity or they think all good people should use KDE or suck it up. I havent looked into the possibility to plug a GTK interface into it yet, has anyone gotten that to work? It does support skins and custom interfaces, so that should be possible as well.
And I am talking about the simple installation of VLC, not all those hackers compiling from source and replacing interfaces statically/dynamically or custom-adapting the MPEG decoder(s).
I find that MPlayer works much better for me. It has a neat minimal interface, CPU usage about 80% of VLC (and that often matters a whole lot), much better subtitle customization (placement, rendering, etc) and it has not made the idiotic decision to statically embed system-wide libraries just because it is *easier* to work with. Until developers are AFRAID of dynamic linking, because of compatibility issues, the libraries will not get better either. So, I am glad, MPlayer developers among others understand this.
eball wrote just now of the Combined Community Codec Pack, and on a page on their site is the only set of API-level media player reviews I have ever found. I have been looking for this a very long time, they are covering all of the Windows comprehensive media players I've used. The reviews all start at the API level, and I hope that some more Windows developers out there start to work to the standards recommended; if they do, things will get much better.
J.E.B.
Joshua Corps
Can't somebody blot on unrarlib to FUSE, archivemount style, and get it over with?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
I always refer non-techies to VLC. Like I see many posting here, I prefer MPC and installing my own codecs. I don't know if they changed the interface, but MPC is just faster and works better, which is why I like it.
"When all other media players fail, whether on Windows, Linux, or the Mac, VLC will almost always deliver."
ALMOST always? So it may fail? Yuck. PowerDVD or WMP 9/10/11 plays any video file I've ever acquired. Because I don't need VLC to make up for my lack of intelligence in not having the proper codecs on my system.
So this VLC product is targeted to lazy or non-tech-savvy people who find intermittent failure acceptable. OK. Pass