VLC 1.0.0 Released

rift321 writes "VLC media player, which we all know for simplifying the playback of pretty much any codec out there, has finally released version 1.0.0. Here's a quick list of improvements: live recording, instant pausing and frame-by-frame support, finer speed controls, new HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0), new formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS) and major improvements in many formats, new Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder, video scaling in fullscreen, RTSP Trickplay support, zipped file playback, customizable toolbars, easier encoding GUI in Qt interface, better integration in Gtk environments, MTP devices on Linux, and AirTunes streaming."

Comments

Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Rogerborg]

Has anyone fixed the volume control yet, or is that too trivial to bother with?

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Icegryphon]

Yes, It now goes to 11.
Isn't that good enought for you?

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Blakey Rat]

What's broken about it? I'm using 0.9.9 now (or whatever the last release was), and I don't have any issues with the volume control.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Maxo-Texas]

Actually, in a way it does.

I'd been adjusting the volume up to 100% but for some unknown reason, I kept rotating the mouse-wheel and it went up to 200%, 300%, and finally 400% of the default volume the .avi provided.
I'd had trouble getting it loud enough before using the standard system audio controls.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, hold the up arrow while holding Control...

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Mister Whirly]

Can I raise a practical question at this point? Are we gonna do Stonehenge tonight?

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had similar issues with other A/V software. Where the internal vol control is not tied to the 'system' very well. So inside the program it is maxed out and you can not hear it at all. But you tweak the 'system' one and it is now loud enough.

I think what is happening is A/V software is tied to one of the volume sliders (there are many) and not to the system one. So you end up with quiet audio in a movie.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[OolimPhon]

If you don't turn it up enough you can't hear the whoooosh!

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Daravon]

I know Winamp was (is?) like that. When you adjust the volume, it adjusts the Wave output in Windows. This is fine if you're using Winamp all the time, but if you switch to another media player (I used to be a big fan of The Core Media Player until it died), you're left with turning your volume to max and still not being able to hear anything.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[maxume]

You are describing the correct behavior. An audio or video program should not be messing with the system volume (or any auxiliary system volume control).

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

yes I hate when to listen to a low recorded video all the windows sounds and other applications stuff become extra loud. fortunately vista have the option of mixing the volume for each application

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Reziac]

I've noticed that too. I'd wondered if that's a function of how Windows handles WAVs -- that is, is WinAmp passing the volume control on to Windows rather than actually handling it itself?

I seem to recall a similar issue with MIDIs. But not with MP3s, which Windows doesn't handle natively.

I'm just pulling explanations out of my ass, but those are what came out. :)

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[thyarcher]

Actually, they did fix the sound control from being directly tied to the scroll wheel. There is now an option in the hotkey selection window to allow the scroll wheel to seek or be ignored and subsequently mapped to a hotkey. I just noticed the setting this release. Since it was a pulldown option instead of just using hotkey mapping, it was non-obvious.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Otto]

You are describing the correct behavior. An audio or video program should not be messing with the system volume (or any auxiliary system volume control).

Actually, no. ALL volume control should be adjusting the system volume controls. There is no such real thing as "digital volume".

If you alter volume digitally, you lose resolution. Take a 16-bit signal. Your max volume corresponds to the peaks of that signal. Assuming that the peaks range from -32768 to 32767 (the signal has been normalized), then all you can ever do is reduce the volume. If you increase it digitally, you get clipping or some other form of loss of quality, depending on how you do it. The system volume controls, on the other hand, are generally directly hooked to the amplifier in the sound card, which is analog, and which doesn't have the same issues.

In other words, volume is an analog thing. It's controlled by the amplifier in the sound card. Emulating it by manipulating the digital signal (which is all that a program has real control over without hitting the system volume) always causes loss in signal quality, in some manner.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Khyber]

The trick to stopping that (it's no longer a default setting in newer versions) was to go to the device controls and uncheck the system volume box that you found under the output options.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[retro83]

Not sure if this is what you meant, but at least on OSX it is broken in that it now does not tell you what percentage the volume control is set to. This is only really a problem because the volume goes above 100% without snapping at the point where you reach full volume.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[maxume]

Well, most software shouldn't be applying gain either, and any degradation from attenuation is unlikely to be noticeable on top of the decent amp and cheap speakers that most people are using.

Basically, the problem with the twiddle-the-system mechanism is that my loud music will occasionally be disrupted by a jarring system noise. This is terrible.

Perhaps the system should present an audio api that makes it easy to select a volume somewhere between nothing and the current system volume (and provide high quality attenuation based on that setting), but I really don't want apps changing the system setting.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[clone53421]

IIRC my own experience has been that full-volume on other players is more like 200% on VLC. It struck me as odd, which is the only reason I remember it probably. As you said, though, 400% is quite a bit louder than other players' maximum volume and that does come in handy sometimes.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[zmollusc]

I think that the crux of the matter is that the audio signal in the problematic film clips had _not_ been normalised.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[JHromadka]

Is there a way to mute playback in the app when playing at faster speeds?

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I believe in the older versions you would just set it to use directsound output instead.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[shutdown -p now]

IIRC, this was fixed in Vista (which now maintains separate per-application volume settings).

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Ash Vince]

Perhaps the system should present an audio api that makes it easy to select a volume somewhere between nothing and the current system volume (and provide high quality attenuation based on that setting), but I really don't want apps changing the system setting.

Well I do so lets just face the fact that it is personal preference and their is no right and wrong way to do it apart from making sure it is configurable. What default you choose is irrelevant as someone will always think it was the wrong choice.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

In theory that should depend on which output module you're using. If you're using DirectSound output module, that should not be the case as the DirectSound system maintains an independant volume control for each program (and mixes it all together in software.) But if you use the tradtional 'wave' output module, then, yes, behaviour is as you describe (as the traditional system doesn't do this.)

Yes, I just love how windows has umpteen APIs that all overlap...

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Rogerborg]

For the record, I have never used VLC and had no idea if there was a problem with the volume control. I just gambled that there was. How astonished I am not to find that there is.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Farhood]

i just installed .9.9 on 30+ client computers. Thanks for the new release, assholes.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[rdnetto]

The weird thing is that it only does that under Windows - under Linux (or at least using the version in the Ubuntu repositories) it's limited to 200%, as shown by interface.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Otto]

Basically, the problem with the twiddle-the-system mechanism is that my loud music will occasionally be disrupted by a jarring system noise. This is terrible.

Yes, it is, which is why audio playing apps should temporarily turn off system noises. Windows has a call for this, somewhere. Not sure on Linux systems, but I bet there is a way.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Otto]

Digitally you can increase the audio to the max no-clip volume (normalize it) without serious loss of fidelity. A good player app could do that automatically, but many don't because it involves scanning the entire clip to find the peaks, and sometimes you don't have access to the whole clip (streaming).

Even so, if you don't know where the peaks are, then altering the digital signal level just haphazardly is certain to make your audio sound like complete crap. Which is why you manipulate the system volume for volume control, because that's analog (even if you set it digitally) and doesn't involve changing the signal.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[JuliaNZ]

Yes, I just love how windows has umpteen APIs that all overlap...

Surely you're taking the piss. ALSA, various versions of OSS, PulseAudio enough for you?

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[zmollusc]

It seems the more elegant solution, to turn the analogue amplifiers way up to compensate for an un-normalised weak digital signal, right up to the point when you get an email and the speaker cones hit you in the face.

Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive

[Otto]

A good player app takes exclusive control of the sound system, to prevent exactly that sort of thing. VLC has this as a configurable option, in fact.

"GUI in Qt"

[quantic_oscillation7]

"GUI in Qt" now that's nice! but i'm so addicted to mplayer+smplayer!!!

Re:"GUI in Qt"

[stoanhart]

Hands down the best front end for mplayer, IMHO.

Hardware acceleration

[frednofr]

Without hardware accelerated h.264 playback, I'm not going back to VLC.

Still, it's a great do it all player / streamer.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 can be compiled with VAAPI to get hardware acceleration.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Jamamala]

VLC supports hardware acceleration on nVidia G80 and higher hardware using VDPAU on Linux. As soon as ATI releases a XvBA driver, hardware acceleration should be possible through VAAPI.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[je ne sais quoi]

You might want to read this then. It appears that there are even patches available for vdpau (=NVIDIA's hardware acceleration). I haven't tried this yet myself though (but will be as soon as I get home from work).

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

No, VDPAU doesn't support G80. G9x and higher.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[westlake]

VLC 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 can be compiled with VAAPI to get hardware acceleration. The simplest way to insure a permanent fractional 1% share for Linux is to require a compiler to gain functionality the OSX and Windows app delivers on launch.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you an insurance agent?

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Taibhsear]

Some of the G8x are supported but not all.
VDPAU Supported Cards

My only issue is does this VDPAU support in VLC come natively or do I have to do something asinine like compiling the damn thing myself instead of just offering a parallel download (name it VLC-HD or something like that)?

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Midnight Thunder]

Without hardware accelerated h.264 playback, I'm not going back to VLC.

People are looking into hardware accelerated codecs. Some of the approaches aren't cross-platform, but it is better to see some progress somewhere, than none at all. I holding out for solutions that can take advantage of stuff like OpenCL.

Another focus for getting hardware accelerated video into VLC is ffmpeg, though I am not sure what sort of effort if being done here?

Re:Hardware acceleration

[tlhIngan]

Without hardware accelerated h.264 playback, I'm not going back to VLC.

Still, it's a great do it all player / streamer

Actually, that's one reason why I use VLC - because I know it's not going to use any accelleration except minor ones that don't affect much (e.g., DirectX video surfaces). It's important when you remove the DRM that you actually removed the DRM, and sometimes testing it with Windows Media Player doesn't help (you can check through the properties, but I'd like to be sure). With VLC not using the OS components, I know if it plays there, there isn't any DRM on it.

Of course, having the option to use hardware accelleration, or disabling it, is better...

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Cyberax]

You're in luck: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Njk1NA

Re:Hardware acceleration

[AikonMGB]

Do you have a link to a well-written guide on setting this up? I've been trying to test it out on my laptop (which research tells me /can/ run VDPAU), but I'm a Linux user, not a developer, and I keep getting lost and giving up before I reach the destination =(

Aikon-

Re:Hardware acceleration

[loutr]

Well that doesn't really matter as the linux folks who would be afraid to try and compile an app will get it via their distro package manager, and it's almost certain that distros like ubuntu will compile in video acceleration support. The others will have the choice, and that's what OSS's all about :)

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

What software actually has good and working hardware acceleration for h.264? I am not talking about hardware accelerated blu-ray discs. I want to be able to read h.264 in MKVs or AVIs as well. I don't know any software which can do this well and is usable so I stick with VLC. Anyways, my cheap dual core CPU can play a 15GB H.264 1080p movie so acceleration isn't that much an issue, and you won't even care in a few years, just like you don't care about acceleration for MPEG2 DVDs when you watch them in your computer.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[sarhjinian]

That does not help. Saying "well, you can just compile in support for ____" shouldn't be acceptable in this day and age. You shoudn't have to compile in support for a given piece of hardware into a player: this is why we have things called "drivers" and "APIs".

Video on non-MacOS/Windows is in an awful state, even when using the same player. If I use VLC on a Macintosh or Windows machine, I can play back content without skipping, sync, artifacts, tearing or stuttering as long as it's within reasonable processing limits. On Linux, it's a crapshoot, completely dependent on the player, video card, window manager and version of X and/or video drivers. I know it's supposedly getting better, but there's still no unified video acceleration API, it looks like nVidia and ATI are going to propose competing (VDPAU, XvBA) standards, and it looks like players are going to need to know about them in order to get reasonable performance. That's akin to having to code applications to support SoundBlaster or AdLib cards, which, I feel the need to point out, was the case in the late 1980s.

There's something seriously wrong when I can watch, say, YouTube content or a simple video file on an Intel Atom-based netbook running Windows and it plays more smoothly than on a Xeon 5520-equipped workstation running Linux. Video on Linux makes the current Audio on Linux clusterf_ck look simple by comparison; it's an unacceptable state of affairs for what is a very important consumer-level aspect of computing.

I don't want to seem as if I'm coming down on the people doing some very, very good work on this. Watching the progress on X/DRM/Mesa and the various drives is impressive and they've made great strides, but posts that talk about compiling in support for a piece of hardware into a player and/or getting bleeding-edge drivers and/or turning off things like compositing are the wrong way to address the problem.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[loutr]

It should Just Work TM, provided you're using a recent proprietary nvidia driver (some weeks ago you had to use the betas, but I think the latest official release supports VDPAU), and that the apps you're using are compiled with VDPAU support. On Arch Linux, I just had to install the latest beta nvidia driver and XBMC 9.04, and it worked.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[rho]

You have the oddest definition of "Just Work" that I've ever seen.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[MightyYar]

What are you ensinuating?

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

That you can't spell insinuate?

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says ATI is going to propose something? They have yet to even acknowledge the existence of XvBA! VAAPI is missing some of VDPAU's fancy presentation queue features and support is spotty at best.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Doug Neal]

That does not help. Saying "well, you can just compile in support for ____" shouldn't be acceptable in this day and age. You shoudn't have to compile in support for a given piece of hardware into a player: this is why we have things called "drivers" and "APIs".

That's what the 'API' part of VAAPI is :-)

There's nothing wrong with having compile-time options in open-source software. It's the job of the package and distribution maintainers to abstract this kind of thing away from end users. It'll be a while before this 1.0.0 release filters down to users' desktops through their package managers, which you could wait for and not have to worry about it (this is certainly what I'll be doing)... but if you want the latest and greatest direct from the developers as soon as it's released then you can't complain about having to get your hands a bit dirty.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[MightyYar]

That's intirely possible.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[tibman]

So the Driver must be recent enough to support VDPAU, Check.
The Application must be compiled with VDPAU support, Check.

Don't know why you consider this overly complicated? This is the same thing you'd have to do with windows. The only difference is with the windows version of the app it would probably have everything+kitchensink compiled in whereas on linux there would be many variants and options. Ubuntu type distros probably ship the app with kitchensink compiled in by default anyways.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

That's priposterous!

(CAPTCHA: mistake)

Re:Hardware acceleration

[MrHanky]

So, do you think Windows and Mac OS X apps don't need to be compiled?

Re:Hardware acceleration

[MightyYar]

And rediculous.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

We do have a unified video acceleration API, it's called VAAPI.
Of course applications have to be recompiled to support it, users shouldn’t do it themselves, distributors will do it for them.

A pleasant audio / video experience requires flawless drivers on any application / operating system / hardware combination. No o/s can work with crappy drivers and that's the same for Linux, Windows or whatever else. The difference is that, when drivers suck on Windows, you blame the drivers, while when it happens on Linux, you blame Linux.

There's something seriously wrong when I can watch, say, YouTube content or a simple video file on an Intel Atom-based netbook running Windows and it plays more smoothly than on a Xeon 5520-equipped workstation running Linux.

Indeed! Because on my computer, for instance, I manage to watch DVB TV much smoother on Linux than I can do on Windows. Are you using VESAFB on the Xeon? :)

P.S. Vista, too, disables compositing when an application uses an overlay-based video API (yes, even Windows has many different video APIs with varying degrees of functionality). This cannot be solved, overlays are crappy by design.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[MostAwesomeDude]

AMD won't be releasing XvBA to the general public. Just wait for Gallium VDPAU. Or write it yourself. We've got all the docs.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[yuna49]

mplayer has complete support for VDPAU as well as support for things like SSA/ASS subtitles. While the current repository versions tend to run a bit behind the development versions (bzip2 archive) at mplayerhq.hu, rvm's builds as part of his smplayer project are quite up-to-date. smplayer is a fine GUI front-end to mplayer as well, and it runs on both Linux and Windows.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Draek]

The simplest way to make your argument irrelevant is complain about the work you need to get a feature practically nobody cares about.

When grandma says 'I expect my h.264-encoded videos to be hardware accelerated' I'll start worrying about having to compile it in, but not before.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[AikonMGB]

Right.. it's this "compiled with VDPAU" support that's the problem as far as I can tell...

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Otto]

Seems pretty valid to me. On the more recent linux systems, installing the latest video driver is a matter of going to the install program of whatever stripe, selecting the video driver, and saying "install it". Given that, then installing the video player, it should indeed "Just Work". It's not a matter of having to compile your own, if you're using a distribution that does relatively recent compiles of code (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch all the popular ones).

Re:Hardware acceleration

[loutr]

Well by "just works" I mean "you only have to install the app and the correct driver if you don't have it already, no configuration or troubleshooting are necessary" :

pacman -S yaourt
yaourt -S nvidia-beta
pacman -S xbmc
xbmc

Done. That's a bit complicated because I was using beta-quality software so I had to install it from the community repos (which are fantastic on Arch BTW). Now that the stable nvidia driver supports VDPAU, it becomes :

pacman -S nvidia xbmc
xbmc

That's what I call Just Works (assuming you know how to use your system of course). If you know a simpler way to install a program and run it let me know :)

Re:Hardware acceleration

[AceofSpades19]

Because VLC only runs on linux and is the only video player for linux

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Compile it yourself. It's an experimental alpha feature and they're using the compiling as a skill check so they don't have random people whining uselessly about it not working properly.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[mdarksbane]

But grandma will say "why do my blu-ray movies look all jumpy on my system when they run fine on yours?"

Well, grandma might not, but quite a few people with enough tech level to want to watch movies but not enough to compile something will.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely you've never seen a DRMed file in the wild and you're a basement-dweller with nothing better to do but examine the metadata of his tranny porn collection.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[madsenj37]

If I use VLC on a Macintosh or Windows machine, I can play back content without skipping, sync, artifacts, tearing or stuttering as long as it's within reasonable processing limits.

Who told you that? I have an original Macbook with 10.5 and do not use VLC past 0.8.6i. Why? Because I get the skipping, sync, artifacts, tearing and stuttering you talk about in any newer version. Its a known problem.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Hurricane78]

Well, if you're too dumb to use a computer, you can always use the build/package of someone else, an continue playing with your Playmobil/VTech computer.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[PitaBred]

The thing is, you have to compile things in right now to get the support due to the fact that it's still so new. With the GEM/TTM/DRM changes happening in the graphics system, there will be a "generic" video acceleration setup happening eventually. It just takes time... Linux is open source, and it tends to do things "good", rather than "fast", because it has no choice but to be cheap. (in reference to the common "good, fast, cheap: choose two").

ATI is really working toward getting hardware acceleration going, as is Intel. It just takes time and legal wrangling. Gotta love patents.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could just use The KMPlayer which has every benefit that VLC offers, a better UI, external codec support and hardware acceleration.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[louiswins]

Well, it's admittedly a little more difficult than that to get yaourt installed initially, since it's not in the default repos, but it basically consists of either (a) adding a repository or (b) downloading some files and running makepkg.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

but if you want the latest and greatest direct from the developers as soon as it's released then you can't complain about having to get your hands a bit dirty.

Why not? I don't have to 'get my hands dirty' for the Windows or Mac version.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[beckett]

isn't that just another great part of living with Linux though?

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Zontar The Mindless]

It'll be a while before this 1.0.0 release filters down to users' desktops through their package managers...

Yeah, for me it was about 60 seconds after I saw this article.

Might have been 30, if I'd not typed "vcl" the first time. :)

Re:Hardware acceleration

[rho]

Everybody who has replied to me used words that, if uttered anywhere near a locker room, would earn the speaker a thorough wedgie. Yet they are unanimous in their assertion that it's non-trivial.

Nerds.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[jedidiah]

That feature is still in beta. If you want it really bad you can go out and get it yourself.

Without actually testing this out for myself in both Windows and MacOS I would not take
it for granted that it is as easy and as robust as you make it out. Nevermind the fact
that you were not likely to even have that capability available to you in a Mac until
relatively recently.

So how do I enable hardware h264 in my previous generation minis? [snicker]

Re:Hardware acceleration

[jedidiah]

There is something wrong when Trolls make up stupid sh*t and then ignore the obvious.

The only content where h264 acceleration is really relevant is the
high bitrate HD stuff and that will require either a fast CPU clock
speed or a video card with hardware acceleration.

A lot of the Macs and Windows boxes out there just don't have the power to
handle that sort of thing but have plenty to handle anything else on whatever
OS you want to run.

Nevermind your bogus quad core example, some of us do this stuff on AppleTVs and ancient laptops.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Eravnrekaree]

I definitely agree. Compiling programs is not user friendly for regular users who just want to get things working right away and have them run out of the box. Linux really does need to work on this, and also on better backwards compatability. There is definitely a situation where kernel developers system developers, etc, just cant understand the fact that normal users dont want to have to wonder about if their hardware will work, have to figure out of software will work on one of twenty linux distro and kernel version combinations, deal with 20 different compilations of a driver or software program for different linux versions. they just want to download the software, click install, and use it. Users should be able to use one version of a driver supplied by their hardware vendor on any installation of Linux with complete backwards compatability, and any packaged software with complete backwards compatability without having to deal with compilation and configuration marathons and shaninagans. Most users arent interested in messing around with compilers and so on. They dont want to mess around with configuration files. Either Linux developers are arrogant bout regular users or they just dont care and want Linux to remain a fringe OS.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[sarhjinian]

The point is that there's no really good way to seamlessly handle even low-bitrate and/or trivially-compressed video on a large range of cards without artifacts, stuttering or tearing because the API situation is terrifically bad. And yes, that the drivers are closed doesn't help, but it would probably be a lot easier for driver and application authors if they didn't have to worry about each other, or the X/Mesa/Gallium/DRM mess in between. The fact that tearing even happens is a deplorable on the state of video playback on X.

Put it this way: Windows has had DirectX video acceleration for a decade, it works well, and virtually every card and driver supports it, and all VLC et al have to worry about it supporting DirectX. X has, at best, Xv on most cards, and it's not guaranteed to perform even remotely as well either in terms of quality or performance. Again, we're not even talking about H.264 here, just basic MPEG.

I'm glad you can do this on an AppleTV. I can get video working if I'm very specific about which card and driver I use, but I really ought not to have to pay that kind of attention to it because it ought to be something that's abstracted from the application playing the video.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, which Windows app delivers hardware acceleration on launch? Oh right, none of them...

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

> Video on non-MacOS/Windows

In terms of video acceleration, video on Mac OS is worse than Linux. At least Linux has video acceleration options with a bit of effort (XvMC, VAAPI, VDPAU).

Mac OS X has no video accel options, it's all software decoding. People did try to reverse engineer a closed MPEG2 accel interface in apple's DVD Player app, but the project never got to a usable level.

There are rumors of the upcoming Mac OS X version adding video acceleration, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Mike610544]

Still, it's a great do it all player / streamer.

Based on this new version I'd say it is. They seem to have fixed all the sketchy UI stuff (didn't there used to be a bunch of values of "-1" for defaults?) and also jumping to different points in a video is seamless now (much better than WMP.) I used to get a few seconds of weird colors when changing location. Good work VLC devs!

Re:Hardware acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

You appear to be trying to communicate some kind of salient point to a select group of people. I get it, but you are quite bad at it, based on the people you're really trying to communicate it to. This is all assuming you want to achieve something with your posts in this thread, obviously.

Basically: Yawn.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[jedidiah]

Like I said, that's BULLSHIT.

What is already out there on Linux does well enough on Intel, Nvidia and ATI cards.

Some of us actually use this stuff and don't just take potshots based on something we found on Google.

There's a large Linux HTPC community using a wide array of hardware from the
dregs that you can't get rid of on Ebay to bleeding edge stuff that isn't even
supported in MCE yet. Much like the audio situation on Linux, the video situation
is not as dire as a naive appraisal of the relevant technical information might
indicate.

You waste a lot of energy spreading FUD while the relevant coders are already taking care of business.

Re:Hardware acceleration

[not flu]

You do if you want to compile in custom options.

VLC media player and MPEG-2

[viralMeme]

Would I have to pay royalties to MPEG LA to watch MPEG-2 encoded media on VLC media player

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Anonymous Coward]

technically, i believe so.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Kjella]

VLC didn't pay them, so if you need a patent license then yes. But then the most popular MPEG2-encoded content is DVDs, and to play those you'll be a criminal as well so why bother.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[omnichad]

Yes, and you'd be joining the other person who paid royalties.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[drinkypoo]

Would I have to pay royalties to MPEG LA to watch MPEG-2 encoded media on VLC media player

No, it will play just fine.

Oh, you mean, do you have to pay royalties to watch it legally? Probably. Do you follow every law on the books or are you just trolling?

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[maxume]

It probably depends on your jurisdiction, and on whether you care about violating the license. You certainly don't need a license to make the software work.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[funkatron]

No. You're too worthless to get sued.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[wvmarle]

You forget to add that your reply is of course very much limited to people living under US law. Software patents are afaik not valid anywhere else in the world (luckily), nor do many countries have anti-circumvention-laws like the US has. Remember that the world is bigger than the USA.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[westlake]

Oh, you mean, do you have to pay royalties to watch it legally? Probably. Do you follow every law on the books or are you just trolling?

You do if you want to see your OEM product on sale in the mega-mall.

Which does much to explain why OSX and Windows have a 99% share of the client desktop.

The geek may be comfortable downloading a "gray market" codec.

The shopper laying out $800-$1500 for his HTPC wants an iron-clad guarantee of full-featured hardware-accelerated media play. Demoed in the store.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[DNS-and-BIND]

Thanks for that reminder. This comment only appears about fifty times a day on Slashdot.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC didn't pay them, so if you need a patent license then yes. But then the most popular MPEG2-encoded content is DVDs, and to play those you'll be a criminal as well so why bother.

patents can only exist on hardware and physical methods, they cannot exist on a non-physical idea, so no need to pay them anything for reverse engineering it.

there is also NO legal basis whatever for the "country codes" on dvds. therefore, if you have disks coded for regions outside of your own, there is nothing at all criminal about playing legally bought, officially produced disks, no matter where they were bought.

of course, some countries treat their populace as nothing more than a cash-cow to squeeze all they can from and they are not afforded the freedoms the more civilised countries have, and they may have more restrictive laws designed solely to criminalise reasonable behaviour

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[MightyYar]

Thanks, sometimes reading Slashdot a European doesn't mention this. You forgot to make fun of us for not using the metric system, btw.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[MightyYar]

Dell has historically done a pretty good job selling hardware that people don't lay their hands upon until after purchase.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Software patents are afaik not valid anywhere else in the world (luckily),

They are valid in Japan. Some other countries too, try wikipedia.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Thanks for that reminder. This comment only appears about fifty times a day on Slashdot.

... which corresponds with the number of people, per day, who need to read it.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia, is now a country..... finally!!!!!!!!

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Hurricane78]

Which will soon be over, when ACTA gets written into law, without anyone ever seeing it. IF we let them.
I won't. I will rip their fucking heads off because of it!

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Apparently that's not enough then, is it?

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[HybridST]

This comment only appears about fifty times a day on Slashdot.

...and is rarely modded above my reading threshold. Then again my own posts seldom make it past my threshold.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You're too worthless to get sued.

Tell that to Jammie Thomas-Rasset .

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it is still needed that many times.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[legirons]

nor do many countries have anti-circumvention-laws like the US has

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[jedidiah]

$800 is overpriced for an HTPC. $1500 is just plain rediculous.

Your neighbors won't even realize what it is or how expensive it
is so that whole "conspicous consumption" thing really won't work
out.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Anonymous Coward]

That's never stopped the RIAA, so why should it stop the MPAA?

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[PiSkyHi]

Nooo...body expects the MPAA!!

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if Linus Torvalds has a license:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439858

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[rdnetto]

You forget to add that your reply is of course very much limited to people living under US law. Software patents are afaik not valid anywhere else in the world (luckily), nor do many countries have anti-circumvention-laws like the US has.

I wish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_convention

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[wvmarle]

You are mixing up copyrights and patents. Patents are limited to geographic regions, a US patent for example is not valid in the EU and the other way around. If you want an invention protected elsewhere you have to apply for a patent in that country as well. As a result the US has software patents, and those patents are not valid in the EU. So a Europe based computer user can play mp3 for free while a US based computer user may have to pay royalties.

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[grotgrot]

There is a company dedicated to letting you pay for your codecs on Linux, although they do then bundle free player software. I am guessing more than one person has paid up :-)

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[pbhj]

Software patents are afaik not valid anywhere else in the world (luckily),

In Europe the law says that software is not patentable "as such". This then boils down to a requirement for a "technical effect" ... which is nearly impossible to define. Merely implementing a known solution in software is not a technical effect. Generally a real physical change has to be made - things like reducing bandwidth requirements for video transmission appear to fit. I'm a bit rusty, it's been about 6 years since I had to know this stuff.

Short answer software patents per se are not allowed, software patents as a layman understands it are.

Image compression tech has always been allowed in the UK, though I couldn't understand why it's not considered just a mathematical method, I can't see why video codecs wouldn't fall in the same space and be allowed (the UK harmonises with European Patent Law on the whole).

Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2

[pbhj]

It would be interesting to write to the MPEG LA and ask for a user license and see what the charges were.

Re:So it plays back media

[0xdeadbeef]

To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?

Pissed on your grave, you ungrateful whiner.

No longer in beta?

[omnichad]

So much for being acquired by Google.

Re:No longer in beta?

[nine-times]

Maybe there's still a chance?

Re:No longer in beta?

[omnichad]

touché

Re:No longer in beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so that's why Google dropped the beta tag today... Good work VLC!

Re:So it plays back media

[daem0n1x]

I guess they should include all kinds of useless bloat until the download is 200MB and takes 5 minutes to startup. Software that does only one thing, and does it well, oh the horror!

Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank god for Instant Pausing and Frame by Frame support. I needed more granularity over the location bar while watching porn videos. The old versions seem to be skipping to and from "keyframes" during seeking. It was very frustrating.

Re:Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame

[Maxo-Texas]

Now now -- porn would be easy-- that one clear perfect frame in an regular movie or sometimes even TV is the hard part.

Re:Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame

[Winckle]

It's great for taking DVD screen grabs too.

Of purely non-pornographical content.

Re:Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only the window didn't resize as I jump from movie to movie, it would be the ultimate porn viewing app.

Re:Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame

[Jugalator]

I looked in the program, and tried finding it on the home page, but I don't get how you're supposed to skip forward/backwards frame-by-frame?

The menus don't seem to contain the option, and I've guessed some shortcut keys with no luck... Hmm...

Re:Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame

[bughunter]

Hey - go ahead and mod him Funny, but porn is srs bsns. Wankers are the power user of video players. We need:

1. Instant Pausing
2. frame step forward AND frame step backward
3. skip ahead, skip time set in prefs (default something like 5 seconds)
4. thumbwheel support and a slider bar
5. bookmarks with thumbnails
6. robust error handling for bad files and scratched DVDs
7. ignore autoplay and other odious crap installed on commercial DVDs
8. timely codec updates

If VLC can at least manage the first four, I may pay for an upgrade to OS X 10.5 - I'm getting tired of Quicktime Player and DVD Player.

Re:Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame

[glwtta]

I don't know if that was meant to be tongue in cheek, but terrible seeking control is one of the reasons I never used VLC; it's very frustrating, even in non-porn situations.

Actually, the whole UI in VLC leaves a lot to be desired: it's oddly unresponsive, has the classic OS approach to design called "randomly pile as many options as possible into arbitrary menus", and is pretty damn unattractive.

Meh, to each their own, I guess. I like Media Player Classic - simple and fast, what more would you want?

Re:Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank god for Instant Pausing and Frame by Frame support. I needed more granularity over the location bar while watching porn videos. The old versions seem to be skipping to and from "keyframes" during seeking. It was very frustrating.

wow, it has frame-by-frame now? that was always something that quicktime did better, and is very useful for seeing details in a video.

I don't think VLC was "skipping to keyframes" before - it had some sort of buffer where the decoder fills the buffer and the player plays it, and the player didn't have any concept of the length of a 'frame' in the decoder?

Better DVD menu support?

[smellsofbikes]

If anyone has tried this and played around with its menu support I'd love to hear about it. I have several newer DVD's that won't play on VLC, Ogle, or mplayer. Oh, they'll play: the stupid previews, the trailers, the additional material. But the intro screen with a menu item that says 'play movie', crashes any of them when I try to actually play the movie. This is happening on a brand-new copy of Stardust and another of Letters from Iwo Jima, and it's making my linux sell really difficult for my girlfriend and my roommate, who both say "if it can't play a DVD, I'm not using it". Sigh

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[GigaHurtsMyRobot]

I bet there are linux dvd players made for that sort of thing...

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[dwieeb]

Nope.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[GigaHurtsMyRobot]

Fluendo is a closed source linux dvd player, fully supported, for under $30.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Wooky_linuxer]

I wonder if there isn't any copy protection mechanism that breaks the player. I once tried to rip a Wall-E DVD and it appeared to have over 60GB in it. They are using false sectors in the disk to fool rippers. Perhaps these DVDs you tried to watch have some similar "feature" that messes up the Linux software. You could try playing the .vob files directly as a workaround.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[qoncept]

Sigh? As in, you don't like that? What's wrong with "If it doesn't do what I want, I'm not using it." Sounds pretty reasonable to me. It's why I gave up on my Linux expirament (along with "If it makes the things I want to do a horrible pain in the ass, I'm not using it.")

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[gbarules2999]

Xine-UI is pretty good. Actually, any Xine-based player plays DVD menus fairly well.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Whorhay]

Damn, already used all my mod points!

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[cranky_slacker]

Hate to go off topic, but I was having a similar problem and so far, Xine has played all the discs that VLC and MPlayer couldn't.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[smellsofbikes]

Sigh, because I'd like it to work for them so I don't have to keep trying to fix their Windows machines that *do* play DVD's and also get filled with viruses and horribleness.
That doesn't do what they want, either.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[smellsofbikes]

Thanks for the recommendation: I'll give it a try tonight.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Hatta]

it's making my linux sell really difficult for my girlfriend and my roommate, who both say "if it can't play a DVD, I'm not using it". Sigh

Don't sell linux. Quitting windows is like quitting smoking, if deep down you don't really want to quit, you never will.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Man Eating Duck]

Xine has played all the discs that VLC and MPlayer couldn't.

I'll second this - I've never tried a DVD in Xine that didn't play perfectly, and it'll let you skip the trailers and other junk. I use VLC and mplayer for files, but don't even bother with them for DVDs.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[SiChemist]

If you're using KDE (or even if you're not), I've found that Kaffeine does a good job of DVD playback including menus.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Anonymous Coward]

For some people using Linux, well at least for myself, it is the other way around. If a DVD does not want to play on my machine (i.e. it does not do what I want), I do not want to see that movie. However, there was only one instance were I could not play movie on my machine and it was promptly returned.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[TheRaven64]

I have recently rented a couple of DVDs with that kind of behaviour. If you go to the Playback menu, select Title and then select DVD Menu, it usually jumps straight to the menu, bypassing the trailers and so forth.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Late Adopter]

(Paraphrasing DNA:)

To summarize the summary: Computers are a problem.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Cormacus]

just out of curiosity, how old is the DVD player itself (the hardware)? I had trouble recently with a slightly older DVD drive when trying to play newer DVDs. Put in a new DVD drive that I had lying around and VLC didn't crash anymore.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Draek]

Charge them for the service, even something small like $5-per-issue works. Unless you're forced to use the same machines, in which case charge them and always keep a Xubuntu LiveCD on your backpack.

You wouldn't believe how careful people are with their computers when it starts affecting their bottom line.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[smellsofbikes]

>Charge them for the service, even something small like $5-per-issue works.

For the record, this works *incredibly* poorly with my (aforementioned) girlfriend.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stardust DVD (european) works fine on my VLC. It's my default DVD viewer, and I haven't had it choke on a DVD these last few years...

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[tirefire]

This plan would work well with:

1. Lawyers.

2. Completely perfect individuals.

This plan would not work well with:

1. Everyone else.

Most people have to take what they can get when it comes to friends. They've got some good points and some bad points. One thing friends start to do after a while is depend on each other somewhat for expertise. I'll fix your computer virus problem if you'll help me figure out what's making this weird noise in my car, etc. Involving money unnecessarily in a friendship like that is a good way to make it fade away.

If you're really not willing to help your friend when he asks you, the problem is that the friend is either too needy or you're too stingy, or both. But adding money to the picture (especially such petty amounts... $5? You wouldn't just let a friend HAVE five dollars?) doesn't do anything about the root problem.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[smellsofbikes]

Oh, now that's a very interesting idea. I was trying this on an 8 year old Sony Vaio, a 5 year old Dell Latitude, and a 6 year old homebuilt desktop. I don't *have* anything newer, but maybe I'll borrow one from a friend and give it a run. Thanks for the suggestion.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Anonymous Coward]

... It's why I gave up on my Linux expirament (along with "If it makes the things I want to do a horrible pain in the ass, I'm not using it.")

And spelling, apparently.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Falcon4]

Then, it boils down to one further argument: would you rather have it not doing what they want it to do because:
- they were stupid and installed viruses on their system, and need to learn from their experiences...?
or
- because the OS wasn't even designed to do what you want it to do to begin with?

In other words, which would you rather spend your time fixing? Something that you/they broke... or something that shouldn't've even been broke to begin with?

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[smellsofbikes]

Wait a second.
What does the OS, *any* OS, have to do with playing back menuing items from a DVD? Where I come from, that's called an application, and applications are available for purchase for Windows, Linux, Mac, and other OS's, that handle DVD's quite well. The issue at hand is running a free/Free DVD playback program, and that is a recurring problem with what's available on Linux -- and on Windows; I have the same problem when I try and play this DVD under VLC on Windows. In other words, it's the application, not the OS.
However, security problems *are* generally an OS problem. That, I can't fix, especially in Windows. And, as you say, that's something that shouldn't've been broken in the first place, and generally *isn't* in Linux, but generally *is*, in Windows.
And just to make sure, are you actually saying that I'm not allowed to tell them what OS they're allowed to use, but I am allowed to tell them what websites they're allowed to use?
I think you are about as backwards as it is possible to be, in both your arguments.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[LarryRiedel]

I have had a couple problems which I think are separate. One is that the DVDs are munched, so trying to do a filesystem copy fails because there are so many bad sectors, which are not part of the actual content... knowing what is actual valid content requires following the menus rather than treating the DVD as a filesystem. It seems like some versions of libdvdnav4 are able to figure out what bytes are part of the content.

The other problem I seem to have had is the offsets in the menus for chapters and titles is mangled, so the DVD may appear to have 99 titles, each with a long list of offsets for where the chapter content is, and the only way to figure out which title is the real one is play the DVD via the menu, and let it jump from one title to another. I recently did this with a DVD with "mplayer -v -identify dvdnav://" and saw it eventually wound up on Title 58; then if I just started by playing dvdnav://58, it worked ok. If I used, say "dvdnav://1", it would skip over a lot of the content. Each of the titles (dvdnav://10 or whatever) would look like the right thing-- many chapters and a runtime of about the correct length, but it would skip around-- it played the content, but not all of it.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[lennier]

"What does the OS, *any* OS, have to do with playing back menuing items from a DVD?"

Because the OS/application divide is not a real thing.

The user doesn't care about the difference, the computer doesn't care about the difference, and therefore ultimately, there is no actual difference.

It's all just software. It's shipped together. Therefore, it's not an 'operating system plus applications', it's just a *system*. It's supposed to do stuff the user wants done; that's what it exists for.

When your system can't play DVDs, yet it's inhabiting the desktop niche on a piece of hardware that has a DVD drive in a world where DVDs are a popular media, that's a problem which needs to be fixed.

If the solution is 'pay extra and buy an add-on', that's only a solution to a third-party *company*'s problem of 'how do I get people to give me money?' , not to the user's original problem of 'how do I play DVDs?'

A large part of the problem of computing today, IMO, is that architects and designers put so much effort into maintaining an inherited abstract mental *infrastructure* - categories like 'OS' and 'application', for instance, which are ideas that made sense in the days of batch timesharing systems where a program was literally a 'job' , but have almost zero relevance to the desktop, let alone the Internet.

But this infrastructure is imaginary. These concepts aren't real. They're ways we've invented of thinking about the problem of computing, but they're not computing itself.

The user doesn't care. The user is *right* not to care. And software engineers need to start caring less about maintaining the 'correct' mental infrastructure they've been taught and asking 'how can we think about this whole thing from a better viewpoint?'

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Falcon4]

*pssssst* hey... ah... I think he's agreeing with you... *nudge*

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[PiSkyHi]

If everyone had the attitude of "If it doesn't do what I want, I'm not using it." there would be no software for you to use.

Re:Better DVD menu support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, I did the same experiment and it came down to a choice

1. Use Linux and learn how to tweak every config from video apps to games to function as well as they did on windows.
2. Use windows and learn how to avoid viruses and malware.

Guess which one won?

Hint: Users should know about their privacy and security.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty sure that was janet...

Consolidation

[dwieeb]

All of this wouldn't be necessary if they consolidated media types. What's so bad about having one extension? I'm going to get that done. Videos, music and pictures will all have the .dwieeb extension. You'll see.

Re:Consolidation

[Kjella]

Actually, we are approaching some consolidation, H.264 seems to reign supreme for almost all video, I guess that's run by people with eyes. Audio, meh. If they did a double blind test between LPCM, FLAC, Apple Lossless, TrueHD and DTS-HD Master I swear they'd find a ton of differences. And apart from those that want the kitchen sink general programming environment, MKV is doing a pretty damn good job on video, audio, subtitles, chapters, multiple angles etc. BluRay for example is a whole JavaVM, there's a full OS running inside the machine just to play the damn disc. Now I'm just hoping that all the browser plugins will die and be replaced with HTML5 video elements.

Re:Consolidation

[Anonymous Coward]

.ogg?

Re:Consolidation

[Anonymous Coward]

If they did a double blind test between LPCM, FLAC, Apple Lossless, TrueHD and DTS-HD Master I swear they'd find a ton of differences.

Apparently you don't know what "lossless" actually means. There is no point in doing audio-comparisons between files which are bit-for-bit identical after decompression, unless you are are in the same class of people who believe that homeopathy works because of "water memory".

Re:Consolidation

[should_be_linear]

you don't need double blind test for lossless formats. If you decode your audio file, you can use binary diff to see if any of codecs has bugs (different decoded file to original source file).

Re:Consolidation

[TheRaven64]

You won't hear any difference in double-blind tests between lossless audio formats. Both formats in such a test will first be decoded to identical bitstreams, then sent to the sound hardware. The only time there will be a noticeable difference is if one is more CPU-intensive and causes the system fan to make more noise. The difference between lossless audio formats is in the compression ratio they achieve and the CPU load, not the audio quality.

Re:Consolidation

[Malc]

Blu-ray Disc doesn't require Java. It has HDMV mode which doesn't go anywhere near Java. You're also perfectly free to play the M2TS files (MPEG 2 Transport Streams, that are not limited to MPEG2).

Re:Consolidation

[thisnamestoolong]

"If they did a double blind test between LPCM, FLAC, Apple Lossless, TrueHD and DTS-HD Master I swear they'd find a ton of differences."

This may not be entirely untrue, but for different reasons than you might imagine. Lossless means lossless, yes, but I hear rumors (definitely don't take my word for this) that DTS does apply some sweetening to the signal when they process it (boost the bass, widen the surround field). Not sure if this is true or not (and if it is true it is a really dumb idea), but for all intents and purposes, lossless is lossless and I can prove it -- with science!!

1. Step 1 -- Take an audio track, rip it as WAV, and dump it into any sound editing software.
2. Step 2 -- Duplicate that track and flip the phase on it.

What you are (not) hearing is perfect digital silence, as the waveforms are 100%, perfectly identical and cancelling each other out. This same trick sort of works in the analog realm (ie noise cancelling headphones), but you can never really get a perfectly opposing waveform and the effect thereby never works perfectly. In the digital realm however, the effect is flawless.
When two waveforms are similar, however, all of the similar parts of the waveform will cancel out, leaving only the differing bits. If you extrapolate this out, we can figure out what (if anything) is lost to different encoding processes. If you rip that same track as a 128k MP3 and repeat the experiment, you will hear everything that is lost to the encoding (that's where that hi-hat went!). When you repeat this same experiment (I know, I have done it) with Apple Lossless or FLAC, you will again get perfect digital silence, as the lossless track is bit-for-bit identical to the CD track. Science FTW!

Re:Consolidation

[Anonymous Coward]

/sigh

H.264 is a video codec, LPCM is an encoding method, FLAC and Apple Lossless are lossless* CD audio codecs, TrueHD and DTS-HD are lossless HD audio codecs and MKV is a container format.

I know the whole audio/video scene is a complicated mess, but it seems you're not even trying. Or trying to impress by stringing a number of abbreviations together. You do not happen to work in marketing or management, do you?

*) See other AC for righteous bitchslap.

I know my formatting is fucked up, blame fucking slash 2.0 ...... DIAF

Re:Consolidation

[JTL21]

Can't be bothered to Mod down all the people who didn't realise that you were saying that the all the lossless systems would have same audio quality but that "Audiophile" idiots would claim that there are differenced.

I understood anyway.

Re:Consolidation

[wiredlogic]

You just don't get it. You have to use the right lossless format that's harmonically balanced with your speakers and cabling or you're just going to get trash out. With a mismatch, at best you'll get a limited sound stage and lack of presence especially when playing punk or thrash metal.

Re:Consolidation

[TheNinjaroach]

Apparently you don't know what "lossless" actually means.

Sure he does, lossless encoding takes out the "whooosh" sound.

Re:Consolidation

[rrohbeck]

But which of the lossless codecs will support my Denon Ethernet cable? I can't just let any old codec provide a jittery bitstream that's worse than a cheap Ethernet cable would produce.

Re:Consolidation

[sootman]

Works for images, too. Take two images which may or may not be identical, put them on separate layers, then invert the colors of the top one and drop its opacity to 50%. If you're not looking at a perfectly uniform field of 50% grey*, the images aren't the same. Great way to tell if something's been 'shopped, or even resaved as a JPG again (since each resaving introduces new artifacts.) Automate this process with a webcam and you've got motion detection.

And speaking of sound, this is how Dolby Surround originally worked with just 2 channels of audio. Combine the left and right channels for "center"; invert one and add them (to get the difference) and that's your "surround." Back before I had a surround amp, I bridged two channels of my amp into speakers wired in series to make this happen.**

You're right: science FTW. :-)

* or something close. Just tried it with identical images and some pixels were 127-127-127 and some were 128-128-128. YMMV.

** can't find any suitable images so I'll try with a one-line ascii art:

Amp L Pos [+]-----[+] rear L spkr Pos | rear L spkr Neg [-]-----[+] rear R spkr Pos | rear R spkr Neg [-]-----[-] Amp R Neg

Re:Consolidation

[Ma�djeurtam]

Easier method:

Convert your FLAC, Apple Lossless etc. to RAW PCM (given the same bitrate/sample rate).

md5 the resulting .pcm files. If the md5 is the same, the waves are the same.

Re:Consolidation

[supertusse]

Some people can even note differences between a 'WOOOOOOSH!' encoded in FLAC and the same 'WOOOOOOSH!' in pure uncompressed WAV!

Re:So it plays back media

[Picass0]

That wasn't Michael.
It was Janet. (Ms. Jackson if you're nasty)

(Oh god I didn't type that.. too much Micheal Jackson news... it's rotting my brain....)

Re:So it plays back media

[eldavojohn]

Is that it?

These days, if all you do is one thing, no matter how well you do it, you're always only going to be known for that one thing.

To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?

What in the hell are you talking about? I hope your attitude is not commonplace. I am not afraid to stand up for VLC for I've never found something that has worked so flawlessly crossplatform (Win XP, Linux) for me that allows me to record streams and shoutcasts of any nature to any codec with any number of parameters ... and a decent GUI interface so far. In VLC, I can open any WMV or AVI file without any fear of some messed up virus destroying my WinXP machine.

You know it's funny. You make media playback sound so trivial. Yet the number of solutions out there prove that nobody has perfected it. VLC has impressed me time and time again. I worship it for its simplicity. Have you even used said software? Or are you just bitter about something?

It plays every freaking codec under the sun with dead simplicity! That's such a herculean task, what more could you ask from it!?

Re:Talk to the frog

[Thantik]

If it's that trivial to fix...why don't you go fix it yourself?

Pause / subtitle function

[Anonymous Coward]

What about being able to pause with a single click somewhere on the movie or being able to but subtitles below the movie for wide screen movies on a non wide screen display?

Re:Pause / subtitle function

[IDK]

The pause button, or space should pause it. But the other thing I agree with. As they say, patches are welcome, and that what I'm going to do...

Re:So it plays back media

[ByOhTek]

I'd rather have a dozen tools, each of which excells at it's one thing, than one tool that does a half-assed job at a dozen things.

No matter what OS I'm on, I always seem to use one app for audio, and one app for video. What constitutes a clean and useful interface for audio rarely does for video, and vice-versa. I've yet to see an app that auto-switches on media type.

Heck, in FreeBSD, I usually have three video apps (noatun, vlc and mplayer) because none of them works well on everything, but at least one will work for whatever I watch.

Re:So it plays back media

[Icegryphon]

It plays every freaking codec under the sun with dead simplicity! That's such a herculean task, what more could you ask from it!?

Agreed Bro, (wish I could add the ascii image of brofist, silly slashdot filters)
But I also like to add to my system just to be sure.
http://www.cccp-project.net/

Download Broken

[Anonymous Coward]

The download finishes instantly at 0 bytes

Re:Download Broken

[Gramie2]

I had that happen with the Canadian mirror. I refreshed the page (as instructed at the very top), got a U.S. mirror, and everything was fine.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

That was Janet Jackson, not Michael, moron.

Re:Does it still have a GUI interface

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't like the native look?
Use the skins: http://images1.videolan.org/vlc/skins2/subX.png

Re:So it plays back media

[Junior J. Junior III]

To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?

Ah, nope, that's Janet. Ms. Jackson if you're nasty.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

Just give me a bro-job and we'll call it even.

Re:So it plays back media

[Maxo-Texas]

A friend's boss actually said that to her after she worked so much over time for 2 months to get a major project in that she got sick.

"So... what have you done for me lately?"

---

With regard to your comment tho-- I don't suppose you never heard of the phrase, "Jack of All Trades, Master of None".

I use VLC-- because it's awesome and focused.

I used to use WinAMP but it became very difuse (and confusing).

I sincerely hope when they "finish" VLC that they will *STOP* instead of continuing onward and making a bloated mess of it.

Re:Does it still have a GUI interface

[sys.stdout.write]

As long as you can make it not look like this:
http://vlc-media-player.brothersoft.com/screenshots/VLC-Media-Player-0.8.-6c_1.png

Re:So it plays back media

[orzetto]

excells at it's one thing

... Which is why you did not install a Firefox spell-checker, I presume?

Re:Talk to the frog

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC is a student project. I can tell by some of the mutexes and by having seen quite a few student projects in my time.
Also, OggFrog is not a replacement for VLC. Oggfrog.com even has a get VLC button on the main page.

Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[McDutchie]

Any remaining Tiger users needn't bother. As of this version, VLC requires Mac OS X 10.5. This is not obvious from the website.

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that only the binaries, or even if you try to compile it yourself?

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[Anonymous Coward]

I went onto the IRC channel, and they said that 0.9.9 is the latest version that will work for OSX 10.4
The way that they said it, it will be unable to compile (however if you do compile it and it works, let me know)

Posting Anon cos I is a OSX user, and don't wanna get beaten up :( oh, and I moderated

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the Fuck would anyone still be using Tiger?

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[Heywood J. Blaume]

I know, feeding the trolls and all, but my kids have 1GHz G4 eMacs with 768MB of RAM. You think Leopard would work well on that?

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[antdude]

How about 10.2.8? I still use Jaguar on my old PowerBook G4 with 512 MB of RAM. :P

Re: Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there is nothing worth $129 in 10.5.

Because 10.4 works.

Because 10.5 is a bloated warthog.

Because I have a machine that has the cojones for 10.4 but not 10.5.

Because 10.5 breaks things that I use. Please note, I'm not complaining, I'm explaining.

To sum up: I have 10.4, no reason to go to 10.5, several reasons not to go to 10.5.

However, if you do not find my reasons compelling for me, write me a check for $129 x 4 machines (the family pack will be cheaper) and I'll be glad to purchase 10.5, even if I don't install it on all my machines.

I'm personally sad that VLC doesn't support 10.4. 10.5 is the Vista of Mac OS X (well, not quite THAT bad) and 10.4 is still a supported OS. If they are going to support Mac OS X, they should support 10.4. But hey, VLC 1.0 isn't enough to get to me to upgrade and any paid-for program that doesn't have a 10.4 version (I'm looking at you "Delicious Library") doesn't get my money.

10.6 I might actually get, once it gets out of beta around 10.6.2, if it is good as promised.

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[eldepeche]

Because I bought my computer in 2006 and it still works fine without paying $129 to upgrade. That would be $129 I couldn't use toward my new laptop.

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[oDDmON oUT]

How is this (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html) not obvious?

"VLC media player for Mac OS X
Latest Mac OS X package for 10.5 and 10.6 (release 1.0.0)
universal binary (29MB)
latest platform specific packages for 10.5 and 10.6 (release 1.0.0)
intel package (17.9MB)
powerpc package (17.8MB)
Last Mac OS X package for 10.4 (release 0.9.9a)"

I mean yeah, I had to scroll to the bottom of the page for the 10.4 info but.... /shrug

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for heads up. What a waste!

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[0racle]

Yes it will work, but it would be happier with 1 or 2 GB RAM. We had Leopard on a G4 mini with 1GB RAM just fine. They were running Adobe CS2.

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it works just fine?

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[Joe Jay Bee]

I switched back down to it because my early-2007 Intel iMac Core 2 Duo runs like shit on Leopard. There was nothing on 10.5's features list that I really cared about all that much, nothing I've missed since switching, and Tiger runs pretty much everything I use anyway. Oh, and it's not a slow piece of shit. That helps.

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[silverspell]

The end of support for Tiger was mentioned in a poll on the VLC forums a while back (down for some reason, so here's a Google cache copy). The announcement was handled in a fairly tactless way, actually:

We are trying to build a world-class modern media performance and streaming framework, and that excludes limitting ourselves to the lowest common denominator of all operating systems. I am sure we will get our share of whining with this proposal, especially if it is implemented. Let it be known that I do not care. When millions of people use your software, whining users are a more often than daily occurence, no matter how excellent/crappy your software may be. You simply cannot satisfy everyone, especially when your project is constrained by the time and motivation of a few core open-source developpers.

I don't know about you, but when I see attitude like this from a developer, my reaction isn't "Gee, this is a project which I hope succeeds, and which I want to support." Which is a shame, because VLC is a good project, but has been undermined on more than one occasion by tactless developers. Why needlessly alienate people? One could just as easily have said --

"Unfortunately, we don't have any resources to continue supporting 10.4.x, so the only way to reinstate Tiger support would be working, user-contributed patches to bring the Tiger version up to speed."

But I guess that wouldn't have put the hungry, grasping, whining lusers in their place, eh?

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[TheoMurpse]

I was using Tiger on my MBP until I was forced to upgrade two weeks ago because the software the bar exam in Texas requires only works in Leopard.

Re: Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[TheoMurpse]

Delicious Library doesn't have a 10.4 version? That's a surprise to me, since I upgraded DL a couple months ago and used it fine with Tiger until I upgraded to Leopard two weeks ago.

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[sootman]

Because that's what the computer I use at work has on it? Because I've got everything set just the way I like it in 10.4? Because 10.5 doesn't work reliably with the 802.1x VPN we have at my night job? Because my sub-800 MHz Macs are still chugging along nicely, thankyouverymuch? Don't get me wrong, I like 10.5 just fine, but between home and my two jobs I own or use seven Macs, and about half are still on 10.4, and will stay there for quite a while.

10.4 is my least favorite OS X of the last several years. I hate spotlight and there's nothing in 10.4 that I prefer over 10.3. (Other than some better stability and networking improvements.) I liked the old 'find' a million times more for many reasons. 10.5 has some changes that I hate (the Dock and sidebar) but Time Machine is the best thing ever and Quick Look has turned out to be surprisingly useful. If I could run 10.3 plus Time Machine and Quick Look on an Intel Mac I'd use that forever.

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[Anonymous Coward]

Because iCal in 10.5 sucks ass and the Finder is crap.

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[SgtChaireBourne]

(damn that web 2.0 intertface. hit the wrong option on keybounce)

I switched back down to it because my early-2007 Intel iMac Core 2 Duo runs like shit on Leopard. There was nothing on 10.5's features list that I really cared about all that much, nothing I've missed since switching, and Tiger runs pretty much everything I use anyway. Oh, and it's not a slow piece of shit. That helps.

I didn't notice anything worth the upgrade either. Some of the upgrades actually did improve performance, but not this last one. We'll see about 10.6. There are probably a lot of 10.4 users out there.

Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4

[Joe Jay Bee]

Yeah, I'm sorta holding out for Snow Leopard, considering it's supposed to be the performance upgrade. I didn't notice anything in Leopard be faster, it was actually all just slower and more annoying. That they broke Front Row's handling of the Movies folder was just icing on the cake tbh... fuck that shit.

Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[blahplusplus]

VLC has shitty subtitle support, why VLC gets accolades is beyond me when there are so many bugs compared to just downloading one of the many great community made codec packs and media player classic.

VLC is jack of all trades master of none, with weird bugs when you want to play subtitled files.

Re:So it plays back media

[CRiMSON]

Fanboi

Does it now play DVDs with "piracy" warnings?

[llogiq]

I found that VLC 0.9.9 ceased playback on the last seconds of a pesky "piracy" warning for two recent original DVDs (What are those warnings for anyway? It's not that I'm planning to steal any boat...). Has anyone else had this issue?

Re:Does it now play DVDs with "piracy" warnings?

[Kushieda Minorin]

(What are those warnings for anyway? It's not that I'm planning to steal any boat...)

If you pirate DVDs, you'll have a Nice Boat end.

Re:Does it now play DVDs with "piracy" warnings?

[TheRaven64]

Yes, I've had this issue. Selecting DVD Menu via the Playback menu (Title submenu) jumps to the menu, however, so it's only a minor issue.

Re:Does it now play DVDs with "piracy" warnings?

[mehrotra.akash]

1- obvious solution is to pirate it so that you dont have to see the anti piracy warning, the warning is like being exempted from anti drug seminars if you buy drugs
2- simply going to video_ts folder in the dvd and selecting the biggest file works for me(i dont want to see ad's when i buy a DVD at full rate, give it for free and i will see them)

Re:Does it still have a GUI interface

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Due to confusion, the GUI has been eliminated.

You now have to type "vl -dev \/\device\opt\ifiea -drive \f3fsag -output fs/fb/nv -disp sc1 -sz 15.4 -fmt wdsc -play now"

At least...on my system you do. It's easy, though. Just change the command line to match your screen and video hardware, as well as whatever file or disk you want to play, and you'll have it working in no time.

Ok...now that my sarcasm is done....what the heck is wrong with a 1997 GUI? They were simple, quick, lightweight, and did what the heck you wanted without getting in your way.
Nowadays we have monstrosities like Windows Media Player 11, which is pretty much impossible to navigate.

(Posted anon due to previous moderation.)

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

I really like where VLC is and think they have done a great job. At this point, even if they were to take the 3:05 to bloatville, I could just keep using the current version. This doesn't help when new codecs become available and you are forced to upgrade but I also suspect they will add the new functionality without adding all the useless cruft. At least based on their development history so far.....

Re:So it plays back media

[ptelligence]

You can't possibly still be holding on to the assumption that Michael and Janet are the same person. Not after recent events.

Re:Does it still have a GUI interface

[maxume]

The 'native' interface still uses basic looking controls, but they don't really look like that anymore. Both the layout and styling have improved.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

What constitutes a clean and useful interface for audio rarely does for video, and vice-versa. I've yet to see an app that auto-switches on media type.

Zoom Player can be set up to do this. Of course it's Windows only.

cutting edge

[wondersparrow]

Oooh, another cutting edge video player that likely wont be able to play a 2 year old 1080p h246 file I have on my 6 month old quad core. I could be wrong, but I dont see any notes about this supporting multiple cores ona windows machine.

Re:cutting edge

[wondersparrow]

and as for the spelling mistakes. somehow the /. edit screen is only 2 characters wide for me on my work computer. so even this messages is like 4 pages long.

Re:cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't think anything plays h246 files - try h264 :)

Re:cutting edge

[wondersparrow]

How insightful Captain Obvious. Comment on typos even after I acknowledged them. heh ;)

Re:cutting edge

[chammy]

Thats too bad for you, vlc plays 1080p h264 content just fine on my cheapo dualcore AMD.

Re:cutting edge

[omgarthas]

My 9 months old quad core runs smoothly all the 1080p movies I have played so far (A LOT, believe me).

Also, I was very surprised when I got the Matrix trilogy from the intertubes in raw BluRay format (25GB each one) and they also were played smoothly, so YMMV...

Re:cutting edge

[omgarthas]

Also, I want to note that I watch my movies on a projector with 1600x1200 resolution, so it also has to scalate the media

Re:cutting edge

[CecilPL]

Don't know what's wrong with your box, but 10Mbps 1080p h264 rips are smooth as butter on my 3 year old AMD X2 3800+ (running XP). It's only when I get above about 14-15Mbps that it starts to get choppy, and really who needs the quality to be that high?

Re:cutting edge

[nine-times]

It's not about being cutting edge, it's about being a catch-all. VLC is an open source cross-platform (works well and looks relatively native in Linux, OSX, and Windows) video player that plays and transcodes almost any format you throw at it. And it's not really "another" video player that does this, but pretty much *the* video player that does this.

Re:cutting edge

[Anonymous Coward]

I could be wrong, but I dont see any notes about this supporting multiple cores ona windows machine.

Applications should not support multiple cores. This function should be solely the domain of the OS itself.

While applications can be written or compiled to facilitate multi-processor use, the actual task of loading the process onto the different cores (or virtual machines, or even physical machines) should be 100% transparent at the application layer.

Some things your application should not have to support include (but not limited to)
- Multiple Cores
- Storage devices
- Network Cards
- RAM
- BIOS

The list goes on. It's Window's job to utilize the cores, the memory, and the rest of the hardware resources, so stop bitching about the app developers, it's not their fault, and I would take severe issue with a high level app trying to take over the OS functions at all.

Re:cutting edge

[toddestan]

The OS does take care of that stuff. All the application developer has to do is split the application up into more than one thread, and they're done. From there, the OS decides how to best assign the threads to the different cores available in the system. The problem is that there are still lots of single threaded applications out there, or at least applications where only one thread is responsible for all the heavy lifting.

Re:cutting edge

[Slashcrap]

Also, I was very surprised when I got the Matrix trilogy from the intertubes in raw BluRay format (25GB each one) and they also were played smoothly, so YMMV...

You used 75GB of bandwidth downloading the Matrix trilogy?

Get off my fucking Internet.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

"It plays every freaking codec under the sun with dead simplicity! That's such a herculean task, what more could you ask from it!?"

So does zoom player... Every version since 5 goes through & fixes all your codecs as part of the install process. And on top of that it has the best UI ive ever seen on a video player. It is so incredibly configurable and versatile I always feel like im tying my shoes while wearing mittens when i try to use VLC

Unfortunately zoom player isnt available for linux, its pretty much my killer app at this point.

Awesome but where is the Symbian version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, we need a good video player like this for mobile devices running Symbian (S60v3 Nokia phones specifically). Qt is available, what's the deal?

There are iPhone, Windows CE, and soon probably Android... Where is the Symbian love?!

Re:Awesome but where is the Symbian version?

[thaig]

It's all in the codecs. VLC uses ffmpeg quite heavily. A full port of the ffmpeg library might help.

Re:So it plays back media

[The Grim Reefer2]

That was Janet, you disrespectful dumbfucks.

You mean they actually were two different people???

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[Anonymous Coward]

Much improved in recent releases, IMO. You should give it another try and see if it's any better.

Re:So it plays back media

[leppi]

OK, that was actually quite funny... Shouldn't be modded flamebait.

Re:So it plays back media

[kingtut]

Janet Jackson.

Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[ChipR]

I like VLC, I really do. For that matter, I like xine too. But neither one, as far as I can tell, can do one thing that mplayer does: Display closed captioning. No, that's not DVD subtitles. It's purely a US American thing, so is routinely ignored, or at least misunderstood, by the international communities that maintain these products.

I watched a thread on a VLC (or was it xine?) discussion forum where somebody asked about closed captioning support. After about twelve messages, they finally determined that no, it really wasn't the same as subtitles (some participants never were convinced of that fact), but was "some American thing", at which point amidst a lot of tongue clucking and regrets, the thread fizzled out.

So until a media player can display closed captions, I'm not really able to use it. But nice try, guys, and keep up the good work.

(Yes, I am sure I could dive into the mplayer code, locate the closed-captioning bits, extract them, and submit them to both VLC and xine as patches. I'll get right on that, mmm-hmmm!)

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're not a seasoned programmer and good at persuading nerds that they should follow your lead, then that comment is totally irrelavant.

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Hatta]

But neither one, as far as I can tell, can do one thing that mplayer does: Display closed captioning. No, that's not DVD subtitles. It's purely a US American thing, so is routinely ignored, or at least misunderstood, by the international communities that maintain these products.

What do deaf people in Europe do for TV then?

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[squizzar]

Teletext subtitles for the old analogue broadcasts, and I'm guessing some equivalent is embedded in the DVB stream that Satellite and Terrestrial digital TV uses

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[smoker2]

There is also Audio Description on some digital streams. Closed captions are supported in VLC but not apparently under Windows or BeOS. LOL

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

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, I think you need to look a little harder.

VLC supports CC on Linux and OSX.

xine supports CC but you have to manually add the settings to your xine config closed caption (search for "subtitles.closedcaption" options).

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Mulder3]

We use Teletext Subtitles

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

So then what is the difference between subtitles and closed captions??

According to Wikipedia:

Most of the world does not distinguish captions from subtitles. In the United States and Canada, these terms do have different meanings, however: "subtitles" assume the viewer can hear but cannot understand the language or accent, or the speech is not entirely clear, so they only transcribe dialogue and some on-screen text. "Captions" aim to describe all significant audio contentâ"spoken dialogue and non-speech information such as the identity of speakers and, occasionally, their manner of speakingâ"along with music or sound effects using words or symbols.

To me, this sound like the difference is entirely the content of what gets displayed. So why should VLC be able to display subtitles and not closed captions??? I don't get it!

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

From the release notes:

Changes between 0.9.9a and 1.0.0:

* Closed Captions using the SCTE-20 standard are now correctly decoded

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Hurricane78]

Well, how many people need them anyway? I guess that group is too small to have any relevance. But hey, you can always add the feature yourself!.

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Hurricane78]

Wow. Wanna know how you call the moderation on parent comment?

Reverse discrimination!

I stated a simple fact: Not everyone is deaf. Only a small group is. So by physical definition, there are less people caring for that feature. Which again, by definition, makes it less relevant.
So stop hiding behind your hypocritical political correctness, because all you did was discriminate against every non-deaf person, in favor of the deaf. Which is just as bad as the reverse.
Note again, that I was not the one discriminating here.

Man, people are so STUPID, when it comes to thinking for themselves!

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... given that non-USA people have usually been ignored by the USA, fair's fair! :-) Yes, it is some american thing, of zero value to anyone that isn't playing an NTSC DVD so it is of somewhat limited value.

Anyway, judging by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning, it's not surprising that it's not emulated. Only NTSC DVDs carry them. (Line 21 in PAL is just part of the picture as we have more lines.) Neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD carry them. (PAL DVDs often just have two subtitle tracks, "English" and "English for the Hearing Impared.")

The curious thing about them is they appear to be encoded as text (rather than DVD subtitle streams, which are actually bitmaps). On a traditional DVD / TV combo, they're decoded by the TV, not the DVD player. Wouldn't be too difficult to decode them, on par with rendering on alternate subtitle files on top of the video and extracting out the extra data stream from the MPEG-2 data..

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[tweak13]

Closed captions are encoded as part of the video stream, subtitles are completely separate.

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

Closed Captioning is a north american specific way of encoding captions into a TV signal (and is specific to NTSC). There is also a standard for embedding this into an MPEG-2 stream so that a tradtional DVD player will generate them on the outgoing composite or RF feed, and there is a standard for embedding this into the ATSC digital TV standard as well. Neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD support(ed) this particular standard, as they aim at HDMI which cannot carry this particular standard. These signals are decoded by the TV, generated into characters and superimposed over the image by the TV. I think US style Closed Captioning can be recorded onto VHS as it's just another line of data.

In New Zealand, which I think is the same as Europe, for tratidional over-the-air, they use the Teletext standard which allows for both full page data (an information service) and partial overlays (used for subtitles/captions) superimposed over the image by the TV if the TV supports teletext (not all do.). For DVDs, then the captions are carried on a subtitle stream which is superimposed onto the image by the DVD player. THis is the same mechanism used by Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Very few VHS decks can record Teletext and Teletext based subtitles. I don't know what Europe is doing with digital TV subtitles/captions though.

Long story short: Closed Captioning is a specific captioning technlogy and standard used in the USA. It's not the only technlogy for displaying subtitles or captions!

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[ChipR]

So what you're telling me is, this latest version of VLC now supports CC? Cool, once it shows up in Debian, I'll give it a try.

Thanks for the info!

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[ChipR]

Apparently VLC 1.0 supports them now, and since I heard about it only today, I was unaware of that support.

Xine may support them, but it's not mentioned in the docs at all. I did find that line in the xine config file, and changed it to "1", but that seemed to have no effect. None of the subtitle streams I select have the CC data on them. So if you know how to make it work, please tell me!

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[ChipR]

So I cd into my mplayer tree, do a nice "grep -R caption *", and what do I find in sub_cc.c ?

"uses source from the xine closed captions decoder"

That's all well and good. But the mplayer docs tell you how to make it work. The xine docs don't. I've tried six ways from Sunday (including the mysterious and undocumented "subtitles.closedcaption.enabled" option) and still cannot see CC in xine. If you find somewhere in the mplayer comments how to make them actually work under xine, please do tell me! :)

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[KingAlanI]

Is there some reason why playing the DVD with English-language subtitles wouldn't work well enough compared to closed-captioning?
My university has a large deaf population; I see that shortcut taken fairly often to play a video in-class that doesn't have captioning, etc.

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Killjoy_NL]

I hear ya :)

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

We use CC in South America, public channels are required by law to have CC (mostly presidential speeches and political debates), VLC supports CC but it's somewhere hidden in the options YMMV. My only complains about VLC are the funky timeline and some MKV files that show artifacts on fullscreen.

Europe uses Teletext, wonder whats the format in Asia

Anyway, thank you guys at VLC, You make an "All Terrain 4x4 FWD RT" software in the realms of video :D

-i0

Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you

[MontananIceMan]

Closed captions does work on this new version now. I worked with the VLC developers (Great guys) in the last couple months on getting this feature to work due to many misunderstanding between Subtitles and American Closed Captions. My friends and I have tested it in 1.0.0 and closed captions does work. Its under Subtitles > Closed Caption 1, 2, 3, 4 not a seperate Closed Captions option. Grab a movie that you know that has CC encoded in the video stream and try it out now. If you find movies that does not work in VLC with Closed Captions but you have tested on a regular DVD player or in a commerical verison, let me know the exact DVD info ASAP and I will pass it on to the VLC developers for more bug testing. VLC thread is here.... you would have to be a registered user to see this thread though. http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=57338

Re:Talk to the frog

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC is poorly designed. Not their fault -- they don't have a lot of experience and a lot of features are tacked on. Fixing the mutexes means scrapping everything and starting over.

*Ribbit*

Ogg Frog is properly designed.

Thanks, thanks, thanks.

[Futurepower(R)]

Thanks, thanks, thanks to the VideoLAN team. Just tried the 1.0.0 version. It works great.

Thanks for freeing me from the media player craziness of Windows XP.

Media player?

[BenoitRen]

It's not just a media player when it also supports live recording and media encoding.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody on /. gives a fuck about Windows only software. Get a clue.

Shame they broke...

[Anonymous Coward]

... the nice simple GUI it had before. (the main GUI)

Who thought it was a nice idea to have 2 rows of buttons when it could have easily been on one row?
And why the fancy shmancy volume control? Give me a flat line any day. (in before Death)
At least they fixed the terrible Options GUI(s) though, holy headache. (let's not forget the page with all the hotkeys... oh god, so many input boxes! THE HORROR!)

On a more technical note, i had a bug where it was taking ages to load an MKV with subtitles, anyone know if anything along those lines were mentioned in any bug fixes? (or generally mentioned as a bug)
I had to resort to MPC because of the annoyance it caused. (so did my friend actually now that i think about it)

Fedora 9?

[PadRacerExtreme]

Anyone know how to install on Fedora 9? If you find the install instructions (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-fedora.html), I try to install the rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm and it says I need a Fedora 10 machine.

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Retrieving http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

warning: /var/tmp/rpm-xfer.hIiu76: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 49c8885a

error: Failed dependencies:

system-release >= 10 is needed by rpmfusion-free-release-10-5.noarch

I am sure I am missing something obvious....

Re:Fedora 9?

[salimma]

RPMfusion follows Fedora's policy of only supporting the 2 most recent releases (i.e. 10 and 11). I just looked at their repository and indeed, the packages for Fedora 8 and 9 have been removed.

Best way to upgrade? (or Videolan's website sucks)

[Rich Klein]

Checking for updates from VLC 0.9.9 reports that I have the latest version. I figured I'd visit Videolan's site and see what the release notes said about upgrading, but I can't find any release notes. So I tried checking the FAQ, wiki, and forums. The FAQ doesn't cover upgrading from 0.9.9 to 1.0.0, and the wiki and forum links just seem to return you to the VLC main page. I'm downloading 1.0.0 now. I'll probably end up uninstalling 0.9.9 and installing 1.0.0, but it sure would be nice if the "check for updates" functionality worked. And it would be nice if the wiki and forums worked, too.

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[compro01]

Subbing bugs aside, I keep VLC handy as it will play ANYTHING. Files in obscure codecs that media player classic fails on. Even files that my codec identifier gives up on, though media player classic HC is still my choice for day-to-day use.

Playlist

[CopaceticOpus]

As someone who usually listens to music as entire albums, the playlist has a great feature. The playlist can be displayed as a tree. This is disabled by default, but can be enabled in the preferences. It is nice to drag folders onto the playlist and see the songs for each album grouped together.

Unfortunately, I can't see any way to reorder this list. When I try dragging items around, I end up putting one album folder inside another, rather than reordering them.

Also, it would be really nice if there was a way to have the playlist and the controls in a single window. I don't need two VLC items on my task bar. If I bring up the playlist, I usually want to view the controls as well, so I'd really prefer it all in one window.

Re:Playlist

[clone53421]

I too have had awful problems trying to rearrange the playlist. The new version doesn't even always play them in the same order they're listed. The old version had horrid bugs when dragging and dropping playlist entries (selection, weird redraw issues, etc) but at least you could get them in the order you desired and then play them in that order.

Re:Best way to upgrade? (or Videolan's website suc

[Rich Klein]

Follow-up to my own comment:
When you run the 1.0.0 installer (in Windows) it will detect earlier versions and ask if it can uninstall them before installing the new version. So far, so good.

Re:So it plays back media

[Kjella]

Ah, nope, that's Janet. Ms. Jackson if you're nasty.

How about Ms. Superbowl Wardrobe Malfunction? I'm sure she'll love to be remembered as that...

Re:So it plays back media

[Just Some Guy]

VLC has impressed me time and time again. I worship it for its simplicity.

I think you're thinking of something else. VLC is neat, cross-platform, and awesome, but I've never heard anyone describe it as "simple" with a straight face.

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[DNS-and-BIND]

VLC "just works" when you throw video files at it. Where am I, a novice, supposed to find a "community made codec pack"? I barely know what a codec is, and moreover I don't care. And having downloaded one, which one's the best? I swear, it's like wanting to buy a shirt, and then having to spend time researching stitch counts and whether the garment was dyed after assembly or the fabric was dyed before stitching. As for subtitled movies, nobody watches them. If you're Wapanese then go to hell, otherwise use a different player for your foreign movies. Actually with most of the foreign movies I watch, the issue is how to turn the subtitles off.

Zipped file playback

[NitroWolf]

I can't seem to find any additional information on the zipped file playback stated in the summary. Can anyone elaborate on that? Do they literally mean it will only play files that are zipped, or will it finally play back multi-part RAR files? I (and many others) have been asking for this functionality for years now - I even went so far as to submit a patch for this functionality... however, the developers (at least at the time) were whiny little princesses and refused to implement a feature like that because it compromises the integrity of VLC (no seriously, that was the reason).

As such, the lack of multi-part RAR playback has made VLC pretty much useless for serious media centers. If they've finally backpeddled and implemented this feature, my hat is off to them for manning up and accepting the fact that multipart RARs are a standard (however unfortunate that is) and the ability to play back media that is in that "format" is a necessity for a good player.

If they have still not implemented this functionality, however, VLC is still fairly useless for true universal media players, since other software is capable of it and works just as well if not better.

So - can anyone elaborate on that?

Re:Zipped file playback

[Rockoon]

Can you explain to me why you are wrapping media files into size-increasing RAR's, let-alone multi-part ones?

Is it a 4GB file size limit issue?

The only time I ever see RAR files is when I am dealing with a warez-kiddie. RAR is not the best at compressing (that would be PAQ), nor is it the most popular or widely implemented (that would be ZIP), nor is it an open standard of any kind (I guess the most popular would be 7zip?) ..

Re:Zipped file playback

[GreenEnvy22]

I'm a little confused. I have a htpc/media center, and when I get a movie that has been compresed into multi-part rar files, I simply extract it to it's original file. If you have WinRar installed it's a simple right click, and pick extract here or extract to subfolder. One click, seems pretty simple. I fail to see how this is a critical feature to add to VLC. It seems simple to me to just setup something to automatically extract the rar's if you are too lazy to do that single click yourself. Of course I can't speak for everyones situation, there might be situations where this isn't possible, but to be it just seems like bloat.

Re:Zipped file playback

[Tweenk]

7-Zip is only a program, the underlying compression algorithm is LZMA. It is not a standard (as far as I know no formal specification exists), but a public domain reference implementation is available. ZIP on the other hand is truly an open standard, since it is a part of e.g. OpenDocument.

Re:Zipped file playback

[SpacePirate20X6]

It will play files that are zipped, not split. This is useful when compacting a video_ts folder, for instance, instead of having it broken into several smaller .vob files.

Re:Zipped file playback

[Cormacus]

+1 Completely Agree

Re:Zipped file playback

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is playback of multi part rar/archives such an requirement in a media player?

The vast majority of media is already compressed. That's why, for example, a standard xvid, dvd/mpeg2, divx, [insert favourite codec here] is a fraction of the size of the source/uncompressed/raw media. Use of multi-part archives is mainly to simplify transport/distribution/rebuilding of the compressed file. If the archive is considerably smaller than the compressed media then the codec isn't doing its job properly.

I may have missed something, but unless you keep a whole load of uncompressed media in multipart archives that you frequently access, not being arsed to unpack the rars just seems lazy for the sake of a couple of clicks.

I'm a media player home cinema guy http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ myself so don't even know if it is supported or not in the latest VLC, but I can just imagine the dev 'princesses' having a good laugh:

dev1: "Here... check this email... this lazy fk can't even be bothered to extract the movie from multipart rars... he wants it added as a feature..."

dev2: "AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"

dev3: "Should I start on the code? What's the best approach? Spend time unpacking it completely before playback, play it, then cleanup? Or some clever code to continuously unpack enough to keep the buffers full? What about skipping forward and backward?... What about rar not being open source? I know we can unpack for free but..."

dev1: "How about 'right click, extract to...' for the lazy fk?"

world: "AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA" x 100
 
;)

Re:Zipped file playback

[funkatron]

I've never understood why people create multipart rar torrents. BIttorrent has it's own mechanism for splitting files for download and I don't think it improves dthe filesize by much. Seems totally unecesary to me.

Re:Zipped file playback

[Draek]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't RAR covered by patents? I seem to recall that was the reason for Ubuntu having both an 'unrar' and an 'unrar-nonfree' package in the repositories. And while the cynics may point that VLC opens patented video/audio formats just fine, I'm under the impression they simply let ffmpeg decode those instead of doing it themselves and if so, RAR's patent liability would still be a valid reason to reject it from VLC itself.

Re:Zipped file playback

[Hurricane78]

OMG. I loathe those multi-RAR torrents. They are made by total retards! Especially those with an extra checksum file.

BitTorrent already contains checksums, splitting, compression, directories, and much more. So the whole point of multi-RARs is gone.

Maybe they still use alt.binary to share their stuff. But then I have to say: Welcome to the 21st century!! ^^

Re:Zipped file playback

[TerranFury]

Clearly OP has a collection of movies in multipart RAR archives because that is how warez types distribute them. Without the ability to play back multipart RAR archives, he has three options, none of them particularly nice:

1 - Extract the videos and delete the original archives. Upside: Videos are instantly accessible; no disk space is wasted. Downside: Can't seed the torrent of the archive any more.

2 - Extract the videos only temporarily before viewing. Upside: Can continue seeding the torrent of the archive, and essentially no disk space is wasted. Downside: There's a minute or two of delay whenever you want to watch a video.

3 - Extract the videos as soon as the download finishes, and keep both them and the original archives on disk. Upside: Videos are instantly accessible and he can still seed. Downside: Twice the disk space is used, for no good reason.

If VLC could play back multipart RAR archives, he would have all the advantages of #2 without the (significant) disadvantage of delay.

Question: Is there a video player that handles multipart RAR archives?

Re:Zipped file playback

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason why you find multipart RARs is because that is the "official" release format of piracy groups, whose releases enter the wild on FTP "topsites", where RAR is still relevant.

Multipart RAR allows for the greatest portability; it avoids 4GB file limitations on ie FAT32, and manages file integrity internally via checksums, without needing another layer on top.

Once it hits torrent sites, of course, there is no more need for it.

Re:Zipped file playback

[TheoMurpse]

Because he's not wrapping them. He's pirating them off places like Usenet and then is too lazy to extract the files.

Re:Zipped file playback

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's the massive MKV files that can't be burned onto a DVD because of their size. The individual RAR pieces could be burned onto a DVD, but extracting them all to view the movie would take forever and consume a handy chunk of hard disk space in the meantime.

Re:Zipped file playback

[Anonymous Coward]

Burn it in UDF format. UDF doesn't have a size limit. There's also a workaround for ISO: multiple extents, but I haven't tried that.

Re:Zipped file playback

[Anonymous Coward]

"serious media centers"? Excuse me, but what the fuck are you talking about? Serious media centers use gigabytes or terabytes of raw uncompressed video, they certainly wouldn't be using Xvid and RAR crap.

Like others have said, you're talking about films that you've pirated. That is the only place you would ever see a multi-part RAR archive of video files, because the people putting them up are morons and don't realise that the video is already compressed nor do they realise that Bittorrent already downloads in chunks, performs CRC and can be paused, stopped or resumed at any time.

Re:Zipped file playback

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of bla bla bla and smart asses answering this one... now: what if I want RAR (not necessarily multi-part RAR) because I archive my stuff with the additional parity records in order to be able to rebuild in case of partial media failure?

Re:Zipped file playback

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC plays files inside multi-volume RARs, in this release, but uncompressed ones, because of licenses issues of libunrar.

Moreover, there are a few plugins around to deal with compressed ones.

Finally, being very close to the developer community, your "compromises the integrity of VLC" statement is complete FUD.

Re:Zipped file playback

[DoctorLard]

Try this: rar x myretardedrarfile.rar

Re:Zipped file playback

[tygerstripes]

Torrents. And not for compression, but for the multi-part quality.

Have a look on TPB for some seriously flame-rich debates on this very topic. It seems the pro-RAR cadre feel that breaking a large file into moderately-sized chunks makes it a trivial task to re-download selected pieces, should any become corrupted, and that this is much harder otherwise. I can't attest either way, but that seems to be the rationale.

Re:Zipped file playback

[NitroWolf]

I am going to address the salient points in one post, instead of responding individually, since most of the responses are from clueless people - it's kind of pointless to engage in direct conversation with people so out of touch from reality.

1. As has already been explained, at least in minor detail, is that multi-part RARs are for media distributed over the internet. Pirated, not pirated ... it doesn't matter. The fact is that the media is there, it's popular and it's not going away. The file size limit of the distribution mechanism that shall not be named (according to rule #1) prevents large media files from being posted. So yes, it's partly a file size issue, see number 2.

2. BitTorrent is not the only distribution mechanism, nor is it the most efficient in many instances. However, even IF you are using BitTorrent, having multi-part RARs is extremely handy when only ONE or FEW of the RARs are corrupted - you only have to download a small chunk of data, perhaps from another provider, to complete the media in question. If it's distributed as a monolithic file, you have to then download another 12 GB (or more!) to get the complete file. So yes, it still serves a purpose, even with BT. See #3

3. I think multi-part RARs are fucking annoying as hell and I wish they would go away, even with their benefits. I am willing to download another 4, 8, 12 GB on the rare occasions I get corrupted files if it means getting rid of the fucking RARs. However, I accept the fact that RARs are here and they are here to stay for the immediate future ... therefore I work with them and do not cover my hears and shout that multi-part RARs don't exist and hope they go away. They won't. They are here, we have to deal with it.

4. Yes, several media players exist that play multi-part RARs just fine. Personally, I use XBMC - it is FAR, FAR, FAR away superior to VLC when it comes to playing media of any kind. It plays everything I've ever seen - There is no other media player on the face of the planet, except mPlayer (which is what XBMC uses) that is as versatile and complete as XBMC. VLC is a joke compared to the formats mPlayer/XBMC plays out of the box.

5. Now this point always gets peoples feathers ruffled, and I always get a good laugh out of it, because it's so easy to test yourself... but no one bothers to do it. I have bothered to do it, a number of times, just to be sure I'm not smoking crack: A RAR'd media file is smaller than the original. Yes, you read that right and yes, it goes against conventional wisdom, but the fact remains that a typical 60 minute show, weighing in at around 350 MB in size (SD) will be about 20 MB (give or take 10 MB or so) smaller in multi-part RAR's than when it's unrar'd, depending on your CODEC. While 20MB in savings in this day and age of 2 TB drives seems like a drop in the bucket (and in fact is a drop in the bucket), if you measure that 20 MB out over thousands of files, it becomes a more significant number. Is it worth RARing all your media? Probably not - but since the media already comes that way, why unrar it to play it and incur the small but measurable space penalty in addition to using up time and CPU cycles for absolutely no gain at all?

6. One poster seems to misunderstand what a serious media center is. It's not uncompressed video; It is a media center than can play back anything you throw at it. VLC is not it (or at least hasn't been it up until now?). XBMC, however, is. Either way, my point is (and this addresses the AC comment who is supposedly "close to the dev community," lol - whatever that means.) I offered to submit a patch to VLC upwards of 2 years ago that was rejected because they disagreed with the fact that VLC should not play files in such a format. I happily went on my way and used other media players. I've never said it wasn't VLC developers perogative to not include that functionality - because it most certainly is... but the fact that they abjectly refuse to accept the fact

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

Just give me a bro-job and we'll call it even.

Goddammit, now I've got a broner.

Re:Does it still have a GUI interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, that's what VLC looks like in the latest Ubuntu.

Except they put the controls in a separate window. But yes, even Motif looks nicer IMO.

I swear a previous version had nice transparent overlay on the video, but that seems to have disappeared.

OSX 10.4 support dropped...

[gabrygenoa]

Don't update your VLC if you have OSX 10.4.x (or 10.3.9). VLC dropped 10.4 support for "technical reasons" in 1.0.0rc2, the newer version that works on 10.4 is 0.9.9a.

Re:OSX 10.4 support dropped...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any reson that you are not running OSX10.5.x ?

Re:OSX 10.4 support dropped...

[TheDugong]

Because 10.4 works fine and you have to pay for 10.5?

Actually, no

[elrous0]

In all seriousness, I just tried it out and, despite its claims to the contrary, it does still "jumps" around when you try to advance the time slider and the full-screen pop-up interface, while improved over some awful early versions, is still annoying (it pops up at any mouse movement, not just when the mouse is at the bottom of the screen). I'll stick to the FAR superior GOM thank you very much. If only GOM had a Linux version, it would be the perfect media player (with the best and most feature-filled user interface I've ever seen).

Re:So it plays back media

[jameskojiro]

Well to be fair they can always make a system tray app that loads about 1/2 of the 200MG in memory on system start up and can check for updates every 10 minutes by downloading and uploading about 1MB of data.

The system tray app should only delay your system start up by 20 seconds and will shave a good 2 seconds off every time you load VLC. So it is a win-win scenario.

Maybe they could also throw in a few services for good measure as well, I know any app is helped by have a couple extra services running always in the background. They could each chew up around 32MB of memory and could reall help to shave a few microseconds off of the loading time of the parent application, plus every time you update the main software you have to update the services and who doesn't like to reboot every time your media player updates???

Re:So it plays back media

[MrNiceguy_KS]

There was originally 5. With Michael's death, they're down to 3. (Shortly after the plastic surgery binge started, Tito was stripped for parts.)

Looking forward to v2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe in version 2.0 they manage to fix the UI. A media player should play/pause when you click on the picture, it should use the plain arrow keys for seeking, and the filename shouldn't overlay the subtitles in the first seconds. And what does 200% volume even mean? Will it pop my speakers?

It's the old FLOSS disease: disdain for usability. In a media player, that's fatal.

Gripes about the installer:
* VLC 0.9.9 on Windows XP doesn't see the update, even if you tell it to search
* it wants to set VLC as the default player for ALL audio and video formats and disc drives, regardless of former settings
* ActiveX plugin is checked by default, regardless of former setting. I don't know if the browser plugin is still so crash-happy but I'm definitely not going to use it in IE. Video plugins for browsers will hopefully soon be a thing of the past.

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you haven't tried 1.0.0, where SSA subtitles have been greatly improved.

VLC Mosaic

[Anonymous Coward]

Come back to me when the Mosaic feature in VLC actually fucking works with DirectShow streams instead of crashing everywhere.

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[Anonymous Coward]

do you mean non-english subtitles support id much improved?

because every other vlc version i have tried totally blew chunks with their awful support for japanese text subtitles.

ie, IT DID NOT WORK AT ALL.

the ONLY way to get vlc to support other text scripts was to set the entire system to use only that script. in other words, they did not use utf yet, they were still code paging it like dos in 1981...

But....

[Anonymous Coward]

will it blend?

A note about XULplayer

[haruchai]

I've been using and recommending VLC for years but recently tried to open a training AVI that, while it would play, would freeze up the machine and take
nearly 5 minutes to load. Windows Media Player also had lots of trouble with it and all the alternative players would freeze, crash or spit errors.

Strangely, tools that claim to be able to fix AVIs couldn't find anything wrong. Then, 2 weeks ago, I came across XULplayer and tried opening the file
with it - it hangs for about a minute but then plays normally. Very strange.

But, I must say I've not seen a more ghastly interface in a long time.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right, he was good for nothin anyway... Tito that is...

Re:Talk to the frog

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you, Michael? Still talking out your ass?

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[Pulzar]

Where am I, a novice, supposed to find a "community made codec pack"?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=community+made+codec+pack

And having downloaded one, which one's the best? I swear, it's like wanting to buy a shirt, and then having to spend time researching stitch counts and whether the garment was dyed after assembly or the fabric was dyed before stitching.

I'm sure you know that if you don't do any research, you're definitely *not* getting the best one. So, either you care to get the best one or you don't... if you do, then you certainly don't want VLC. If you don't care, then you can't use that as an argument against downloading a codec pack and being able to use any player.

NOOOOOOO!!!! :(

[solios]

I've been using a G4 dual 450 for SD playback for the past several years... now I'm gonna have to upgrade! :-|

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[Colonel Korn]

VLC has shitty subtitle support, why VLC gets accolades is beyond me when there are so many bugs compared to just downloading one of the many great community made codec packs and media player classic.

VLC is jack of all trades master of none, with weird bugs when you want to play subtitled files.

VLC has shitty subtitle support, why VLC gets accolades is beyond me when there are so many bugs compared to just downloading one of the many great community made codec packs and media player classic.

VLC is jack of all trades master of none, with weird bugs when you want to play subtitled files.

I think it's more convenient to download codecs as you need them, not in a pack, because every time I use a pack I find that it breaks something that worked before. Installing xvid covers most of my needs, and in the rare case that I need something else, I go get it. I like the full screen UI a lot better on WMP or MPC, but VLC's is no longer terrible and I know the keyboard shortcuts too.

That said, I use VLC a lot. For a long time it was my backup player for things that wouldn't let me skip properly in MPC, or took too long to start the video moving again after a skip. Recently I switched over to using VLC by default because a lot of TV episodes have the skip problem.

Is it useable as an object in code?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will this package be accessible as a programmable, automation object? Can it programmatically return all frames of data as DIBs?

Re:So it plays back media

[homer_ca]

I think he means simple to install. Have you tried the codec packs like K-lite? Sure, they have simple install presets, but it's a huge number of components.

OT: cutting edge

[Man Eating Duck]

somehow the /. edit screen is only 2 characters wide for me on my work computer. so even this messages is like 4 pages long.

That somehow made me think of this. No hard feelings, but it made me chuckle :)

Agree 100%

[mister_playboy]

I had the exact same problem! Trying to get that perfect frame to use as a wallpaper was a total PITA... :)

Re:Does it still have a GUI interface

[Hadlock]

That's the best GUI what are you talking about. I downgraded to 0.8.6 because the 0.9.x interface is terrible and looks like they hired the GUI developer of Mosaic from 1993 to design the current VLC GUI. As far as I know there's no skin that restores the functionality of the 0.8.6 GUI without recompiling from source (if that's even possible anymore).

Re:Talk to the frog

[Anonymous Coward]

Go take your advertisement somewhere else.

Zawinski's Law

[modemuser]

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Time to change their icon

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I see their "construction site cone" icon I involuntarily think that the software is still heavily under construction... and hence not mature.

Re:So it plays back media

[ByOhTek]

Firefox has come with one for over a year now, I was just in a hurry.

Guessing you've not installed Firefox recently?

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

no it doesn't (play every codec under the sun)
"
No suitable decoder module:
VLC does not support the audio or video format "IV41". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.
"
http://www.engr.colostate.edu/me/facil/dynamics/files/drop.avi

also it has problems with CRAM codec with not being able to transform it (flip horizontally or vertically)
http://www.stockshots.com/images/videoclips/city_lights.avi

Re:So it plays back media

[smooth wombat]

I don't suppose you never heard of the phrase, "Jack of All Trades, Master of None".

If you're going to use the quote, at least get it right:

Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than Master of one

That said, I do agree with you that having VLC do one thing, and do it right EVERY time, is a boon. When we have people who can't play a DVD, we put VLC on their machine and it works. Every time.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:So it plays back media

[R2.0]

"Wait, Michael and Janet were actually two different people??"

I believe you are thinking LaToya.

As for Diana Ross, has anyone noticed that Michael Jackson's physical transformations began right after he was in "The Wiz" with her? Coincidence? I think not (or at least my wife doesn't - personally I couldn't give a rat's ass.)

AC3/DTS passthrough in windows?

[guidryp]

During the last update VLC update cycle people talked up MPC Home Cinema. So I cleaned out all my old players and codecs and started over with VLC and MPC HC.

VLC I can't get DD/DTS passthrough working with at all (never could on any version) it just gets stuck repeatedly playing a sample.

On MPC HC I can get some tracks to passthrough, but the on 1080 MKVs it produces jerky video (while using almost no CPU). It might be the renderer but I needed an advanced one to all the change from 0-255 to 16-235 gamma levels or something like that. Without this, blacks are gray.

In short I want a decent windows player that will:

Play DTS/DD soundtracks with proper passthrough to my Denon receiver.
Play high res without frame skipping/jitter (MPC HC)
Allow gamma adjustment to get black blacks...

Maybe I have to go back to the old MPC and codec packs???

Re:AC3/DTS passthrough in windows?

[Wraithlyn]

CoreAVC is the fastest software H.264 decoder, you might want to try that out with MPC. I haven't had any video playback issues since switching to it. Of course it's Windows only, and not free.

My problem is that my stupid Yamaha receiver has a "DTS bitstream bomb" problem... certain BluRay movies exhibit extremely loud "digital popping" noises during DTS passthrough playback, forcing me to switch to Dolby Digital. :( Hopefully Yamaha support can provide me with a firmware fix I've read about on some forums.

Re:AC3/DTS passthrough in windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

During the last update VLC update cycle people talked up MPC Home Cinema. So I cleaned out all my old players and codecs and started over with VLC and MPC HC.

VLC I can't get DD/DTS passthrough working with at all (never could on any version) it just gets stuck repeatedly playing a sample.

I had that too. Change the audio output device in the preferences to one of the others. I can't remember off the top of my head, but there's only one that will pass through cleanly. NOT any of the DirectX ones.

Re:AC3/DTS passthrough in windows?

[guidryp]

Thanks, one worked(Win32 WaveOut extension was the only one) But now there is a audio sync problem. Ugh.

Why does VLC render video like crap?

[Nightspirit]

Default install of VLC, video is incredibly blocky compared to WMP, GOM Player, or J River Media Center. This is for nearly any video I throw at it, it looks better in any other player. What gives?
VLC: http://imgur.com/o5HbC.png
WMP: http://imgur.com/hjmaF.png

Re:Why does VLC render video like crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

are you sure VLC is using hardware acceleration? mess around with Tools - Preferences - Video button - Output dropdown box, see if DirectX video output mode helps.

Re:Why does VLC render video like crap?

[Nightspirit]

Wow, I'm ashamed to be a geek, you fixed my problem! Thanks!

Re:Why does VLC render video like crap?

[rwa2]

There's additional deblocking that you can turn on by setting "Input & Codecs | Codecs / Muxers | Post-Processing quality" to 6. This will smooth out quantization artifacts due to high levels of compression -- essentially, it will get rid of the grey squares that seem to show up particularly in dark shadowy areas.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather have a dozen tools, each of which excells at it's one thing, than one tool that does a half-assed job at a dozen things.

That reminds me of a room in my elementary school. My dad always called it the cafetoranasium because it was a combination of a cafeteria, auditorium, and a gymnasium. He also liked the to call it multi useless room, becuase it wasn't quite multi purpose because it didn't do any one thing well.

Re:Best way to upgrade? (or Videolan's website suc

[SpacePirate20X6]

They tend to stagger the updates just a bit on the automatic updates... They post it on the website for those who absolutely must have it now, while the casual users, using a perfectly good 0.9.9a, will get it sometime over the course of the next few days, or when they next get around to opening it.

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. .ASS support is extremely lacklustre, and MKV ordered chapters and variable frame rate has plenty of bugs still left in.

VLC isn't done until the Hitsuji Haruhi (reference .MKV) release plays perfectly. And so far, that's only in CCCP latest beta under Windows.

Re:Does it still have a GUI interface

[FrankieBaby1986]

whats the problem with that interface? It's very simple, and takes up very little space.

you need

[markringen]

because you need to change the video rendering in settings. change it directX 3D or OpenGL. it has nothing to do with vlc, just with the systems default settings.

Re:So it plays back media

[Khyber]

I've had VLC crash several times and lag absolutely horribly trying to play 1080p video. Very unintuitive GUI and useles help file. With so much bloat you'd think they could put in a decent fucking MANUAL instead of the crap 'help' section they do provide.

Moved to Zoom Player and haven't had any problems.

Re:Best way to upgrade? (or Videolan's website suc

[Anonymous Coward]

And it would be nice if the wiki and forums worked, too.

Are you going to update the Wiki?

Is it missing iPhone / Quicktime-X HTTP Streaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

With iPhone 3.0 and the comming Quicktime 10 (Snow Leopard) there is a new way of making "streaming".

It is a sequence of HTTP download from small Mpeg2TS file based on an extended playlist.
It does work for VoD and for PseudoLive (with 30-40 sec of delay).

So it is not progressive download.
It is not a proprietary protocol such as what Flash is doing.
It is note real streaming (RTSP/RTP) like a Darwin Streaming Server does.

If this new way of pushing content to an iPhone and potentially all the QuickTime user does work... many content (Live of VoD) will be available in that format.

VLC can read Mpeg2TS and Mpeg2PS.
It surely can read a standard playlist.

But it may lack the little tweeking to behave like an iPhone (at least from the client side).

Does it?

Of course since VLC is also a streamer, they may want to implement the encoding side of the story... but there are existing source code to produce that kind of format.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

To borrow a phrase from MichaelJanet Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?

You insensitive cultural barbarian.

Re:So it plays back media

[ninjamonkey26]

I could ask for Purevideo support (nvidia graphics card hd playback codec) given that it has been added to the opensource mediaplayer classic for quite a while now. Once they have that I'll gladly call vlc the very best.

Re:Does it still have a GUI interface

[clone53421]

Agreed, I like it better than the new one. (Well, I haven't seen version 1.0.0, so I can't comment on its interface.)

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[PingSpike]

Isn't that just it though? I *can't* use just any player or just any codec pack. I'm with the grandparent. I got tired of downloading some warezy looking codec pack to get 80% of my files to work then fighting to find some obscure codec anyway for the next 10% and then the next 5% and so on. VLC has tracking issues for me (haven't tried 1.0.0 yet) but I've yet to run into a file that it wouldn't play. And frankly, that's my number one priority. Other stuff is nice, but I can and do live without it. Before I had a handful of different players and a number of codec packs that may have been loaded with malware and I STILL couldn't play every file.

arc

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't paid the $99 yet, but the best video quality I have seen yet is ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre 3 with the SimHD plugin. That plugin uses NVidia GPUs and CUDA to upscale. The quality is tremendous. They have a demo (without sound) that's worth a look. I haven't been able to reproduce that level of quality with mplayer/K-Lite codec packs/FFDShow tweaking to kingdom come.

Re:arc

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that it looks great - but I won't use TMT anymore. No technical reason, but ArcSoft screwed me over when I purchased their product. I bought version 3 when it was newly released, they gave me a version 2 license, then somehow lost the record of -that- license. Multiple emails, including my cc billing statements, the email records, and a PDF copy of the purchase were not enough to convince them they were wrong. The final verdict from them: I needed to buy v3 at full price.

I seriously considered the Pirate Bay version of their software.

Re:Best way to upgrade? (or Videolan's website suc

[Rich Klein]

That's a good idea, but I can't access the wiki.

Re:So it plays back media

[Hognoxious]

Tito? I always thought that was Janet's nickname, but then my hearing's not so good.

Re:Best way to upgrade? (or Videolan's website suc

[Rich Klein]

Oh, okay. Thanks for the explanation, Space Pirate!

Re:So it plays back media

[clone53421]

Agreed. Not too long ago I had a conversation on here with someone where I was trying to explain this very thing.

I use VLC for videos. Shorter video clips often in windows (short, likely to use the controls), long movies usually in full-screen (clean, no borders, and I'll use the keyboard shortcuts if I need to do much of anything to the playback).

I use WinAmp for audio. Tiny skin, sits in the corner of the screen when it's not minimized completely. Usually, I keep it minimized, no taskbar button, just the systray icon. Again, I'll use the keyboard shortcuts if I need to do much of anything to the playback.

Re:It DOES support multi-RAR!!

[PRlME]

I was just about to suggest using VLCRAAR for RAR playback (which I've been using for years), but I just noticed that VLCRAAR is broken in 1.0 (works fine in 0.9.9). HOWEVER, I then tried loading a RAR archive straight up and it played the video fine! It even allows for fast-forwarding across multi-RAR archives! I'm not sure why they didn't advertise this in the 1.0 launch, but this is great! (note - doesn't appear to work with HD content, only divx/xvid worked. For HD content RAR archives, I recommend BS Player Pro + Haali media splitter + ffdshow)

Re:So it plays back media

[Blakey Rat]

It's called a "troll". Don't feed it, or it'll come back.

Re:So it plays back media

[QRDeNameland]

Wait, Michael and Janet were actually two different people?? So does that mean Janet is still alive (well, except her career)? Does that mean Diana Ross is a separate entity also?? (Beside the fact that the Jacksons all share her nose) I am so confused...

You take the monkey, I'll take the llama,

We'll have a party: get me a Pepsi --

Michael is Janet, Janet is Michael --

I'm so confused now --

Who is Diana?

He's oxygenated

His nose is deflated

And he thinks he looks good to you

And he thinks he looks good to you

-- Frank Zappa - "Why Don't You Like Me?"

Re:So it plays back media

[Hurricane78]

I agree. I do not know ONE single GUI app under Linux, that adheres to that UNIX philosophy.

If it would, there would be a executable for every button in the UI. and you could use apps like tools or like wizards, to work on your file (which could also be an executable or any other file system object).

The Linux GUIs are just bad clones of Windows/Mac/etc. And in my eyes this is no advantage but a complete failure.

My only hope is the new KDE4 philosophy. It at least is a little step in the right direction. Although they got infected with the Gnome misunderstanding, where you think that simplicity would be equal to efficiency, even when it is the opposite.

VLC! FUCK YEAH!

[GameboyRMH]

Comin' again to play those muthafuckin' vids YEAH!
VLC! FUCK YEAH!
Freedom is the only way YEAH!
Proprietary players are through,
'cause now they have to answer to
VLC! FUCK YEAH!
It's for everyone 'cuz it's cross-platform!
VLC! FUCK YEAH!
No need to install codec packs now,
It's the dream we all share, the hope for tomorrow

FUCK YEAH!

DVD, FUCK YEAH!
Blu-Ray, FUCK YEAH!
Quicktime, FUCK YEAH!
RealVideo, FUCK YEAH!
WMV, FUCK YEAH!
FLV, FUCK YEAH!
DivX, FUCK YEAH!
Matroska, FUCK YEAH!!!

Re:So it plays back media

[Runaway1956]

Gave you a free fucking media player. Don't like it? Don't use it. And, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

Re:Getting sick of...

[b4dc0d3r]

Maybe the people responsible were doing other things and they didn't want to hold up the release for a bug noticed by two people?

To get a fix in, they have to have someone with the time, desire, and know-how to find the issue and fix it. Maybe the cause is in an upstream package like the codec libraries...

Feel free to find it yourself and submit a patch. I always used to hate hearing that, but sometimes a fix simply isn't available by the next release.

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[Wildclaw]

as it will play ANYTHING

Try playing my low framerate mkv files (screen captured go lectures). VLC chokes badly on low framerate mkv containers.

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[Anonymous Coward]

It still doesn't recognize when subtitles are encoded in some ANSI codepage (as most subtitles are) and displays question marks instead of special characters. VSFilter at least defaults to the system codepage. (A heuristic approach would be desirable, but AFAIK no player has that.) And still no support for downloading subtitles. Bug #899 was filed three years ago, nothing has happened since.

Re:So it plays back media

[Maxo-Texas]

No so much "get it right" as "another less commonly version of the quote goes this way:".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades,_master_of_none

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

My only hope is the new KDE4 philosophy. It at least is a little step in the right direction.

The philosophy where all app frontends are supposed to run in the plasma process as plasmoids?
Or the phisolophy where all background stuff is done by the one process to rule them all, kded4?

Slashdot speaks English

[tepples]

You forget to add that your reply is of course very much limited to people living under US law.

Like the editors of Slashdot.

Remember that the world is bigger than the USA.

Remember that Slashdot and SourceForge, its parent company, are in the USA. In fact, two-thirds of people living in an industrialized English-speaking country live in the USA.

Re:Slashdot speaks English

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Hmmmm, well assuming for a moment your statistics were accurate... so what? Does an English speaking person not count if they are living in an industrialized country where less than half the population speaks English? A large percentage of the /. contributors/readers aren't in the US. If you want to make it a site for Americans only then go ahead, that is certainly your right. Failing that then making sweeping statements that are incorrect for a large percentage of the /. contributors/readers seems like a rather parochial thing to do. Then bristling at people who then attempt to improve the accuracy of such statements is... well let's just say it doesn't put one in the best light.

Now as to your statistics... assuming that by English speaking country you mean countries where >50% of the population speaks English, and that by industrialized you mean not strictly agrarian... then you are wrong. A quick visit to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population will show (millions):

US: 251

India: 90

UK: 60

Germany: 46

Canada: 25

Australia: 17

Netherlands: 14

Sweden: 8

Belgium: 6

Austria: 5

Denmark: 5

Switzerland: 5

Ireland: 5

As you can see the US accounts for less than half of the English speaking industrialized world. Note that I have excluded countries with any chance you might argue aren't industrialized or where the English is a dialect or pidgin English; and the population numbers are those of the actual English speakers - all of which benefits your claim. I did include India even though the majority don't speak English because I felt that 90 Million English speakers was just too many to ignore.

So, what was your point anyway?

Re:So it plays back media

[dotgain]

I'm glad you're not bitter!

IDK...Dziobas rar player works okay

[mr_stinky_britches]

IDK...Dziobas rar player works okay

but percentage of English speaking geeks?

[fantomas]

"two-thirds of people living in an industrialized English-speaking country live in the USA."

I'd love to get a breakdown of how many English speaking geeks live in the USA compared to the rest of the world... there's a heck of a lot of English speaking geeks in many countries where English is a second or third language.

Or did you mean English-only speaking people? :-)

Would be really interesting to get a slashdot breakdown of readers by country for sure.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

That was Janet Jackson

The Blue Light Special on Aisle Three

[westlake]

Well, grandma might not, but quite a few people with enough tech level to want to watch movies but not enough to compile something will.

Grandma buys the OEM system bundle.

Pretty much like everyone else who isn't posting to Slashdot on a long summer weekend.

Media play has to work in the store.

It has to look and sound as good as anything the OSX or Windows system can deliver out of the box.

It has to be competitive with the XBox 360 or PS3.

The high end HDTV has Ethernet and a minimally functional browser.

It won't be long before the mid-line set can "tune" Internet video directly - and it will be mp4 and not Ogg/Theora.

Re:The Blue Light Special on Aisle Three

[jedidiah]

Grandma will certainly be disappointed with the current Windows boxes.

It's hard to say with Macs.

Like I said in the other message. Any given Mac may be lame enough to
not even support any sort of hardware acceleration of h264 and further-
more not have a fast enough CPU to make up for it with brute force.

Grandma will probably end up with a "fast enough" CPU before you see
properly pre-configured Windows boxes.

Re:So it plays back media

[4v4l0n42]

I am not afraid to stand up for VLC for I've never found something that has worked so flawlessly crossplatform

How about MPlayer and its various Grafical User Interfaces?

Re:So it plays back media

[ndege]

Were you speaking of VLC or FireFox?

Raw H.264 playback still broken?

[dougr650]

If they still haven't fixed playback of raw H.264 files (without any transport stream or other wrapper), then I'm going to have to continue to stick with 0.8.6. This has been broken for a ridiculously long time now and no one but me seems to have complained about it. I love VLC, but it hasn't decoded "everything under the sun" in quite some time. I last checked the 0.9.9 versions on both Windows and linux, and both failed to play any of a set of H.264 reference videos. H.264 is pretty standard now, and the inability to play back .264 files is a fairly serious defect.

Has anyone fixed Pulseaudio?

[mrmeval]

Pulseaudio = Pain in the ass hate machine.

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the fact that it will play most anything. But...that's about it.

I was a continual user of VLC 0.8xxx but since they released the 1.0 crap they screwed up subtitles. I used to watch
movies with my Korean wife - her English is not terribly good - but now Korean subtitles are completely broken
with VLC. I've put message out on their forum, but their team doesn't seem to give crap if something is broken.

If it's so f&^king good, why disable forums/wi

[Anonymous Coward]

Their forums and wiki on videolan.org have been shut off due to high traffic.

I suspect that there's enough people writing in to say WTF that they couldn't handle the load AND fix the bugs they created

Re:So it plays back media

[Trogre]

Us now-suffering Amarok users hear you. Oh yes we hear you.

A reminder to be careful not to post flamebait

[tepples]

So, what was your point anyway?

My ultimate point is that people who brag about the differences in copyright and patent policy between their home countries and the United States should be careful about their tone. Several posters aren't as careful as wvmarle, instead posting something to the effect of "Sucks to be you, Americans."

Re:So it plays back media

[dangitman]

I'd rather have a dozen tools, each of which excells at it's one thing, than one tool that does a half-assed job at a dozen things.

That's a false dichotomy. There's no law that something that only does one thing has to suck at it, or that something that does more than one thing can't be good at all of them. What about a tool that excels at a dozen things versus one that sucks at the only thing it does? Which tool would you use?

Anyway, back to VLC. I would not say it excels as a media playback interface. It's quite clunky and ordinary as far as user interaction goes. What it does do well is handle a lot of different formats. It would be nice if it did that and was pleasant to use.

Is SWSCALE working in OS X?

[DJRumpy]

I know this hasn't been working for .99 and .99a. I really miss Lanczos for upscaling to my HDTV from my HTPC. Especially for those really small sub-dvd resolutions. I think I saw that there was some sort of build issue and they disabled it.

I don't see anything to indicate it's been fixed.

Does anyone know?

Re:So it plays back media

[Tubal-Cain]

The only thing I've never figured out how to do is rewind. I have to settle for clicking on the bar or using Shift/Ctrl/Alt + Left Arrow. More advanced functions such as fullscreen, alternate audio tracks and subtitles are usually unnecessary but are in the menus if you need them (or 'f', 'b', and 'v', respectively).

"Closed Captions" isn't quite "captions"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Closed Captions" are a specific USA technlogy/standard, one way of implementing 'captions'. "Closed Captions" are technlogically distinct from the subtitle/subprogram streams on a DVD (and only seem to exist on NTSC DVDs).

A subtitle/subprogram stream on a DVD can have either captions or subtitles. But subprogram/subtitle streams are distinct from "Closed Caption" data.

XBMC will do it (has done for 5 years now)

[itslifejimbutnotaswe]

Just use XBMC - plays back from multi-RARs or multi-ZIPs, assuming they're stored. Even if they're compressed (which would be silly) it'll uncompress and play 'em for ya. Any format that VLC does, it'll do (i.e. it uses FFMpeg as well). Why multi-part rars? Obvious reason is distribution is easier through multiple channels, and it contains it's own checksum. A better reason is: Why not?

Re:So it plays back media

[extra88]

To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?

That's Janet! Miss Jackson if you're nasty.

Re:Media player classic + codec packs VLC

[Tacvek]

You might be surprised. I who virtually never watch non-English programming, am a native English speaker, without any hearing impairment, often watch shows with subtitles on if they are available. It helps for those times when speach is slightly garbled, and you can't quite make out what was said.

Oddly enough though I've seen subtitles backfire on Content producers. On one television program being aired on a network site, Subtitles were provided. The dubtitles here were produced by the Closed-Captioners of the program, (as evidenced by the caption credit during the title sequence).

In one scene, I noticed two lines of caption that did not correspond the the audio. Upon replaying that scene, I discovered that the dialog was indeed spoken, but due to character positioning it was almost impposible to see. The dialog in question would also only confuse listeners, so at the last minute they apparently scrapped those lines by muting the speech tracks there. This was apparently after they had sent the copy to the captioners, so the result was that the cut dialog was revived by the captions.

I've also seen plenty of poorly done fan made subtitles, and occasionally even professionally produced captions with mistakes that were pretty bad. Bad enough that a single play-through would have caught them. My guess is that they forgot to note these particular issues on their test play-through, and do not have a policy of requiring one play-through with no spotted errors before releasing.

Subtitles are too large and distracting

[Anonymous Coward]

Because subtitles are made for old-school TVs and are too big when plastered over the image while playing it on an widescreen set. Captioning, on the other hand, is rendered in whatever font and color you choose so you can have them at a more reasonable size.

Re:Subtitles are too large and distracting

[KingAlanI]

The closed captioning I'm used to seeing is blocky white text inside a black bar, plastered over the bottom of the images, whereas the subtitles appear under the image (in the black bar that's there anyway when widescreen stuff is being played on a normal TV)

GUI still sux

[saur2004]

How about implementing a true repeat one/all sceme instead of that annoying A->B function.
How about cleaning up the numerous bugs in the shoutcast browser.
Oh of course we cant have changes where they really count, can we?

Re:So it plays back media

[atamido]

So, like iTunes?

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

How was this not modded hilarious?

Re:Lossless difference

[gringer]

er, I think the point of the parent post is that differences would be found when they don't actually exist.

In other words, seeing patterns that aren't there. False positives. etc.

Which makes me wonder if any double-blind trials have been done where they test a drug against itself.

Re:So it plays back media

[ivano]

You've never used it on a Mac then I assume. Because you would change your mind pretty quickly :)

For OSX, VLC is not the best

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are wanting to play back content on OSX, the current "Mplayer Extended" program is far superior to VLC currently.

It has many more features in its preferences such as multi-core decoding and downconverting of DTS that VLC on the platform lacks.

Re:So it plays back media

[Lars T.]

That was Janet, you disrespectful dumbfucks.

You mean they actually were two different people???

No, La Toya was Michael, Janet was NippleGate.

Re:So it plays back media

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to ask, what is so bloody complicated with it? I install it, do a couple of minor preference changes (change my full screen shortcut, stop showing filename at startup of file, both not necessary for most users), and I use it. What the heck are people doing with it that makes it complicated?