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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."
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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!?
My work here is dung.
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.")
Whale
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.
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???
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
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.
--srj/mmv