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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."
Has anyone fixed the volume control yet, or is that too trivial to bother with?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Without hardware accelerated h.264 playback, I'm not going back to VLC.
Still, it's a great do it all player / streamer.
Would I have to pay royalties to MPEG LA to watch MPEG-2 encoded media on VLC media player
To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?
Pissed on your grave, you ungrateful whiner.
So much for being acquired by Google.
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!
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.
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
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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....)
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.
If it's that trivial to fix...why don't you go fix it yourself?
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.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
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.
You don't like the native look?
Use the skins: http://images1.videolan.org/vlc/skins2/subX.png
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.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
... Which is why you did not install a Firefox spell-checker, I presume?
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
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.
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!)
(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.
It's all in the codecs. VLC uses ffmpeg quite heavily. A full port of the ffmpeg library might help.
This is all just my personal opinion.
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.
-Rich
Thats too bad for you, vlc plays 1080p h264 content just fine on my cheapo dualcore AMD.
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.
-Rich
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?
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".
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...
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.)
Redundancy is good And also good.
"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!
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
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.
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.
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.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Apparently you don't know what "lossless" actually means.
Sure he does, lossless encoding takes out the "whooosh" sound.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
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.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Pulseaudio = Pain in the ass hate machine.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty