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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."
Yes, It now goes to 11.
Isn't that good enought for you?
Without hardware accelerated h.264 playback, I'm not going back to VLC.
Still, it's a great do it all player / streamer.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
... 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!)
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...
"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