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Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac
plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."
The DVD player that comes with Apple's computers is rather intolerant of scratches, etc., and will report "Skipping damaged area..." then skip ahead a ridiculous amount. VLC will play fine right through the supposedly damaged segment. Losing VLC for the Mac would be terrible. If I knew anything about programming, I'd think about joining this project.
Apple is poised to take over the whole video world in the next year. It'll be windows that needs the fancy VLC to watch Mac-made movies
There's going to be a million and two volunteers now since this is ./'d
Sad to see VLC struggling, but there's always Mplayer OSX Extended for the mac. Get the extra codec pack and it can play anything!
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Whoever takes the job, please remove the stupid "anything I want to play gets added to a stupid playlist" thing. When I open a video with QuickTime, it plays that video. If I open another video at the same time, it opens up another QuickTime window.
VLC is more like QuickTime (video player) but it currently acts more like iTunes (media library player).
I'm a mac user and I find no reason to use VLC as quicktime can handle everything (I have Perian installed). The current VLC version for mac is not working fine, so I better not use it anyway.
Why do they need a special OS X build? Shouldn't it build the same way it does on any UNIX?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Let's remember that Handbrake uses VLC for video decoding. No more VLC = no more handbrake.
Fans of the walled garden may be happy with what they get, while those who are unhappy with that choice may be looking elsewhere for their OS environment, thus VLC for Mac may not be on their radar.
If this were a worthy project, Father Steve would have told us so.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I remember when I had a Mac about 2 years ago it was very hard to find something that would burn CD's (yes I know VLC won't do this), play tunes and videos because the developers of all the alternative programs just gave up in the face of the mighty iTunes when that started to gain popularity.
And I hate, hate, hated iTunes, the interface, the then DRMified music store, the way it tried to force you to use a 'library' to store every single song that I only wanted to play once - it was and still is one of those programs like MPLAB [IDE for writing software for PIC] that just for some reason makes me want to dig my way to China with a teaspoon because that would be less stressful than using it.
Its like its authors decided the age-old concept of 'files' was not good enough anymore so their software (poorly) tries to portray the real-life concept of a dusty box filled with records while dumping every song into some random folder with a cryptic filename. But these wiseguys don't realise that I'd much rather deal with files that I can recognise by their filename, copy and move them with the well known 'cp' and 'mv' commands rather than having their craptastic software try to manage it all.
Having VLC go from the Mac would mean there is only one real alternative left - mplayer. Now mplayer is a fine piece of software but it's good to have VLC just in case, they both have their own distinct advantages.
why cant they just have their current linux developers switch to mac? surely there are more people running that?
i thought vlc was open source? isnt part of the power of open source that when crap like this happens the source code is available for ANYONE to continue it?
wont there be like half a dozen different forks of the mac version in a month?
If enough people are missing a feature in 1.1.0 release, someone will take the source and add it. As for any product and platform, development is a matter of supply and demand. It could be that physical media like DVDs is simply on the way out and most Mac users are happy with Quicktime player to watch H.264 torrents.
VLC is by far the best versatile cross platform VIDEO player available to mankind. Very sad if MAC OSX VLC development is discontinued.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
Seriously, with Perian you can pretty much play any video that plays in VLC in QuickTime, which also means that you can integrate it into all the other OS X apps(such as iTunes, iDVD etc). With VLC you are pretty much stuck using the VLC video player, which has a horrendous interface....
VLC plays anything and everything. (Well, OK, not Windows 7 Media Center files...but nothing plays those.) I have no idea if you're really having issues with it but nobody I know does. It would suck serious rocks if VLC were abandoned on the Mac.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Why use VLC as a player when Perian installs codecs that allow quicktime player (or any quicktime based app) to play back anything VLC will. It's basically ffdshow for mac. I rarely use VLC anymore for that reason. Quicktime player just feels more lightweight as it starts up faster.
My experience with VLC is that it has handled everything i've thrown at it admirably, with the few exceptions being horribly corrupted beyond recognition.
Mplayer will open and play more, but suffers horrible A/V desynch which, despite months of soliciting and applying arcane fix ideas, has remained persistent.
VLC is currently the only playback solution which can handle HD H.264 matroska without a major malfunction, and additionally has the highest quality video rendering, with more detail, smoother pans, and finer grained video controls than competitors.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I thought Handbrake uses FFMPEG. Anyway, if Handbrake uses some VLC code then the Handbrake developers will probably continue to maintain that code without necessarily having to maintain VLC as a whole.
have they considered using horsepower?
I think seeing VLC die on the Mac would do much more harm than the death of the Windows version. There is plenty of wonderful video programs that allow you to easily tweak what filters and codecs you use, and pretty much can support any codecs you want. MPC-HC comes to mind as the most versatile. VLC is still useful for formats that you don't use very much - like *.flv, or videos that may not work for whatever reason in another video program.
However, on the Mac, there are far fewer options. A few days ago, I attempted to setup a Windows share on OS X 10.6. Besides the fact that you can't easily add a shortcut to a share (you need to mount it which doesn't work if the machine isn't on) the default player for pretty much all videos files is Quicktime.
I'm pretty sure that everyone can agree that Quicktime is utter crap. It's similar to VLC in that it's pretty much monolithic in that it's supposed to include support for many formats, and it's not easy to add support for new formats. WMP, however, can use any Directshow filter. So can MPC-HC. Why is this a problem? Because Quicktime doesn't support ANYTHING and yet is the default for pretty much EVERYTHING.
- Can't play H.264 above Baseline. That means you can't play H.264 from a Blu-Ray/HD DVD or any (decent) x264 encodes. Pretty much limits you to iTunes downloads
- Can't play Xvid/Divx by default. I was shocked by this. It opens AVI's by default, but it just shows a black screen and won't play
- Doesn't support Matroska (MKV) file format which is now used on all HD videos and and higher-quality SD videos that either use x264, AAC, or AC3/DTS. Most AVI's are plain xvid/mp3.
- No easy way to add Xvid/Divx support. No Xvid codec for OS X that I could find. Installed 3vix (sp?) but it didn't work.
-----
As an aside, I tried setting up OS X to play MKV and AVI files over a Windows share a few days ago. This was my experience:
I couldn't get OS X to use VLC by default. Selecting "open with" VLC ALWAYS only works for that single file, not the file type, despite it saying so. Changing the settings in Quicktime to not play AVI's also did nothing. In the end, I just told my roommate to use the open with VLC option, as I gave up trying to get the Quicktime or the OS to do what I wanted. Couldn't get Quicktime to play XviD AVI's after installing the appropriate codec, and couldn't get OS X to play AVI's with VLC by default.
Mysterious (and ignored) thing is, Adobe won't implement GPU acceleration on Flash beta 10.1 on OS X citing "not stable interface" or "not enough documentation"... Whatever, the reality is, a Mac Mini with NV9400M can play 1080p Flash video with 3% CPU load under Windows Vista/XP/7 but it will choke the CPU (no matter how powerful) on OS X. As far as I understand, GPU accelerated version is either available or soon to be available under x86/Linux too.
Game developers, once interested in GC figured "once you write for GC, it will be OS X only" and they stay away too.
Apple made a big mistake acting like Microsoft. They should have released GC simultaneously on both OS X and Windows, with decent developer support and they could become de-facto standard for multi core/GPU acceleration which game developers are dying for. Of course, it would be really hard but not impossible.
I suspect they will find more development help when the job market improves (hopefully soon)... :-/
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
Are you really joking? VLC is the most successful open source project on Mac, forever. It even beats Firefox.
Here is a top sw downloads listing from absolutely general user focused download site: http://www.macupdate.com/popular/
VLC has also become de-facto remote controlled Apple OS X software for iPhone/iPod users. Those are the true "walled garden" lovers/ignorers.
VLC should look at their community, IRC channel, developer public comments for why on earth their developer level dropped to zero with such amazing success. Imagine you are a multimedia developer, is there anything more visible and easy to contribute than VLC? Get a CVS pwd, start showing off with your coding capabilities... Really interesting... I suspect some bad treatment to Mac users/Developers going on. BTW, they should look at pure numbers, not some troll/idiot comments from some download sites or blogs. They are currently de facto standard multimedia player on OS X. They should figure this fact if not already.
PS: Not a big VLC fan really while it saves us all the time at TV. I personally use Coreplayer OS X which is really really unpopular and commercial application which does amazing things like playing 720P HD/H264 on G4 1.42 Ghz.
I seriously don't know what you're talking about. I use VLC all the time, and find it impressive how wide a variety of formats it will play without any problems. It plays damned near everything and never crashes. The UI might not be completely Mac-like, but it's not as horrible as some ports.
Overall, I'll be unhappy if VLC development for OSX stops.
For plugins like Flash and high end commercial games, engine conversion, FreeBSD is irrelevant. What I talk about is something which will run under MS Visual Studio based development environment, whatever game developers/plugin developers use.
Of course, FreeBSD will have GC just like they have launchd but it won't really matter to some game developer or a plugin developer like Adobe.
Seriously, with Perian you can pretty much play any video that plays in VLC in QuickTime, which also means that you can integrate it into all the other OS X apps(such as iTunes, iDVD etc). With VLC you are pretty much stuck using the VLC video player, which has a horrendous interface....
try opening any large matroska file in quicktime, call me in a few days when it loads under perian. Until the perian team can hack their way around that little problem their plugin will not measure up unfortunately.
It's a great idea, but it's not quite there yet, even though it performs admirably for smaller files and I do have it installed : )
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I wanted to respond directly to the person who put this post up, but I don't want to register for yet another forum.
I'll gladly help develop for the project. My knowledge in video and audio processing is very weak (I took a class on it, but I didn't really put too much work into it), but my skills in C and C++ are pretty good (but not expert). I'm also pretty well-versed in Java, though it's been a while since I needed to whip it out. Finally, I'm slowly, but surely, learning Objective-C.
Please e-mail me at the address listed here. I don't want to see this die! I just migrated over to OS X and find this app extremely helpful, especially from my use of it in Windows.
(This message may be seen as inflammatory, but I assure you that it is just my opinion and not particularly anybody else---I don't speak for the projects on which I participate).
Hi.
I am not a developer of VLC, but I am part of the LAME team (that MP3 encoder that a good amount of people use). I see similar problems regarding LAME as those described by the VLC team: lack of continuous power and resources.
Some users just magically think that "oh, this program won't exist anymore, so let's use this other one". The sad thing here is that they are shortsighted in the fact that they, by doing nothing (just receiving the programs), are not giving the incentive for the projects.
What about if the proposed alternative dies a few days from now? The amount of alternatives is finite.
Not only that, but the major players out there all share the same codebase: there are "incestuous" (in a good sene of the word) relations with VLC, xine, and mplayer: the all use, to some extent or another (well, in some cases, to the full extent) some common libraries: ffmpeg, libmp3lame, theora, vorbis, dirac, x264 and so on.
Usually, also, the players also send some feedback to the people writing the libraries and, without them, the libraries would not be as good as they are. And the feedback that developers provide is, not infrequently, in form of patches, or constructive suggestions. Some users, like the one above, just cares less and, honestly, where would you just "grab the extra codec" if they all, come, essentially, from the first place?
If you didn't know, perhaps it is a good reminder to put here that people from the VLC project developed the nice libdvdcss library, which benefited xine and mplayer, while people in the other projects have directly or indirectly benefited the others.
I would not like to have the "Linux desktop" mainstream with a "community" with a person that doesn't want a community. For people that are more altruistic (and that show it, instead of just playing in slashdot all day), I am open to a more open talk.
[Gee, from what I wrote the above, it seems like if I only saw Linux---I actually value the other Unix-like operating systems as much].
I guess that what I meant to say here is: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code. Don't wish the death of what you may proudly use and not even know".
Regards, Rogério Brito.
I also have never had issues with playback in VLC where QT+Perian did any better.
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He's 100% right though. Apple already owns the online music distribution and playing industry and the high end professional computing industry (programming, design, scientific computing, high performance computing, etc.. basically anyone who needs a computer for serious work), so taking over the video industry is the next natural step. Open Source toys like VLC really cannot compete at a professional level with stuff like Quicktime because it has an order of magnitude superior design, usability, security and testing behind it. You freetards really should get a clue.
There are very few Open Source developers for OSX. Unfortunately we, AbiWord, have exactly the same issue. We *almost* had version 2.8 ready for OSX but we lost our lead OSX developer and there is no one to replace him. Rather than delay 2.8, we simply went ahead with 2.8 for Linux and Windows.
With Perian installed (have you been living in a cave?) Quicktime handles every AVI, MPG, FLV, and MKV file I've thrown at it in years. Quicktime Player in Snow Leopard doesn't think it can open MKV files, but that's why you don't remove Quicktime Player 7 (there's an option for this in the upgrade, because QP7 does things the new QP can't.)
Please help metamoderate.
mplayer builds just fine on osx and is in macports. renders natively and is excellent, always been my favorite player over VLC.... http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/ is kept up to date and has a nice gui for osx, I installed it for my girlfriend and was so impressed with it that I even occasionally use it!
FYI:
Quicktime is more than a player. It is a massive video library (with a larger code base than windows 95) used to power video editing etc. Its OLD and used to be the basis of nearly all video editing software. It has gotten stale and others have replaced it but it was the foundation for digital video for many years and its still around being used for this.
The quicktime file format is the basis of the mp4 file format as well.
It is a solid library with a lot of extendability for its size, age, and complexity - its in C and I've coded for it a little bit... like 10 years ago.
What I see now is alternatives usually built around a single format library with an import/export system added on. This makes those easier to implement while quicktime has been open ended and not tied to any 1 format (other than its own container format) the timecode in quicktime is confusing because its not a video time code but an abstraction.
Basically apple dropped the ball when they didn't open source the library years ago (and they did ask for public input for a short period without much attention given to it) now we have MKV containers and the zombee avi containers and many specialized libraries.
Not much out there as far as I've seen that competes with the power of quicktime. It could have been the framework but it looks like mkv will be the open container and somebody will tie together enough libraries and codecs into a generalized framework--- or we'll just have to jam it all together ourselves. (which may not be any more difficult than trying to understand the old quicktime C API...)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It seems like better developer outreach from Apple would help here, but I think the lack of such cooperation is somewhat symptomatic of Apple's movement away from the Mac as its central business to consumer electronics (iPhone and iPod). Apple just does not care as much about the Mac in the iPhone era, which is an unfortunate market reality. They really need to take a page from the Microsoft monkey - Developers, developers, developers!!!
As a previous poster noted, it will be interesting to see if Apple can drag major developers on to the Cocoa bandwagon as the sole solution for 64-bit API support. It really seems like Apple pulled the rug out from under developers when it suddenly cancelled Carbon 64-bit. The Carbon APIs were originally produced because the major developers weren't willing to move to Cocoa. Apple may feel that it's in such a strong position that it can now force the Cocoa switch, but I don't think that in terms of developer appeal of Cocoa much has changed between OS X's launch and now. Sure OS X is established, and making Cocoa the only game in town for 64-bitness may help its adoption to some degree, but other developers clearly won't see it worth the cost.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
VLC Will just become another reason for you to dual boot windows. You already need to if you play games, why not if you watch movies? I just run windows on desktops through. I'm neither a beret wearing graphic designer nor a homosexual.
iirc, the python guys have found a way around osx's single-instance restriction...
For what it's worth, Niceplayer is a fairly decent alternative to Quicktime and VLC http://code.google.com/p/niceplayer/
Because "true Apple lovers" are mostly either multimedia designers, artists, writers or just ordinary users with more money than sense, and not down-in-the-trenches C/C++ developers?
I guess you must not be a "down-in-the-trenches" developer either. Or else your head is so far down in the "trenches" you have not been to any kind of technical conference, where a large number of people have mac laptops (including many Windows technical conferences).
So where have all of the Mac developers gone? I wonder what massive upswing in calls for Mac capable developers might have happened in the last few years that might have drawn people off the project?
Basically, to my mind you need look no further than the iPhone to figure out what has taken the wind out of many small projects in regards to Mac development.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From the sound of things, he's probably using the API, which given the number of platforms supported most likely also supports the G4.
Or an older version of the product they simply no longer sell so they don't have to maintain it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For plugins like Flash and high end commercial games, engine conversion, FreeBSD is irrelevant.
What is relevant, is that GCD is open source. You can use it on any platform you like, though it still requires some porting work for other platforms.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wow... just because you can't wrap you head around it doesn't mean other people can't master it. It sounds like you are just displaying your own inadequacies.
Besides... the original open source WorldWideWeb.app was coded in Objective-C on NeXTSTEP - a direct ancestor to today's Mac OS X. That is arguably the most influential open source project to have been created so far.
Further, you mention Sun? As in the the company being sold to Oracle because it can't seem to make a profit lately, partially because they paid so much for open source projects and don't make enough money off of them?
If the filename or directory is longer than 40 charactes, it's truncated. Then and there with malice. That sounds like a naming scheme to me.
I'm sorry, but they're not dropping OS X support, they just have no one in the current project to handle that side of it, hence asking for more manpower.
If Microsoft puts an advert in the paper asking for more developers for Windows do you assume that they are dropping support for Windows?
Also, if you really are a "longtime programmer of many languages" then Obj-C really shouldn't be much of a stretch for you. It's not like it's written in Latin.
Your thinly veiled Apple bash post has been exposed I'm afraid.
A spec for spec comparison is only relevant if the Dell or Lenova you would buy happens to be exactly the same as available Macs. The vast majority of the time, they will not.
Most of the "Mac Tax" comes from having to buy more powerful than necessary components. Apple does get a large part of that, as those parts have a higher profit margin. To figure out the difference in price, spec out the Dell you would buy, and compare it to the Mac you'd have to buy.
For example, most people have their mets more than met by a $700 notebook. The bottom end MacBook may have better specs, but if you don't need it that's irrelevant; it serves only to pad Apple's bottom line.
The point is that Macs are what they are, and for what they are they are not (that) much more expensive.
Your argument holds true to almost any consumer item. I think when discussing the relative expense of systems the only really meaningful method is to compare like configured systems.
Using your argument I could point out that $700 notebook is too expensive because I can get a lower speced one for $399, or an Eee PC for $249.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
I am not a programmer but pretty handy with PC's. I recently got a computer virus that annihilated my PC so I switched to Mac for security purposes. Overall I like it on many levels, except its not so hot with Media. I got TONS of media from all over the place. My PC played it all and I created my own directory structure that worked for me. Here in macville I often find myself unable to play things or manage them or edit them. Mac seems to have high end editing functionality but for average power users like me with tons of pics, mp3, videos it sucks! iTunes wants to organize and bring everything into libraries, quicktime is sorta lame. Irony
Since when is stating an honest negative opinion "flamebait"? Fucking asshole mods on crack! I'm going back to posting AC until you put the pipe down... P.S. I know people will say you shouldn't complain about VLC because it's free...I've given it several tries over the last few years, and every time I conclude that it's worth every penny I paid for it!
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
It is really amazing design glitch on their part. Their 1.x binary is an universal and something Altivec designers/coders should really see.
These guys (they are also creators of MKV) seems to code old school with hand written assembly all over the place. There is no other explanation especially on G4.
I got the 1.3.2 (6909) here. The version 2.x could be Intel only, I really don't know for sure too since it isn't even released.
What it shows is the amount of optimization one can really do for a CPU having 133Mhz FSB so I really wished it was open source. Well, reality is sad sometimes.
By the time HD-DVD or Blu-Ray won the format wars, it would be too late, we'd see everything delivered via a digital stream.
Blu-ray Disc has defeated HD DVD, but plenty of places still have either broadband capped at 5 GB/mo or (gasp) dial-up.
man
NOUN:
pl. men
For crying out loud ...
If we are naming alternatives then Movist is a good alternative. On the other hand VLC still beats it when it comes to streaming protocols.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Google have a youtube cache in Pipe Networks NSWs Point of Presence, so if you have an ISP who's connected to that, and makes sure they have enough bandwidth to it, there'll usually be not buffering (on rare occasions there can be, however that is youtube itself)
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Did you report any of the crashes you had and share the crash logs?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Quicktime X, which we all hoped as a good client for the Quicktime Framework turned out to be a joke really.
It lacks 3rd party component support... It has no clue what a qtl file is (try nasa.gov/ntv) , lacks 3rd party export support... IMHO if you are a bit serious about media, no need to be professional, you gotta select "quicktime" while installing. That is in case you have not upgraded yet.
What bothers me is that great, visionary framework/arch they are giving bad name with that client. Imagine it was designed/implemented in Apple's darkest days...
What if the people at Apple shameless enough to ask money for full screen video playback (for years!) thinks they can't sell upgraded hardware if they enable GPU acceleration features?
I mean a company sized as Adobe does not joke. They say there is no way to enable GPU decoding for Flash 10.1 beta. That is amazingly big deal especially with the rise of h264 encoded flash video.
VLC's issues, I can guess just by release notes.. They lived a massive problem with gcc 4.2 /PPC compatibility, had to drop Tiger (10.4) support getting the flame from users (instead of Apple who didn't do it for 10.4), some idiotic trolls keep on "Not Mac like" whining and their good intentions of taking them serious...
As result, millions of people not having issues and enjoying their software gets the problem. This is the exact reason why I started hating loud mouth "maccie" community.
There are no secrets that VLC makes use of the CPU for all its work. If any work can be made to offloading work to other processing units, then this would be a great new feature. Whether this is done directly with FFMPEG of with VLC doesn't matter, since VLC would benefit in both cases, but other projects would benefit from the latter.
I am thinking of at least starting with blocks and making use of llvm.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It means SQUAT to me if a MacPro is a "better buy" if I don't require it's features.
I am far better off having a PC built for the same price as mini that has vastly
superior performance. It doesn't matter that it isn't as good as a Mac Pro. It
doesn't need to be.
The same is true for an ION that costs half or one third the price of a mini.
I would really rather run MacOS in a VM on my Quad Core Linux box than an actual mini.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'll be honest, I use linux and windows, but I still think VLC is a valuable counterpart to ANY proprietary tool. Sure, your mac may play everything you have thrown at it, but VLC is willing to support file types that Apple won't purely on grounds of copyright. Mac needs VLC, because, frankly, VLC isn't worried about getting sued. This would be a terrible loss for the mac community.
I love VLC on the Mac. Why? Because I have a need to play back movies created on a TOPFIELD TF5000PVRt
I suck off the movie through a USB bit of software. Stow it on my Mac and Can watch it on my laptop
If I can get a job soon I'd be buying the 7000 HD version of the TOPFIELD.
I have not used Hulu nor NetFlix.
who would want to develop something like a media swiss-army knife for the mac;
These folks?
Perian - The swiss-army knife for Quicktime
If a netbook fits a PC users needs, they can go out and buy one and run all their usual software on it. A Mac user would either have to do without, or straddle ecosystems.
I want to use programs which will be developed even if no one spends money. I will not write code, because I am not a programmer, and that is not a good way for me to contribute.
If the only part of vlc that deserves to live is libdvdcss, so be it. Lately VLC plays less than half of the files that I want to play, the same stuff gstreamer chokes on, AND it has been choking on DVD menus (drawing them incorrectly) so it's not actually worth anything to me. But then, I'm a Linux user. It seems like everything I want to run is developed for Windows or Linux, and none of it for the mac.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ha! There's no such thing.
Apple is a big and stinking company producing proprietary software and partly owned by fucking Micro$oft. I hope all mac faggots get the clap.
While definitely a heavyweight compared to VLC, I've been using XBMC for Mac instead of VLC for fiddling with stuff before it goes to transcoding. VLC has better direct navigation of DVDs, but XBMC seems to be a bit more robust at playing them. And anyway, it's going to wind up played on XBMC for Linux connected to the big screen.
Frankly, if Apple's DVD player would just ignore prohibited user operations, I'd use that. I rarely watch a DVD from even a full rip these days, they get unwrapped, ripped, transcoded, and the physical disc put in storage before ever making it to the home theatre screen.
But XBMC can also handle Blu-Ray transport streams which have LPCM and DTS audio tracks, VLC choked on those. (Though it seemed happy with ones which had AC3 audio; though it could be some other issue about those discs which XBMC can deal with and VLC can't. Obviously, these are ripped to HDD, 'cause there's no BD+ or AACS support for Mac. That also means no waiting around for 47 different copyright warnings and previews.)
On the other hand, I'd hate to lose VLC, and I've been learning Objective C... if only I had more spare time.
What's the problem? You can buy a netbook from any number of manufacturers. If a "Mac user" really wants a netbook, he can get one as well. He could even put OSX on it, although not legally. If these Mac users really really want an Apple Mac, they've probably weighed the pros and the cons and found that the Mac has more benefits for them that make it worth lugging around a larger piece of hardware.
So, what's the exact problem? There are so many people whining about what Apple is and is not selling them, I just don't get it. Apple is doing terrific even though the economy is in a major slump. I think they're on to something.
We're talking about regular people, comparing the cost of Mac and PCs. The vendor lock in is certainly a part of that cost.
Quoting http://forum.videolan.org/
"Mac situation
VLC for Mac death is "greatly exagerated"
We have a kind of lack of manpower on the current Mac interface of VLC.
The VLC core (in C) and most other plugins work pretty fine, but the OS X GUI (1% of the code of VLC) is not really maintained. It is in Objective-C.
That explains the issues you have seen in latest version of VLC 1.0.x on mac, and the drop of 64bits version in 1.0.3
Lunettes
However the old Cocoa graphical interface of VLC, is not being maintained at this time. The reason is that we are in the process of rewriting a new interface for VLC, using a different paradigm. Its codename is Lunettes. Why a rewrite? This is something really easy to see. VLC for Mac is just not "Mac" enough.
For now, Lunettes is being hosted at: http://wiki.github.com/pdherbemont/Glasses.
That said, Lunettes is still under heavy development. And we hope to be able to release a test version in January."
i use the web interface extensively (had to add some fields to access the % skip for those pbs .m2t firewire recordings that just won't skip by seconds/minutes, but will skip a %...wtf?-)
i've never brought up 2 instances, but which 1 would the web interface control?