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VLC For Android May Arrive In Early 2011
dkd903 writes "The development of an Android client for VLC has been going on for months now, but it has been slowed down by the fact that Android's multimedia output libraries are in Java. VLC itself is based on C and so translating them to Java is difficult and takes time. With the newer Android NDK, however, using native codes for Android apps has been becoming easier. So, the VLC developers have developed two basic modules for audio and video output based on the new NDK and most of the VLC libraries have been ported to Android."
but does this mean VLC for android will have limited codec support for now? Bring it to be honest, Archos has stopped providing some exotic ones, until I grab my wallet, in the new fw update of my 101 and free is better.
This isn't going to use battery at all, especially since VLC's codecs aren't hardware accelerated...
And in Java, which is well-known for its efficient support of complex bit-twiddling algorithms.
Umm...
VNC = Virtual Network Computing
VLC = VLC media player (former VideoLAN Client)
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GAH!, never reply to a slashdot article first thing post xmas morning with a hang over. The C/C++ NDK is two years old now, nothing stopping the VLC guys adding to it instead of complaining it doesnt have the lib they need. I think VLC are late to the party anyway, I already use rockplayer to play mkv,mpg video files (thanks to ffmpeg) without any issues.
VLC gets it's codec support from a selection of libraries, primarily libavcodec. There isn't much it won't play. I've thrown everything from old realmedia to quicktime to mpeg to x264 in mkv container with vorbis audio at VLC, and it's all worked.
Agreed. But there was an implication that one couldn't do VLC on Android because it's Java. It's Java syntax, but the underlying VM isn't Java. That means that the performance problems that plague Java do not plague Dalvik (Android) applications.
Undoubtedly Android VLC uses these libraries rather than the usual suspects.
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Interpreted languages are very different now than they were 10-15 years ago. First, most are compiled into bytecode, which is pseudo assembly that can be compiled faster than source code. Second, the interpreter does dynamic recompilation and optimization on the fly, something C and C++ don't do (these code blocks were hand tuned in assembly in the past, but that is rare because the compiler is better than most humans at instruction order because of out of order optimization. While it may not be faster than C/C++, it isn't that bad, especially with systems that make calls to hardware (I get decent OpenGL performance on mine - way better than my old 1.3GHz Pentium on a 1GHz chip, and FAR better memory management). I would hope the optimizations made for Dalvik (the android runtime) also exist in the NDK VM, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet (going to try to port a C++ library to it, but I have a feeling the OpenGL to OpenGL ES transition will be painful on that one).
With the newer Android NDK, however, using native codes for Android apps has been becoming easier.
Codes, plural? What exactly is "one code"?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Instead of making us all look like Apple-style "ha, we can do $APP" fanboys, you should explain why. Deranged partition scheme aside, Maemo is pretty much a typical GNU/Linux distro, complete with glibc and xorg. It also comes with modified versions of GTK+ and Qt, to make interfaces work nicely on a touchscreen. Any Linux application can be ported trivially unless it doesn't compile on ARM for some reason, and will work fine unless it is extremely CPU-intensive or works badly on a small screen.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
You absolutely do NOT want a garbage collector on a mobile device with limited memory and CPU power.
This is just one of the many things that Apple got 101% right in iOS.
My mobile phone has over six thousand times the compute power and over a million times the memory of the first computer I worked on, and that supported 18 concurrent users. More than that, my mobile phone has over five hundred times the compute power and one hundred times the memory of the first dedicated LISP workstation I worked on, and that had a full GUI and generational garbage collection. The idea that modern phones have limited memory or limited CPU power is an idea which only beginners or amateurs could possibly believe.
Back at the beginning of the automobile age, cars were so primitive that they didn't have automatic oil pumps. If the driver didn't remember to keep pumping oil, the engine would seize. We no longer think that's good engineering. Nowadays, our cars have automatic oil pumps, which use a tiny fraction of the engine's power to prevent it happening. Back at the very beginning of the computer age, software systems were so primitive that they didn't have automatic memory management. If the programmer didn't remember to keep freeing memory, the memory system would silt up and the machine would freeze. Do you really think that's good engineering?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
You are seriously off topic here. (But to answer your question, google for Remote Desktop to view remotely, use Camtasia to do recording)
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.