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VLC Player For Android Is Almost a Reality
An anonymous reader writes "Android, as a platform, has always fallen a little short when it comes to media playback. The native apps that come with every Android device don't make it easy to watch movies. The only native app that allows you to navigate movies is the Gallery app, which is great for photos, but bad for movies. Among the many contributions to the Android ecosystem made by Austen Dicken are his developments in support of the Motorola Droid line of phones for Cyanogenmod, Embedded Gentoo for Android, and, as a fun side project, he's playing with VLC for Android. Austen describes his work on VLC for Android to be pre-alpha at this point in time, but he is still able to show some impressive results regarding basic functionality. "
Going from the N900 to the Galaxy S II when it turns up is going to be a culture shock, I honestly hadn't thought that video playback would be a concern.
RIP N900 :(
(Yes I'm a bitter fanboy)
Does an ARM have the guts to decode half a million pixels?
Even if it does, what does that do to the battery?
I suspect your answer lies in one of those two questions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I believe VLC was on IOS, I think it is probably is still possible to get on jailbroken devices. Basically Apple decided that GPL and apples terms and conditions are incompatible. http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/01/vlc-ios-removed-app-store
I've been using android since the 1.6 days and I've never had issues playing any movie or video right out of the box. In point of fact, it's the only thing that's impressed me about the Android OS, that is *could* play anything thrown at it.
Anyway, I like VLC on the desktop, so a fully working one on Android would only be a plus.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Yes, there is hardware acceleration, but it depends on the chipset. The Tegra 2, for example, can play back h.264 1080p24 (/p30/i60) perfectly happily, but ONLY Main Profile. Throw CABAC and weighted p/b frames at it and it'll throw a wobbler, so no High Profile.
There are several existing free apps that provide a nice browsing interface and software decoding for any codecs not supported in hardware (usually pretty slow, think 480p30 max) and hardware decoding for unsupported containers (e.g. MKV. I think MoboPlayer can even handle Ordered Chapters). I can't see VLC doing anything different other than having the traffic cone logo and a hideous interface. And probably dodgy subtitle rendering.
Most videos are 480p or 720p, hardly anything in between. So the choice was between video hardware capable of 480p and upscaling it to fit a 1024x600 screen, or video hardware capable of 720p and downscaling it to fit a 1024x600 screen. From the tests I've done, there's not much difference in appearance between 480p upscaled or 720p downscaled to fit on the NC's screen. So I think B&N made the right call. You lose the ability to play native 720p videos from camera phones, but that wasn't a feature originally intended by B&N, it was one added later by people hacking the NC to run vanilla Android.
Also, 480p may be 2/3rds the NC's native resolution. But 720p (the next step up) is 2.2x the pixels of 480p. So the next step up from the video decode hardware they used on the NC would have to have been more than twice as powerful. And anyway, the Nook Color is primarily an e-reader. B&N (rightly IMHO) put more money into a nice high-resolution screen, less into video playback on that screen. Have you also noticed its capacitive screen can only track two simultaneous touches, unlike the 6-10 for other more general purpose devices?
Not quite that GPL and Apple TOS are incompatible- otherwise Apple wouldn't permit other popular GPL-developed apps like the iOS WordPress client. VLC doesn't hold the copyright to contributed code, and one of the VLC contributors (who holds copyright to part of VLC) decided to make a stink about it for everyone. That person may have thought the GPL to be at odds with Apple TOS, but he's not the one calling the shots. As far as Apple was concerned, the complaint was that the developer publishing an iOS VLC port didn't have the rights to do so.
>"The only native app that allows you to navigate movies is the Gallery app, which is great for photos"
No, it is NOT great for photos because it doesn't understand what a directory structure is. So it flattens out all my subdirectories into just two levels, making it impossible to find anything. Sure, it might work fine for someone just using the camera and with a few directories of stuff. But for someone who wants to load their card with thousands of pictures so they can use their tablet as a nice display system- it is a mess.
Unfortunately, not a SINGLE photo display app I have tested can properly display nested subdirectories with more than 1 nest. And Gallery does the same crappy thing for videos too, it is just that I don't have tons of them, so it isn't an issue.
The screen shot has an R5 pirate copy of Toy Story featured in it.
Guess they forgot to rename the file before taking a shot. Noice.
You don't have to let the complaints bother you.
And tablets are going to replace desktop PCs/laptops? IMHO if they do we will be taking a step backwards in computing power
I'm afraid you are looking for a simple answer to a complicated question. I think the most concise answer is that they will replace many desktops and many laptops. But obviously they cannot replace computers that were being used for computationally intensive tasks, or for tasks with large storage needs, or for tasks which are ill suited to small screens or a touch interface.
I don't have a crystal ball, but my opinion is that they will take a huge chunk of growth out of the PC market (both laptops and desktops), but the PC market will remain stable.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Or contribute (iPhone VLC port) only to have your contribution buried by one of the authors on philosophical grounds, depriving users of choice.
Wrong.
VLC is GPL3. GPL3 is incompatible with the App Store due to the anti-Tivoisation provisions. On that basis, nobody has the right to publish an iOS App Store version without the consent of all contributors.
Nick
It's called a troll...
The non-troll way to say it would be "I'm so happy VLC is coming to the android, my life is complete and the sun is shining"
Contribute good code and people will thank you, crash their computer and they may have a few things to say, imagine that :)
Unless he's planning to build in hardware decoding support for H.264, VLC won't be anyone's main player because it will burn up CPU like nobody's business. It's good news for old/esoteric formats though (MPEG-1? .mod/.s3m/.xm/.it modules?), which don't need a lot of CPU to decode.
Intel's Atom and the Cortex A9 have about the same performance clock-for-clock (the A8 was a bit slower, the A9 is a bit faster). A single-core 1.6GHz Atom can, from personal experience, handle 720p h.264 content in software. Any dual-core Cortex A9 smartphone at 1GHz or above should be able to handle 720p30 h.264 video with the right codec. A dual-core A9 at higher clockspeeds (the SGS2 LTE and HD LTE are at 1.5GHz) can probably even do 1080p30 if you cut some corners (skip in-loop deblocking). Of course, there's little need for anything higher than 720p on a 4.5" display, unless you're plugging your phone into a larger display.
They're shipping some pretty sophisticated programmable GPUs in modern ARM SoCs these days, I wonder if there'd be any gains to be had by offloading some stages of the decoding pipeline in a software renderer to the GPU (in a purely shader-based fashion, since I don't think there are OpenCL interfaces for the SGX or Mali, and nVidia does't plan CUDA until the Tegra 3)?
VLC is GPL3. GPL3 is incompatible with the App Store due to the anti-Tivoisation provisions.
Regardless of that being true or not, it doesn't matter - because that is not how VLC was pulled from the app store. As stated. one of the VLC contributors had Apple pull it - Apple published it to the store just fine and it was up for a while.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, but handling it in software isn't anywhere near as efficient. And less efficient means more power consumed. Software video, particularly processor intensive video like h.264, will suck through battery like nothing else.
I'll be interested to see if it has full software rendering engine bypassing the hardware decoder. I don't see why it shouldn't, I believe that's what the desktop VLC does.
You've got that backwards, as VLC originated on general-purpose PCs without any particular hardware decoder to "bypass." VLC, relying on libraries like libavcodec implements everything it needs in C for maximum functionality on a wide range of hardware. It optionally uses tuned assembly-language routines, hardware acceleration or decoding features when they exist for specific hardware. The C implementations will be the first to work, but hardware features of specific devices that save power or enable higher quality decoding can always be exploited if someone writes the code for it. I think Android devices all implement EGL, which could be used for scaling at least.
Wrong.
VLC is GPL3. GPL3 is incompatible with the App Store due to the anti-Tivoisation provisions. On that basis, nobody has the right to publish an iOS App Store version without the consent of all contributors.
Wrong? That's so wrong it's right. Not only is VCL under GPL2, the VCL project has even spoken out against GPL3 http://www.videolan.org/press/2007-1.html because of the Tivo clause - and the VCL engine is about to move to LGPL2.1 http://www.videolan.org/press/lgpl.html to make it even more open.
Fandroids hate facts.