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VLC 2.0 'Twoflower' Released For Windows & Mac
Titus Andronicus writes "Years in the making, the major new release of VideoLAN's media player has better support for multicore processors, GPUs, and much, much more. From the announcement: 'Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental). Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use. Twoflower fixes several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers.'"
So terrible things will continuously happen, but at least the main characters will survive.
Gone is the two window design! Now it's got an iTunes-like single window, but with its own VLC stylings (e.g., the playback controls on the bottom). I dig!
Looks pretty good so far. Still crashes if you try to set file associations, but I've given up on that being fixed.
They have some balls adding Bluray support.
Does it finally correctly skip the video, instead of just skipping to some time near where I clicked?
Yeah. Because a simple, light-weight, video player that plays damn-near anything you throw at it without the need for additional codecs and runs on every OS that matters is specifically for neckbearded, anime-fan virgins. I can't possibly imagine anyone else ever wanting to watch videos on their computer.
Troll much?
Being on slashdot, you can't really make fun of neckbearded virgins..
he's referring to the section in the change log specifically titled "FOR ANIME FANS"
i laughed too when i saw it
It's not only Windows and Mac. It's been packaged for Chakra Linux, also.
I don't particularly care. But you seem to be quite irritated by him, so, you do what you want I suppose.
Not surprisingly, most of the work seems to have been for platforms other than Linux, but maybe the upgraded OpenGL rendering pipeline will prove of benefit when full-screening 1080p videos. My box periodically stutters a frame or two when viewing such videos on a 1600x1200 monitor, because I've only got a crufty old P4-3.8GHz CPU with 4G of fast RAM. My video card is more than capable, and I never used to see any frame loss under Windows.
Mind you, I didn't have a pile of servers running when I had this CPU chugging under XP instead of Ubuntu 10.04.1.
Alas, the odds are not in my favour that I'll see this update unless I build from source.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Literally the only reason I care about this, and the reason this is the best post today
So what is VideoLAN anyway? Seems like something to stream video, over a LAN, based on the name at least?
Doesn't DLNA pretty much obsolete that? DLNA seems to be built into all my devices (tv, xbox, squeezebox) and Windows by default now, and works just fine.
I'm confused as to what this software is for, and why I should care about it.
Morphing Software
In great anticipation I downloaded it, and it still appears not to be able to go backwards frame by frame. Is it that difficult to do? It boggles my mind that it appears not to be a priority for the developers, if I read the forums correctly. If it can skip backwards in small increments then I suppose it could do that and buffer up the frames forward -1. Oh well, nice work and congratuations on all the fixes and new features, maybe in the next release:)
In a constant bitrate stream, you can just multiply the chosen time by the bitrate, seek once to that point in the file, and start playing. In a variable bitrate stream, you can't. So you have to either A. read the whole file and construct an index of where to seek for each second, B. seek somewhere near where the user clicked, or C. seek near where the user clicked and then retry up to four times ("interpolated bisection" assuming piecewise constant bitrate) to find the exact second. The best option ends up differing for each container. In AVI, option A is best because the vast majority of files have an "index" at the end mapping keyframe times to byte offsets. VirtualDub uses option A, which is fast for AVI but slow for MPEG. Based on your description, VLC appears to use B. The Ogg project tends to use C, but Monty eventually realized that that's too slow over an Internet connection with a wireless last mile, so he relented and put an index into Ogg Skeleton (source).
It still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache".
What exactly is VLC doing when it does this?
There are a number of features largely specific to anime fansubs, e.g. heavily styled subtitles (to replace Japanese text on signs, etc) and MKV segment linking. It's not spurious. And "neckbearded virgins" is rather silly when anime as a fandom is hardly gender-specific (unlike, say, Slashdot).
If we can get by the neckbeard virgin jokes, its actually a good idea for them to specifically target anime-watching (especially the fansub community) in their notes. For years, there has been the complaint that, compared to such offerings as Media Player Classic Home Cinema, especially with lots of external filters from something like the Combined Community Codec Pack, VLC was inferior. Subtitles were not rendered as aesthetically pleasingly, image quality may have suffered, and other factors made VLC a second player choice despite its internal filters and easy accessibility.
The anime fansub community has pioneered the usage of initially arcane formats, expecting exacting quality and often utilizing features that would be an afterthought for most other media. Matroska container formats,H.264/ X264 HD video, Ogg Theora/OGM, multi-channel AAC/OGG/ audio, multiple streams of the aforementioned plus multiple softcoded subtitle options, etc.. showed up prominently in anime fansub encodes long before the general population ever saw them. Some would say their pioneering encoding even helped drive pirate rips of SD and HD content out of old-fashioned AVI containers for everything, besides being a huge boon to localization in any form as these advances helped to move from single language audio and subtitle options hardcoded (or hand-selected-and-renamed-manual-subs) to simple container formats with multiple options. Today, we're seeing many fansub release groups offering 1080p high bitrate MKV with lossless FLAC audio channels and 10-bit color pallets...even for porn!
Anime fansubs/localization has been a quiet but important force in driving online video quality from the days of grainy, option-free rips to a single high-bitrate HD file with several lossless audio channels and subtitles for 8 languages available, often using open specifications and open source codecs to do so. VLC setting the bar for these enthusiasts who really move the media forward is certainly commendable in my opinion, compared to saying "Well, if it runs content purchased off iTunes, its good enough!".
Parent has certainly too much time on his hands. Seriously? Tracking down a nickname? That is insante! I bet he is paid to do this, in fact it only proves the theory of GreatBunzini!
You'll have to buy from someone else until you grow up
rewriting history since 2109
This player supports brony-related content.
I do nit understand the lack of more hoof print support, but at east t s unicorns
they are a perfectly cromulent sub species of something.
rewriting history since 2109
Unless you understand Japanese, watching Anime requires subtitles, so good subtitle support in the player is required.
[Citation Needed]
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
I don't think you are using that term correctly. Looking it up, I found a quite informative primer on the neckbeard.
Not all Anime fans are neckbeards apparently, and not all neckbeards are virgins. A fact that was very surprising to say the least.
Who said anything about gender?
The women anime fans have neckbeards too, in my experience.
Will he sell cocaine to me? If not I do not give a fuck!
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Get a better computer. Works fine for me.
Already have it on Arch Linux.
Huge thanks to all the developers.
Not only that but also plays videos contained inside compressed archives... I heard it is useful for p0rn!
That's a bit trollish.
VLC is an odd program. When it works, it works wonderfully. Otherwise it sucks very badly. I often go back and forth between MPC and VLC.
I get frustrated by that "rebuild font cache" that just keeps happening on occasion no matter what you do. Subtitle rendering left some things to be desired.
It's just a tool like anything else. I never had the expectation that it was going to work in every single circumstance given the unbelievable variation in encoding formats and what they actually output these days.
Overall, I have never regretted installing it unlike some other programs.
Posting AC because I moderated. I've been messing with the new VLC this evening. I like the new interface. Video from the various sources that are in the canned lists plays without problems. However - when I use VLC to play a ripped DVD from my media hard drive, it stutters very, very slightly - but enough to notice.
Have tried it on a 2006 MacBook and a 2011 MacBook Pro - playing Avatar VIDEO_TS from my media drive on the LAN - comparing VLC with Apple's DVD Player, nothing else running on the test machine, nothing else asking for data on the LAN. VLC still has these tiny hesitations that break the viewing experience, while DVD Player is completely smooth.
The funny part is they could have just retitled it "FOR ANIME WAREZERS" as there are no legitimate distributions of any anime series in an MKV container or using ASS subs.
And yet as much as we at Slashdot desire to pay the people who create the works we enjoy, no high quality MKV rip has ever done so. iTunes downloads do, however.
Subspecies implies they reproduce...may God help us all...
My name's not Rui and if you read my comment history you'd probably know that i live in australia.
also, i'm not even 30 yet and i hate Java.
but go on, please continue to think that i have no life and would create multiple accounts to spam & modbomb slashdot.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
In my experience, absolutely not. Quit spreading untrue stereotypes, I mean it.
Maybe this isn't the right place to ask, but I tried VLC a while back but I remember only being able to get it to put out stereo. Any VLC experts know if this works?
I run the lastest VLC it's always the baker's children who have no bread...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
repo: http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/SuSE/ No phonon backend yet it seems
the method of reproduction is still in debate. Current theories include: asexual reproduction, fsm-mmm-donuts - which involves drool and hair, and spontaneously.
rewriting history since 2109
Have you used a MacBook Air? It's fast because you can't do shit with it.
there are no legitimate distributions of any anime series in an MKV container
Every video on YouTube is available as WebM (that is, VP8+Vorbis in a subset of MKV). Are you trying to claim there is no legitimate anime on YouTube?
And yet as much as we at Slashdot desire to pay the people who create the works we enjoy
We pay those publishers who are willing to take our money. Publishers that sit on their works and declare "no export for you" get little sympathy.
What laptop running Windows is competitive in speed, weight, and battery life with a MacBook Air and substantially cheaper?
Basically anything with an AMD E-series. The amount they are slower is more than made up for by the amount they are cheaper.
Wow! I can now skip merrily through a multi-gig MKV file at high bitrates without lag. I can jump halfway through the video and with almost no pause it begins playing with only a little pixelation. This is on Win7 so YMMV on other platforms but I can tell you that compared to even the beta I WAS running this is a giant leap forward - no pun intended. Previously it would hang and slog through the video and was just really awful to skip through big files when I wanted to just check something. Now? Zero issues, clear picture, and plenty of control. I can grab the slider and get pretty good playback too although it obviously jumps some. So far I haven't tried many other video containers or ISO etc. just this one test but for me this was a really big one - very very pleased.
Bravo to the VLC team!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
VLC 2.0? That's nice. I'll keep using my even lighter weight video player that plays even more "darn near everything" than VLC.
Even the built-in filters for MPC-HC are very good, but extending it with Haali's Splitter and ffdshow or CoreAVC results in even better performance.
"But I use Linux!" Then you're used to video not working.
Have you ever heard of mplayer ?
Or what? Are you going to punch your real doll and cry to sleep like a true manchild?
Ah, slashdot.. where neckbeards make light fun of other neckbeards. The only place where a nerd can go to make fun of other nerds without taking it seriously.
Sure, I feel the urge to download this right now but I know I'll be downloading 2.0.1 tomorrow and then 2.0.2 the day after that so I might as well wait until all the "oops" releases get taken care of.
does anybody want a peanut?
Or all the old linux guys have moved over to Macs for their personal computers...
I can't imagine how you have VLC set incorrectly so that it "washes out" color - a default install will reproduce video per-file. I can see no difference between a default install of MPC and a default install of VLC in terms of color.
It sounds like they're using different overlay/buffers and on your system your video has separate settings for each - this is especially common on ATI video cards. It will detect overlay video as "video" and apply its video "enchancements", but then not detect the video for any program which does its own rendering and - naturally, not apply any "enchancements". The same is possible on nVidia, however as a difference, nVidia drivers default to no video enhancement, unlike ATI.
Almost all media programs try to steal all file associations on install. You can simply tell it you don't want to, easy enough. However, this is the norm. Nothing special going on here.
HOWEVER, to answer your question - yes, it seems there are many improvements in VLC, and in my limited testing it's much better at handling very large, very high resolution video with no lag or banding which sometimes appeared in 1.x.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
This is a sales opportunity: Everyone in the world now has a free high quality playback system.
And you are forgetting fair use.
And you use a tautology: by definition a "rip" is not intended to pay someone. Commercial distribution via MKV format is not ruled out.
I am not so knowledgeable about the details of every format, however if MKV will make it easy to distribute multiple languages at high resolution and play back beautifully in a free player why shouldn't we all shift to it? Except Apple with their walled garden of course.
I'm not used to buying DVDs I'm not allowed to rip on my own machine anyway.
And I don't even know what ASS subs are, maybe you can explain this from your superior experience with porn and anime?
I'm excited that this open source project instead of sliding into disuse, has continued to grow so amazingly.
I use VLC for all video including things my European director sends me.
New UI, formats and power on new machines are wonderful since I recommended he buy a Mac as well, and didn't like the UI before.
Open source is my first stop when trying to decipher some wierd format. I did have trouble I think reading a DVD from a strange Japanese consumer player that was recording a soccer match my client had arranged.
If it hands down is the most technically capable software then I am even more delighted.
Historically, as you know adult video was what drove early adoption of VHS at least that is what I have read.
I would much prefer say anime over porn to be the driver of the next generation because it reaches a younger audience and I suppose the high quality artwork would require even more attention to technical superiority in a player.
Also I don't know about now but fansubs used to say to stop distributing if they are published in the user's country. However I recently was delighted to discover French anime (Valerian et Laureline) not available in my own country and though it was not as high quality as VLC is capable of playing, I don't see how I could have found out about it, let alone obtaining it, except through the Internet.
Clearly if someone offered HD distribution of these things through iTunes or some other easy to purchase and find shop the authors would enjoy much more income considering how it is next to impossible to find old foreign TV series in your local video store.
In conclusion, if anime fans were not so prevalent VLC would not be so advanced.
They are probably driving advancement more than porn since the objective is not to get off but to enjoy beautiful artwork and music.
Your claim that no MKV file has ever repaid an author is undoubtedly false.
And the idea that there is not a commercial solution based on the new superiority of VLC is silly since it just was announced today. Personally I would recommend to a director distribution of unencumbered media at a few resolutions with playback via VLC. And it seems likely that distributing via bittorrent would be a very inexpensive solution.
It also seems that distributing older episodes of a series is a good way to attract customers and reviewers, if you have to compare to spending tons of money on advertising the way the MAFIAA does.
"Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos."
VPs at Intel are thrilled, this will really help them at CES next year.
OpenGL isn't what you want. I don't believe it's possible to achieve a solid framerate without hardware decoding in the video card hardware support (vdpau in mplayer). Without that, sure, your CPU might only be 20% loaded. But some frames take much more decoding that others, and occasionally one won't be done decoding before it's time to show it, creating a stutter. I know some people will swear otherwise, but I think they just haven't really looked for it.
You assume/oresume that kids have the $$$ to buy cocaine? Your reality distortion-field is clearly superior to any that has made its way to my poor neck of the woods.
Aka, for the neckbearded virgins.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
Looking for a new coke dealer, kiddo?
MPC-HC isn't actually a full featured media player. It is just a wrapper for DirectShow and Windows Media Foundation, Windows' own highly competent video interfaces. It doesn't actually handle any of the demuxing or decoding itself, it uses the relevant system filters.
Now this is useful in that anything you've taught Windows to play, it can play. It doesn't have to specifically support it. This also makes it lighter weight, since it doesn't have to have any of that kind of thing with it.
The disadvantage is that if the system doesn't have the codec, it can't handle it. Or if the system codec is problematic or the like it'll have problems.
VLC is an all-in-one package. It does all its decoding internally. The only thing it relies on the OS for is things like providing a video rendering interface. So while you can't just feed it new codecs, it doesn't need anything to be on the system. It is self contained.
I keep it around mostly for problematic files. Some of the pro software I install replaces things like the default MPEG decoders with new ones. These new ones do not tolerate MPEG files not to spec. Makes sense, they are for production and you want to make sure it is done right. However sometimes there's an old video that is encoded wrong, but I want to watch it. VLC can handle that, it is pretty robust at playback.
It isn't the be-all, end-all of media players, but it has its place.
...of NOT using VLC. Whenever anyone complains about video playback problems, the first question is "what video player are you using?" Once they say "VLC" the response is "don't use VLC, use Media Player Classic Home Cinema," and they do, and everything works.
That's odd, I've never had video playback issues with VLC.
("But I use Linux!" Then you're used to video not working.
And yet again, when I used Linux I never had video playback issues there either.
Installing... Oh, nice it tries to steal file associations for all video/audio files when you install it.
Yes, that's something many people prefer when they install VLC. Including me.
Let's just drag a video onto it and start playing and ... no? No drag and drop support? Seriously?
Each to their own, I sure don't find it difficult to doubleclick a file, though.
Huh. The colors all washed out.
You've got a messed-up system, there. Or you're lying, I don't know which. Never seen VLC produce washed-out colors on any system I've used, built or seen.
Anyone want to help me figure out why it doesn't work
No, people generally don't wish to help trolls.
Not very convincing Rui. I think we all know that you have no life and you love Java. Going to pubs wearing Java shirts and corrupting Slashdot are your favourite pastimes.
The real question is... does he sell little children for cocaine?
I'd drag and drop this troll post out of the comment thread, but the new version of VLC doesn't let me do that either.
Ah ha, you learn something new every day! Thanks!
In case someone wants further(possibly incorrect information): Strawman Argument
Have there been any improvements to the conversion and streaming part or are the combinations of codecs and muxers still as limited to be useless?
Maybe they should spin that part off...
Subtitle support was already great back in $a_date_long_ago_in_computer_years. Dunno what 2.0 improves on, fluff support was already pretty good, probably it's about doing that on soft subs.
Anyway, the thing with anime fansub subtitles is that they go beyond normal subtitling, adding karaoke with characters(and images) glowing, fading, changing colors and jumping around the screen; typesetting floating objects translations right into a precise place in a timed frame, along resizing, translating and rotating that object if the background image requires it.
It usually isn't that bad, but then Akiyuki Shinbo happens.
No that was spot on accurate. A lot of features don't work or won't work right. They parent is probably talking about windows. I've never seen cut and paste or drag and drop work on Linux across a dozen distros.
VLC can hard crash X at times but then so do some other programs.
I like VLC but I have to accept it will not work or work poorly at times. Since they IMAO screwed the UI by defeaturing it I'll see if it's a wretched as it looks when I can get it.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Everything you said, I've never seen or had happen. Yes it will change your file associations but you have the option to uncheck it during the install.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Whoa whoa whoa, has anyone tried it? I'm on Windows 7
I just tried drag-and-dropping a video file into it, and they seem to have removed the feature!
Is this just me or has everyone seen that too?
Careful of the windows installer (.exe version)
Just tried to install it on Windows 7 x64 Ultimate and I got the following error:
Unable to elevate, error 1814
I believe this to be related to the fact that I turned off the win7 feature to ask for permission but I cannot confirm that it just sounds like based on the error message
Zip version worked fine though!
Good luck!
So any news if the licensing has changed and if they will release for iOS. Still have the old version and it works great.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seems to work fine otherwise.
That's the stupidest thing I'veh eard this month.
It happens when you try to play certain WMV / ASF files that were encoded in 2004.
Getting wet after midnight? ;p
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
Oh dear... is it so hard to get font rendering right? Look at MPC-HC code please, and learn something.
That's the biggest pile of junk that ever polluted my hard drive. Into the trashcan you go!
vlc works *better* on windows than on linux. drag and drop has never been a problem, it plays any damn format you throw at it. it can even capture network streams and encode them into whatever you want. it repairs partially broken avis. it does not care if your file has chunks missing. the ui is the simplest you can get without removing any essential features. it can use your bluetooth earphones to play/pause/next.
once (in ye olde vista days) my fucking graphics driver crashed while watching a movie in vlc. it switched to s/w rendering on the fly, while aero went to fallback mode in the background, error notification appears saying 'your graphics has crashed'. after 30-40 seconds the drive gets restarted, aero comes back and vlc switches back to h/w rendering. all this without any interruption in the playback. i think that is amazing. i dunno why you guys think it crashes hard.
on linux, sometimes right click menu is a bit buggy while in fullscreen.
on windows vlc is the nearest you can get to the ideal video player.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Yeah. Because a simple, light-weight, video player that plays damn-near anything you throw at it without the need for additional codecs and runs on every OS that matters is specifically for neckbearded, anime-fan virgins. I can't possibly imagine anyone else ever wanting to watch videos on their computer.
Troll much?
Aside from what #39089895 said, it makes sense. The anime community has been one of the most strict communities whenever video & audio quality/codecs we're talking about. It wont be long till they start thinking of deprecating x264 8bit encoding in order to move towards x264 10bit which VLC didn't support after a couple of months ago... or did support it but POORLY. They also recommended every single person to not use VLC for that same reason, which only makes sense from part of VLC developers to try and gain their trust (which I doubt will happen considering http://www.cccp-project.net/ ) again.
They should have taken advantage of the chance to change that horrendous cone icon. I love VLC, but sometimes I install other alternatives just to get rid of that ugly icon that gives the idea that there is something broken in the files (yes, I know it can be changed, but I'm too lazy to fiddle with that and it's so 90s to mess around with icon configuration).
Do mules count as a subspecies of horse/donkey?
Or all the old Linux guys care less about consuming content than making something.
I do find Linux a little stunted in the multimedia department - the texture tearing on at least one monitor when using a composite desktop is mildly annoying when using standard applications, but unacceptable when watching video. I'm hoping that Wayland will improve this, but holding my breath for it to arrive would be foolish.
Sounds like a problem in your particular setup. I have used VLC in 5 different Ubuntu machines and it worked great in all of them.
I find Linux to be the best solution when you have a good graphics adapter and driver combination, then you can use software with more control to access your media collection. Mine is just Intel HD3000 but works very well with Kubuntu Oneiric.
No avisynth & ffdshow support in VLC yet. I used to watch videos with Smooth Video Project on,
adding interpolations to make it look, you know, smoother. It needs avisynth (which can be triggered
through ffdshow), which VLC does not support.
I think VLC really can have some sort of SVP support, this is why Media Player Classic is still
better for me.
I've just installed VLC 2.0 on my Ubuntu 11.10
Here's the PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/stable-daily
The nice thing about VLC on Windows is that it can be a least common denominator.
I want to give a friend a video to watch. I don't have to research what codecs and container formats it was using, and what my friend has installed on the computer. I just add the VLC installer on the disc and tell him to use that if their default player doesn't handle the video.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
And yet as much as we at Slashdot desire to pay the people who create the works we enjoy, no high quality MKV rip has ever done so. iTunes downloads do, however.
You say that! But I raise you to to "a mere monopoly on intellectual property is insufficient, we ought to all be paying for it mandatorily by taxes and fees whenever we see a work of art displayed, no matter whether requested or not"? Clearly, it is the only option in which we cannot ever watch any art again for free sufficiently and fairly compensate an artist. Right now there's the loop hole that you can watch a DVD from a friend you haven't paid your proper part of... think of the horror if that DVD goes to 100 people rather than 1.5 on average, as the currnent model assumes, the artists and publishers will starve despite everyone loving them!
Back in reality however, even if people can entirely voluntarily fund artists, they actually do. Anime fans do clearly fund that industry, buying merchandising and DVD and CD and what not, and foreign fans do the same. Not having any persecution of non-commercial copyright infringement at all works out just fine. It is de facto how things work in societies all over the world. Most of which either do not invest any effort into enforcing intellectual property laws, or don't have such laws at all, or -perhaps most prevalently- have it set up so the cost of litigation over non-commercial redistribution will not exceed damages awarded and the punitory part of a ruling is going to be very small, matching how very little damage this kind of crime causes...
I don't watch any anime, but the picture quality in VLC v2.0 has improved quite a bit over v1.1. VLC is still not offloading as many things as I might like to my graphics processor *(HD 6870), but its CPU utilization is not high on my Core i5 based system. I forgot which settings I used before to make some content end up forced to decode on the graphics card; I went ahead & axed the old settings in case they would break things in the new version.
The big positives I noticed right away: The technique VLC uses for dealing with interlaced content improved in terms of output quality in v2.0. I still don't have a solution for the 24 frames issue that causes some HD to stutter a bit, but I imagine that has to do more with how things are encoded than the player.
I've only played around with a few videos with it so far, but I do like the improvements that I can see. I also like the improvements that I can hear!
Its nice when a new version is actually an improvement, and not just more pure bloat that gives the same level of performance at many times the original install size.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
I know that nobody will ever read this, because it's Score:0 and burried somewhere on the bottom of the thread, but I just want to write that /. has refused to mention Linux so many times recently, it's almost as if they've become anti-Linux.
Another fine example is the headline here, where it says "Double Fine Adventure Will Be Available DRM Free For IOS, Android". /. do, they says "For IOS, Android".
In that update video, Tim specifically starts out saying: "The platforms so far are: PC, Mac... AND Linux."
He even says it like that. And what does
Everything to get more fanbois to their website and make money.
Seriously, there used to be a time that /. and its editors cared about GNU/Linux; that time is LONG gone.
Very disappointing.
Man this is going to blow your world... but kids who don't come from poor families regularly get money from their parents.
The last time I tried mplayer it ate 100% cpu on a file that even Windows Media Player happily played without blinking.
VLC works very well on Linux.
Or smplayer for that matter. IMHO the best GUI frontend to mplayer. I prefer it over VLC. It works on windows too.
"I use Linux!" Then you're used to video not working."
I use Linux as my primary OS and in the last 5 or 6 years I haven't had any problems playing videos in Linux other than Netflix (MS DRM) and Blu-ray (which I can now play). Although I rarely use Windows (moslly just support it) I have had more problems playing media in Windows than Linux.
I never use drag'n'drop for VLC but I just tried it in KDE Linux Mint 12 and it works fine.
hmm, no.
For me, it's jumpy when set to GPU decoding for 1080 content. CPU is smooth as always but about 10%-20% higher CPU usage. 3.4 GHz AMD quad core and GeForceGTX 460.
Also, still can't select the s-video input from my ATI tuner/capture card.
A quick browse through the interface and preferences show only one place you can specify a font (for the subtitles).
But what happens when a subtitle uses a foreign character for which your preferred subtitle font has no glyph? Do you want a bunch of boxes, or do you want the glyph from the most similar font you have installed? A font cache helps satisfy the latter approach.
you two are obsessed with each other. why don't you two just go get a room already.
I've recently upgraded to 720p and 1080p videos mostly, and have found that smplayer has weird lag spikes that I don't get with VLC. So I've had to move away from smplayer on windows for higher def content in favor of VLC.
As long as the average frame decodes fast enough, the occasional difficult frame can be handled by buffering the raw output. The drawback is that the buffer may be impractically large or add an annoying amount of latency.
The damn thing starts instantly now - used to be it took several seconds to start up. Now, I've not even released my mouse button from the second click before it's up.
That is some fine startup tweaking.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
A fellow slashdotter directed my attention to this post. This sort of persecution made by these people has started a couple of weeks ago, when I read this post and this post and this post outing the bonch and overly critical guy accounts as accounts used to astroturf slashdot by posting the same marketing drivel, copied almost verbatim from the same PR script.
Then, after stumbling on a post where the bonch account was being used to post messages trying to discredit the astroturfing going on in slashdot here, I've posted this message in reply to bonch, outing that account as being one of a set of shill accounts employed to astroturf discussions here on slashdot.
Due to this, I started to receive personal attacks from anonymous posts. I've posted this message, and a couple of followups such as this reply.
As further retaliation, I had all the posts listed in my comments section suddenly modded as -1 troll, and a wave of messages posted anonymously with conspiracy theories and attacking me personally, such as this one, started to be posted in multiple discussions. This particular version has been repeatedly posted, often in the same discussion and as the first post, as can be seen here
So, thank the people behind accounts such as bonch, Overly Critical Guy, TechGuys and others for this spam and astroturfing campaign. It appears that their astroturfing operation isn't working smoothly anymore, as bonch complains here. So, to stave off some of the flak they have been receiving, they now waste their time with online stalking, personal attacks and creating absurd conspiracies regarding people who posted messages outing them as corporate shills. They quite often throw accusations like this through anonymous posts. For example, after MrHanky pointed bonch as a shill, the overly critical guy and SharkLaser accounts start attacking the user who outed bonch, and start to throw the shill and conspiracy accusations with the followups to this thread. In this post the Overly Critical Guy account is used to post the exact same accusations, but as they precede the post where I out these shill accounts, they only mention users such as Galestar, NicknameOne and flurp.
So, keep up with your conspiracies to try to save your ass. And while you keep blabbering how posts outing the people behind shill accounts, such as bonch, overly critical guy, sharklaser, jo_ham, and others, are posted by conspiracy theory loons, maybe you can spend a minute arguing why those affected by these shill outings actually take the time to compile and publish all this personal information on a single user who happened to post a message reiterating their outing.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
So does that mean MKVs play correctly now? They've been effed up since 1.0.x. I have been using 0.9.x through that entire branch.
Umm... dude, that's not her neck.
You really should get out more.
I can see the fnords!
Tools -> Preferences -> Show settings (bottom left) -> Switch to 'All' view.
Then
Video (click to expand) -> Subtitles/OSD -> Text Rendering mode -> Choose [Dummy font Renderer]
Click [Save]
You won't be bothered by 'building the font cache' after that.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
If you followed the advice of your sig you'd have your answer.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
We're on to you. There will no more hiding from us. We will be heard.
I upgraded to 2.0.0 on my old PowerPC G4 iMac, which I like to use as a movie player "for the design". Warning for that! No sound, red stripes all over the frame... The upside is that it's really easy to downgrade, just move the old app bundle back from the trash can to the applications folder.
The women anime fans have neckbeards too, in my experience.
Depends what's needed for the cosplay.
FWIW, a lot of them shave their pubes. Possibly inspired by hentai.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Do mules count as a subspecies of horse/donkey?
Tricky question. A molly mule (female whose sire is a donkey and dam is a horse) can be impregnated by a stallion on occasion, but give birth to horses in that case. On the other hand, there are a couple of documented cases of a hinny mare (sire is horse, dam is donkey) giving birth to a novel hybrid when impregnated by a jack donkey.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
"it plays any damn format you throw at it"
It doesn't play certain .mov files. It just gives a green screen.
Yes and VLC is very windows centric.
A lot of my complaints should have been directed at the long term problem of drag and drop and cut and paste across several Linux distributions. I've not tested them all so YMMV. Fedora 14, Ubuntu before gnume3 and the current Mint Live CD fail at cut and paste, drag and drop is incomplete.
I should have specified my experience is the 64bit version of VLC for Fedora core 14. I now recall dimly that 32bit did better except for the same crashes due to corrupt videos and UI issues.
I shall give the new version VLC a try.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
What laptop running Windows is competitive in speed, weight, and battery life with a MacBook Air and substantially cheaper?
--
...which synonym for the subject?
If you followed the advice of your sig you'd have your answer.
The point of my sig is that not all web pages use the same term to refer to a given concept, which makes it more difficult to search for web pages that mention the concept. For example, "less expensive" won't match "lower price" or "cheaper". Which Google query would turn up relevant results?
The last time I tried mplayer it ate 100% cpu on a file that even Windows Media Player happily played without blinking.
So, you failed to offload decode from your CPU. Try harder next time?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There's absolutely no truth to that. Several years ago, you couldn't get CPUs fast enough that they could decode high-bitrate highdef H.264 video, but it's been a long time since that was the case. Even low-end CPUs have enough power these days.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It is very 2011.
Carry on.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Or all the old Linux guys care less about consuming content than making something.
That's not the cause of poor multimedia support in Linux, it's an effect.
The cause is driver support, which is due to lack of documented interfaces.
What laptop running Windows is competitive in speed, weight, and battery life with a MacBook Air and substantially cheaper?
Basically anything with an AMD E-series. The amount they are slower is more than made up for by the amount they are cheaper.
Given how underpowered a Macbook Air is, an AMD E-Series will run rings around it.
I bought an Asus U36SD for US$800 put a 128 SSD in there for US$170, I'm still up on buying an entry level Macbook and have the performance of an i5 with a 10 hour battery life (Doubly so with the AUD fetching US$1.07 at the time of purchase).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Without the fan releases you get things like a animated movie taking a over a decade to be shown in a cinema near you only to have the only two sessions sell out within an hour of the tickets going on sale.
The illigitimate distribution has led to more commercial releases as it becomes clear there are enough fans in unexpected areas, and thus the people who create the works we enjoy get the benefit of potentially getting paid more.
Of course there are extremes but it doesn't look like a few fansubs are hurting much. After all, many of those anime fans that look like they "will never amount to anything" will "aquire the blue-ray" (to quote a penguin drum advertisment). Even the local boring conservative electronics outlet in the boring suburban shopping centre near where I work has a few shelves of anime these days.
never come across .mov in years of downloading all sorts of stuff.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
So that's why they decided to put up only a Windows and a Mac version? For Linux, there's just a "go bother someone else" text. Which is probably short for "no, we're not going to make it work, we'll let the Ubuntu guys handle that". And I'm sure that would work if I wanted to switch to Ubuntu. I don't.
Linux is the main developpement platform for vlc, yet there have been changes after linux tag of 2.0 especially on mkv with multithread decoding (which used to cause frame dropping so stutters on HD files). You can either get an up-to-date version from sources or the ppa servers.
perhaps it is my version of windows vista, but I have tried to download the newer version of videolan and all I get is one of two things: it take way to long to download and when it does it says harmful to computer please delete. is there something I am doing wrong or does it not work for W/vista?
Does it work better on porn?
In case you want to try other options:
https://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-windows-media-player-replacement.htm
It usually isn't that bad, but then Akiyuki Shinbo happens.
For those who didn't get the reference, Shinbo is a notable Shaft (an anime studio) director. Most of his works involve rather abstract imagery and sometimes flashing walls of text on screen for under a second. ASS subs are so capable that they can be used to add a subtitle overlay that matches the original video sufficiently well to be indistinguishable in most scenarios.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.