Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
he's referring to the section in the change log specifically titled "FOR ANIME FANS"
i laughed too when i saw it
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).
"But I use Linux!" Then you're used to video not working.
Have you ever heard of mplayer ?
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.
It's designed to play everything without ever installing any codec. End users shouldn't know what a "codec" is, they should double-click a file and see it play, which is what VLC is all about.
It think that after Mplayer, it's the first free media player getting support for it. Windows Media Player doesn't support Blu-Ray yet, for example.
Many people have. It's very easy to run into problems with codecs if you use them. There is no standard user interface to maintain them, so you have to rely on their installers to do the right thing when you install and uninstall them. Which often doesn't happen.
That's because you only used one of the few formats supported by WMP - in this case you have little to gain from VLC. But suppose your grandmother wants to see some family clips taken with somebody else's digital camera. She will double-click them and they won't play. You can either:
- ask her to dig the FOURCC identification in the video clips, ask her what OS she uses and what version, find a codec online which is good for her case, tell her to download and install it, then cross your fingers and hope it works because there is no well-defined way to debug problems if things don't go well at this point. Note that a broken codec will harm *all* media playback on her machine.
- tell her do download and install VLC and double click those videos again.
"Self contained" seems like a big downside to me. It doesn't even compete with VNC or RDP?? The name is pretty misleading as well.
You can capture your desktop and stream it to another room via IP. Or you can capture a football match from your TV card and stream it into your neighbour's house. Or you can convert a DVD into another format. It's both a generic tool for advanced users and an easy to use player for regular users.
Name one innocent person who has ACTUALLY been extradited by the US on BS chages for copyright violations.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
I'm not saying that its never going to happen, but it just hasn't happened yet, at least not in my life time.
You people just don't fucking get it.
We don't come get you and extradite you when we ACTUALLY want to get you. We just do that when we want to pretend you matter, but you really don't. See Julian Assange. When we actually want to get you, you just cease to exist one night. Its far cleaner and raises FAR fewer questions, even if a CIA agent comes out the next day and tells you he did it.
Richard O'Dwyer
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.