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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.'"
Does it finally correctly skip the video, instead of just skipping to some time near where I clicked?
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.
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!".
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...
Here's why you'd want it: you'd never need to add a codec. VLC plays videos in every codec known to man, and several known only to dolphins. That, and it's a damn good music player, *and* it supports playing videos in the framebuffer in linux.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
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
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.
DLNA is not fine and does not work fine. It is a very broken, short-sighted media streaming protocol, lacking in any modern features, and should be replaced as soon as possible.
1) First of all, it streams the whole file, not only relevant portions of the file. For files with multiple streams in them this wastes network bandwidth, especially for files with lots of such streams. This also hampers DLNA-usage on mobile devices.
2) It does not support metadata. Metadata is only available if it's inside the file that is being streamed, and even then it's up to the client to handle metadata.
3) In relation to the above, it does not handle multiple-files-per-item situations.
4) It relies on clients to understand container formats, instead of the server itself reading the container and only sending the relevant streams inside it to clients -> lots of incompatibility issues.
Etc. etc. I've written a lengthy post before about the various shortcomings of DLNA and I am hoping it'll some day in the future be replaced. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem likely.
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.