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.'"

Comments

Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Maciel

[Anonymous Coward]

GreatBunzinni, real name Rui Maciel, has been regularly accusing almost 20 accounts of being employed by a PR firm to astroturf Slashdot, via anonymous comments without any evidence. Using multiple puppet accounts, he mods up these anonymous posts while modding down the target accounts in order to censor their viewpoints off of Slashdot. GreatBunzinni accidentally outed himself as the anonymous troll who has been posting his baseless accusations to every Slashdot story. For example, he wrote the same post almost verbatim, first using his logged-in account followed by an anonymous post days later. Note the use of the same script and wording.

It turns out GreatBunzinni is actually a 31-year-old C++/Java programmer from Almada, Portugal named Rui Maciel, with a civil engineering degree from Instituto Superior Técnico and a hobby working with electronics. He runs Kubuntu and is active on the KDE mailing list. Rui Maciel has accounts at OSNews, Launchpad, ProgrammersHeaven, the Ubuntu forums, and of course Slashdot. While trolling Slashdot, he listens rock music like Motorhead, Fu Manchu, and Iron Maiden, but lately he's been on a big Jimi Hendrix kick, with some Bootsy Collins on the side (as you might have guessed, he has a Last.fm account). He's also a fan of strategy games like Vega Strike and Transport Tycoon.

Most of the users Rui targets have done nothing more than commit the sin of praising competitors to Google or other Linux-based products at some point in the past. Some of them are subscribers who often get the first post, since subscribers see stories earlier than non-subscribers. When one of Rui's accusations is posted as a reply, the original post suddenly and mysteriously receives a surge of "Troll" and "Overrated" moderations from his puppet accounts, while the accusing post gets modded up, despite presenting zero evidence. Often, additional anonymous posters suddenly pop up to give support, which also receive upmods. At the same time, accused users who defend themselves are modded down as "Offtopic."

Rui Maciel's contact information
Email: greatbunzinni@gmail.com or rui.maciel@gmail.com
IM: greatbunzinni@jabber.org (the same Jabber account currently listed on his Slashdot account)
Blog: http://rui_maciel.users.sourceforge.net/
Programming projects: http://www.programmersheaven.com/user/GreatBunzinni/contributions

Known puppet accounts used by Rui Maciel
Galestar
NicknameOne
Nicknamename
Toonol
flurp
chrb
psiclops
anonymov
forkfail

tl;dr: An Ubuntu user named Rui Maciel is actively trolling Slashdot with multiple moderator accounts in an attempt to filter dissenting opinions off the site.

Twoflower eh

[Anonymous Coward]

So terrible things will continuously happen, but at least the main characters will survive.

Re:Twoflower eh

[itsdapead]

Does this mean that is supports Quadroscopic Anaglyph mode? After all, if you have four eyes, Stereoscopic is never going to be enough...

Do VLC now provide inn-sewer-ants against patent infringements?

Re:Twoflower eh

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's too complicated reflected sound as of underground spirits.

Re:Twoflower eh

[Errol backfiring]

Yes. Just feed me and I fart in their general direction.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;don't care anyway

Mac interface VASTLY improved

[bonch]

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!

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Nerdfest]

I hardly think iTunes was the first video player to have a single window, and it's probably not the best example of one.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[readandburn]

I hardly think iTunes was the first video player to have a single window, and it's probably not the best example of one.

It is, however, what most Mac users are familiar with so it makes a good comparison.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[bonch]

What the? Where did I say iTunes was the first video player to have a single window? I mentioned iTunes because the Mac version now has a shaded source list on the left filled with media sources, like iTunes.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Kenja]

Old Mac interface. I push play on the Apple Remote(tm) and it plays. New interface seems unchanged from my perspective.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, Apple-haters are so defensive that they invent reasons to get pissed off. He didn't say iTunes was the "first video player to have a single window."

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Kenja]

Actually, I must interject that the old interface had only a single window for me because I didn't want to use the media library. Now I have no choice. Cant turn it off, cant remove or change the internet sites they opt to list. So to me the new interface is a major downgrade. I just want a media player, not a media management system.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

I hardly think iTunes was the first video player to have a single window, and it's probably not the best example of one.

To me, it looks like the old version, except the icons look slightly different. What is this two window interface people are talking about? Did it used to look like Gimp or something??

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

But still no h.264 hardware support (http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/3558) on Macs. *sigh*

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

In the (no so distant) future, will free software like VLC be available for (what is now "Mac", but will just be "OS")?

I have heard plans that everything will have to go thru the app store... will freeware projects be able to afford the "Tax"?

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[segin]

I've been told by someone that newer GPUs and systems have zero practical use of hardware-accelerated h.264, as the CPU is insanely fast enough to do it just fine without acceleration. Not that I believe it, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone used this excuse to downplay the lack of hardware-accelerated h.264 decoding.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[jo_ham]

Ah, a classic example of putting words into someone else's mouth and then bashing them for what they supposedly said.

He didn't make any such claim, just that it had a single window interface. Does he really need to add disclaimers that he knows that Apple did not invent the single window video player interface?

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

On the windows version, you can hide the playlist+media library by clicking the playlist icon on the bottom center of the window. Does the mac version not work the same way?

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[jo_ham]

There is no "tax", and the new system being introduced in 10.8 merely adds a layer of UAC-style authentication to apps not from the App Store or identified developers (and any developer can get a digital cert from Apple for free, with no vetting process). The large majority of developers who make Mac software but don;t sell via the App Store will see no functional change to their apps on 10.8 from the user perspective, since they'll all be signed already.

If a developer doesn't get a digital certificate then the OS merely asks the user whether they'd like to add the app to their whitelist the first time it is run, but then never again after that. Other than the first request, the OS won't block the app at all.

Or, you could just turn the whole thing off in the preferences and it will never query you about any app from any source.

So no, you haven't heard plans that "everything will have to go thru the app store" - you've heard that 10.8 has a new feature that adds an extra (optional) step when you launch non-signed apps for the first time.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

The hardware accelerated cannot do H.264 Hi10. H.265 is coming soon, so a fast CPU will be needed until they put in new hardware accelerators.
H.265: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4236063/Next-gen-video-codec-hits-milestone

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Majik Sheff]

for future reference, the shorthand term for this is called a "strawman argument"

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[BitZtream]

My computer has a processor designed to do h.264 decoding specifically with very lower power cost and leaving my CPU almost completely unused.

I don't particularly care whats coming in the future or that my CPU is plenty fast enough to do it. A Hummer is plenty capable of driving to work every day, but it still be pretty inefficient for anyone to do when you have a much more efficient car for driving to work, leaving the hummer free to do heavy lifting.

My built in decoder causes my CPU to use a percent or two ... everyone elses runs 30%+ on a good day, god knows flash's crap eats all the CPU it can, though 10.1 seems to be down near the 30-40% range as well. 30% may not be a lot for you, but I use a lot of CPU time throughout the day, I notice 30% being used, not only in performance, but in battery life when I'm out and about.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[tlhIngan]

In the (no so distant) future, will free software like VLC be available for (what is now "Mac", but will just be "OS")?

I have heard plans that everything will have to go thru the app store... will freeware projects be able to afford the "Tax"?

Incorrect.

Mountain Lion has 3 security modes. There's "App Store Signed" (Signed by Apple and vetted). The default I believe is "App Store and Verified Developer" (Apple vets App Store, but anyone with a credit card can purchase a Verified Developer certificate that Apple will not vet your apps for). The final mode is "All Apps" which is the way things are now - allowing apps that aren't signed in as well.

And yes, "App Store and Verified Developer" IS the default. Microsoft, Adobe and others have not shown interest in the Mac App Store. Other companies like AutoDesk want to use the Mac App Store (AutoCAD LE is up there) but the problem is the $1000 limit - they even mentioned Mac App Store is cheaper. So major commercial apps mean the default cannot be App Store only.

No word on how expensive the code-signing certificates are (I know Windows ones are $250), but all they do is say "For now, all apps signed with this certificate are trusted". They can be revoked if a malware developer signs malware with it. All Apple cares about is getting a real billing address they can point to and say "WTF are you doing?". Basically it de-anonymizes developers. Apple will NOT vet apps in this program (they can't - they give you the certificate, and you can sign anything and everything you want).

For other open-source apps, I presume it's on a case-by-case basis. The big ones that people use probably will buy a cert and keep it carefully guarded. The little ones just mean you have to disable it completely if you want to use them.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[retchdog]

you must have never used the playlist. it used to be a separate window, which was annoying. now it comes up over the video if you click the icon (bottom left) or press shift-cmd-p.

unfortunately it doesn't get keyboard focus automatically. i hope they fix that. it's almost there.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[retchdog]

it's basically the same except the icon is a bit to the left. i really don't know what Kenja is talking about.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh...excuse me, when did it NOT have a single windows interface? At least on Windows going back as far as I can remember the thing it was a standard single windows with the file/edit/view style layout on top. Now if you want a "fancier" VLC you can always use Kantaris which is based on VLC and has more of a "One UI to rule them all" kinda thing going but I don't think I ever saw VLC with a Gimp style MDI.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[hairyfeet]

Depends on the machine don't it? I know that on my netbook I get about 30% better battery life by using a hardware accelerated player (I usually use MPC:HC with DXVA, I'll have to see how the new VLC fares) over just letting the CPU do it. Sure modern CPUs are crazy fast but being more generalized use more power to do the job than simply using GPU shaders, at least IME and with nearly everyone being mobile I'm sure many would agree that more battery life is always a good thing on your portable.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember everyone... despite the 1:1 correlation between stories bonch posts in and stories where ACs attack GreatBunzini, there is no merit whatsoever to the claims that bonch & co. are paid trolls. Pay no attention to the obvious fact that such as AC post directly procedes bonch's worthless "whore for karma" observation.

And for God's sake, please don't let bonch post at anything above -1 to start. Mod down everything he posts on sight.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[perryizgr8]

^^this.
i hope they haven't fucked up the windows version. i don't care about macs.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[perryizgr8]

hardware acceleration of h264 uses vastly lesser amount of battery on my win7 laptop. i imagine that might be a good reason for some people.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[RobbieThe1st]

See other poster's comments: It's the playlist which showed up in a different window(which, indeed, in the older version I have, it does show up in a pop-up window).

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[mehrotra.akash]

What happens IF a vetted app is discovered leaking private data, and it leads to some bad consequesnce?
Is Apple liable for damages in that case?
Essentially, can one blindly trust and install vetted apps?

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Apple are very open that all you need is to be an Apple-registered developer and you get a signature. There's no vetting going on. Indeed, in the post you're replying to, "Apple will NOT vet apps in this program (they can't - they give you the certificate, and you can sign anything and everything you want)." And besides anything else, this whole subject is well off-topic.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[wootest]

And yes, "App Store and Verified Developer" IS the default.

When I formatted a USB drive and did a clean install, the default was the "everything" option. Maybe this will be changed later, but it's not the default now.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

Just FYI, the video decoding is not done using shaders. The GPUs have dedicated hardware for that.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

They have improved the Mac version. I don't care about Windows.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[TheRaven64]

Apps in the App Store run in sandboxed mode. This means that they can't access the filesystem, other than files selected in the file chooser (which runs in a separate process and passes in file descriptor rights). The Mac Keychain means that each password has its own ACL and you must explicitly grant an application the right to each password it accesses. For an application to leak a serious amount of data, it must compromise the sandbox - not impossible (there have been holes found in it in the past) but a lot harder than just sneaking some malicious code into the app...

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[trptrp]

I agree. Not being able to disable the library bar made me immediately downgrade back to 1.12. It's annoying that it can't behave in various ways. I'm using VLC as a quick and simple player, now they're offering me just their idea of how it should be used.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[siride]

What are you talking about? On Windows, at least, there's no "library bar". You can show and hide the playlist/library with a button at the bottom (by default it seems to be hidden). In other words, it looks the same as before.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[rishistar]

I hope they haven't taken away the option to have the playlist in a separate window. I do performances of nerdy songs about science where I have backing video and music being played on VLC player. The video goes through the projector and the playlist is on my Windows laptop screen. It would be an annoyance if that modus operandi had been taken away for me.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Ihmhi]

Welp, until someone mods it out, you can get an older version at this page. OldVersion rocks for when companies fuck up their own product (see: Winamp after the AOL buyout).

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Threni]

Exactly. The last thing I want is another Unity.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

Upgrading to the new version is OPTIONAL, you know.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[trptrp]

here's a screenshot, the lower VLC 2 window is at minimum size already http://i.imgur.com/1wEyJ.png

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[siride]

Eww, that's awful that they did that on the Mac. It looks normal on Windows and Linux. Supposedly there is a hide playlist button somewhere. Maybe you can try a different interface skin?

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

The GIMP is the very antithesis of MDI, actually. It is very much SDI, where each (normal, not tool) window is 1 document. MDI is where each document is in a window constrained to the application's single parent window.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[retchdog]

yeah, unless it autodetects multiple displays (which it ought to, like keynote does, but i doubt it), i think you're fucked. keep the old installer around.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[makomk]

According to Apple's official page about Gatekeeper you have to be part of their $99/year Mac Developer Program in order to get a code signing certificate. I think they've been rather misleadingly describing it to the press as free to members of the MDP, and some of them have dropped the qualifier.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you dig. You are a shill who is paid to spread Steve Job's distortion field on slashdot. Why would you NOT like your paycheck?

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[tlhIngan]

When I formatted a USB drive and did a clean install, the default was the "everything" option. Maybe this will be changed later, but it's not the default now.

Considering that NOTHING is signed with Verified Developer, "App Store Only" wouldn't give you much.

Right now, if it was "App Store Only", you couldn't run Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop (CS something or other), or a bunch of other freeware utilities you have right now not obtained through the Mac App Store.

The default will change once Mountain Lion is released. Developer Previews are nowhere near final and are used to get developers to start tweaking their apps. I'd estimate closer to release that the default will change so developers can ensure their apps are signed.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[jo_ham]

Then like a man in orthopaedic shoes, I stand corrected.

Re:Mac interface VASTLY improved

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I must interject that the old interface had only a single window for me because I didn't want to use the media library. Now I have no choice. Cant turn it off, cant remove or change the internet sites they opt to list. So to me the new interface is a major downgrade. I just want a media player, not a media management system.

You don't have to upgrade, just keep the old one. Sounds simple to me.

"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

Aka, for the neckbearded virgins.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

Being on slashdot, you can't really make fun of neckbearded virgins..

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

he's referring to the section in the change log specifically titled "FOR ANIME FANS"

i laughed too when i saw it

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[RanceJustice]

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!".

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[JustOK]

they are a perfectly cromulent sub species of something.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you understand Japanese, watching Anime requires subtitles, so good subtitle support in the player is required.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

The anime fansub community has pioneered the usage of initially arcane formats, expecting exacting quality

lolwut?

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[EdIII]

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.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about gender?

The women anime fans have neckbeards too, in my experience.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[miknix]

Not only that but also plays videos contained inside compressed archives... I heard it is useful for p0rn!

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Microlith]

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.

"Well, if it runs content purchased off iTunes, its good enough!".

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.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

Subspecies implies they reproduce...may God help us all...

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[EdgeCreeper]

In my experience, absolutely not. Quit spreading untrue stereotypes, I mean it.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[JustOK]

the method of reproduction is still in debate. Current theories include: asexual reproduction, fsm-mmm-donuts - which involves drool and hair, and spontaneously.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

Or what? Are you going to punch your real doll and cry to sleep like a true manchild?

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

does anybody want a peanut?

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[vAltyR]

Aka, for the neckbearded virgins.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[renrutal]

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.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[voidphoenix]

Getting wet after midnight? ;p

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Tubal-Cain]

Do mules count as a subspecies of horse/donkey?

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[SacredNaCl]

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.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[bughunter]

Umm... dude, that's not her neck.

You really should get out more.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[AliasMarlowe]

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.

Re:"FOR ANIME FANS"

[rdnetto]

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.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be operating under the delusion that we care about the personal identity of someone who (correctly) has outed astroturfers.

That you take so much time spamming slashdot really only lends credibility to his claims. Who but an astroturfer or the mentally ill would waste so much time doing so?

Keep at it though bonchy-babe. I'm sure not *everyone* is laughing at you.

Not Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

And seeking still mess up the video with blocky frames and overall gray spots.

Re:Not Bad

[readandburn]

They have some balls adding Bluray support.

Forgive my ignorance, but why do you say that?

Re:Not Bad

[SydShamino]

Doesn't every application that processes Bluray data have to maintain HDCP, per the Bluray association's licensing deal?

I assume VLC doesn't have a license, and is displaying Bluray using one of its known hacks. While DVD content protection is dead dead there hasn't been as much case law with Bluray.

Re:Not Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

It's simpler than that: they're based in France, which doesn't recognise the same laws as the USA. Their legal page goes into detail.

Re:Not Bad

[TPoise]

Or they'll just get extradited and hauled before a U.S. court on charges of distribution of copyrighted material. And let's hope their domain name isn't registered with GoDaddy...

Re:Not Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it only plays non-protected content as there is no key..

Re:Not Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll wake up tomorrow, and find that fuckin' green statue dropped from 30000 feet on top of their beloved Awful Tower. That'll teach 'em a thing or two about democracy...

All kidding aside, v2.0.0 plays x264-AC3 content in Linux VERY nicely - congrats to the team, I may even replace vdpau-enabled mplayer with this bad boy.

Re:Not Bad

[ShieldW0lf]

They'll wake up tomorrow, and find that fuckin' green statue dropped from 30000 feet on top of their beloved Awful Tower. That'll teach 'em a thing or two about democracy...

Democracy won't fix anything if your country is full of assholes...

Re:Not Bad

[BitZtream]

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.

Re:Not Bad

[Elbart]

Officially, that is true. ;) Ahem, cough, wink, nudge.

Re:Not Bad

[dokc]

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

Re:Not Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Who's we?

Re:Not Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

France won't do that (Don't think Germany will either) regardless of what the EU thinks about it.

Re:Not Bad

[yotto]

Name one innocent person who has ACTUALLY been extradited by the US on BS chages for copyright violations.

Define "Innocent"

Because one could argue that the VLC guys are not innocent, and are therefore are deserving of extradition.

Re:Not Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

OP: When reality burns that badly, see a doctor.

dokc: Good job, sadly. :(

Re:Not Bad

[NemoinSpace]

He meant "they"

Re:Not Bad

[gmhowell]

They'll wake up tomorrow, and find that fuckin' green statue dropped from 30000 feet on top of their beloved Awful Tower. That'll teach 'em a thing or two about democracy...

Democracy won't fix anything if your country is full of assholes...

This could apply to either France or the US, so, umm... what's your point?

Re:Not Bad

[alien-alien]

Actually, unless I've woken up in a "New West"

They're *all* innocent until proven guilty and that does not happen until after they're extradited, charged (if they're lucky) and subjected to a fair trial.

No wait... pinch me please... this is a nightmare.

Re:Not Bad

[nhat11]

Have you been on TVShack.net before? The amount of illegal content on there I'm surprise it wasn't shut down sooner.

Does skipping video work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it finally correctly skip the video, instead of just skipping to some time near where I clicked?

Re:Does skipping video work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the timeline is overhauled (at least on Windows)

.

Re:Does skipping video work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeking has been reworked for many containers so yes it skips way better (if it doesn't please report a bug).

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, Rui Maciel! You even wrote "slashdot" in all-lowercase like you do on your GreatBunzinni account.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Microlith]

Fascinating, our very own Cat and Mouse game here on Slashdot!

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Should we really up the ante?

Rui Maciel is employed by TechGuru.com.br...

Packaged

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not only Windows and Mac. It's been packaged for Chakra Linux, also.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Microlith]

I don't particularly care. But you seem to be quite irritated by him, so, you do what you want I suppose.

It sounds like they've done some great tuning work

[msobkow]

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.

last ten versions

[Anonymous Coward]

SUCKED
sorry too many issues not upgrading it

Re:last ten versions

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the stupidest thing I'veh eard this month.

Pratchett!

[Anonymous Coward]

Literally the only reason I care about this, and the reason this is the best post today

Re:Pratchett!

[Anonymous Coward]

Words literally mean things.

I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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. ("But I use Linux!" Then you're used to video not working. "But I use Mac OS X!" Then you overpaid for your computer.)

Installing... Oh, nice it tries to steal file associations for all video/audio files when you install it. Let's just drag a video onto it and start playing and ... no? No drag and drop support? Seriously?

OK, fine, right click on the file and "Play in VLC." Huh. The colors all washed out. Let's just fire up MPC and drag the file onto that - oh, hey, look, everything works perfectly! Color is correct, nothing is screwed up. Anyone want to help me figure out why it doesn't work, or should I just stick with the age-old advice of not using VLC?

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the lengthier trolls you'll ever see. Kudos!

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trolling. Although for whatever reason after posting that and closing and reopening VLC in an attempt to get colors working again, drag and drop now works. So that's fucked up and not exactly a point in VLC's favor.

But the colors are still all washed out. It's like it's decided to bump the lightness value up way high and bump the saturation down a bit. It's like looking at an old color TV, black is gray and the colors aren't very colorful. I thought maybe I had screwed up the nVidia color settings, but a quick check of that and it turns out that the settings are "use application settings." So it's VLC's fault, and as far as I can tell, everything is set to defaults. Any ideas why that would be? Because everything works fine in MPC and Windows Media Player, it's just VLC that's fucked up.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[tepples]

You might want to tweak your troll copypasta a bit.

"But I use Mac OS X!" Then you overpaid for your computer.

What laptop running Windows is competitive in speed, weight, and battery life with a MacBook Air and substantially cheaper?

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[swalve]

Get a better computer. Works fine for me.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[EdIII]

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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you used a MacBook Air? It's fast because you can't do shit with it.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anthony Mouse]

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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[MoonSweep]

"But I use Linux!" Then you're used to video not working.

Have you ever heard of mplayer ?

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[black3d]

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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Gaygirlie]

...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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[TheRedDuke]

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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[mrmeval]

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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

It happens when you try to play certain WMV / ASF files that were encoded in 2004.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[perryizgr8]

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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[MMC Monster]

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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I tried mplayer it ate 100% cpu on a file that even Windows Media Player happily played without blinking.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[kikito]

VLC works very well on Linux.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[pinkeen]

Or smplayer for that matter. IMHO the best GUI frontend to mplayer. I prefer it over VLC. It works on windows too.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

I never use drag'n'drop for VLC but I just tried it in KDE Linux Mint 12 and it works fine.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[MrL0G1C]

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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Khyber]

If you followed the advice of your sig you'd have your answer.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

"it plays any damn format you throw at it"

It doesn't play certain .mov files. It just gives a green screen.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[mrmeval]

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.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[bill_mcgonigle]

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?

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[mjwx]

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).

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[perryizgr8]

never come across .mov in years of downloading all sorts of stuff.

Re:I wonder if that changes the general advice...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[JonySuede]

Does he sells cocaine to little children ? If not I do not give a fuck !

I'm leaving slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I'm Anonymous Coward and I've been posting to slashdot from the very beginning.

However you lot have just become too fucking old. You've lost your idealism, and become shitty old men, which is why I'm moving to Reddit.
At first I was concerned by the lack of editors, but it's not like the editors here are worth a damn, and the new censorship system is just unacceptable. The mod system doesn't even go up to 11.

Well, it's been fun but fuck you all. And your mothers.
Good bye sirs.

So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Ark42]

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.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Dwedit]

VLC Media Player is a self-contained media player program that will play almost anything you throw at it, and works independently of any codecs installed on your system. So even if your codec installations get messed up, VLC still works.
It also plays DVDs.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Ark42]

So it sounds like Windows Media Player, except it's not modular and easy for end users to add new codecs? And it's just now getting Blu-Ray support?

Not that I've ever really had a problem with codecs. Videos just seem to work on WMP and MPC just fine every time I try, and I never install any "codec pack" or anything other than XviD perhaps.

Honestly I can't figure out why I'd want this still. "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.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

The blue ray stuff is due to Digital Rights Management and other legal stuff. It can also play videos over the network hence the LAN thing. It has always been much faster to load and respond than windows media player for me (although I do not know about win7). Although the codec limitations might be an issue for some they never have been for me, and I play a lot of stuff with old weird codecs, with the number of dodgy sites which try to bundle stuff with the codecs if it works it is a much safer bet. Your mileage may vary of coerce.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Lanteran]

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.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[BLKMGK]

It's a small install that plays most anything you throw at it including damaged files. It doesn't require you to install CODECs and it's pretty highly optimized code to run on even slow machines. anytime I have someone I know complain they cannot play some file or other I tell them to load VLC - problem solved. Perhaps you just only ever play standard sorts of files

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Gaygirlie]

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.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[peppepz]

So it sounds like Windows Media Player, except it's not modular and easy for end users to add new codecs?

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.

And it's just now getting Blu-Ray support?

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.

Not that I've ever really had a problem with codecs.

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.

Videos just seem to work on WMP and MPC just fine every time I try, and I never install any "codec pack" or anything other than XviD perhaps. Honestly I can't figure out why I'd want this still.

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.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

In addition, if it brings Blu-Ray to the OSX it will fill a big hole in video playback on the Mac. OSX already can read Blu-Ray disks, and MakeMKV rips them to mkvs; but this would eliminate the need and time involved in getting one's blu-ray collection playable in an OSX environment.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

The codex thing has already been explained, it's great.

But for me the largest frustration of using the WMP is it's lack of standardised hotkeys like Space for pause/play, in VLC you can set them up any way you like.

--
Teun

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[kikito]

More like the total opposite of Windows Media Player. That's why it's good.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Bert64]

Does it support CDXL format?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDXL

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've used MPC but pretend you don't know what VLC is? Don't be such a fucking tool.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[lehphyro]

These things are not problems for the average user who needs to stream only an MP3 file.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[X0563511]

as Ark42 said, it is a nice player. But it also serves as a stream host - not sure how that works with DLNA et all, but you can tell it to stream it's output and connect another player (on another device for example) to it, allowing you to play a video remotely where you might not have otherwise been able.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Khyber]

"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."

This statement is what's made all the headaches of computers happen.

People using computers, especially online, should be required to pass a competency test and basic knowledge test. It's just that much a part of life, now.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[lennier]

"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."

This statement is what's made all the headaches of computers happen.

People using computers, especially online, should be required to pass a competency test and basic knowledge test.

Well, sort of. What's made codecs an especially thorny hassle on both Windows and Mac has been the operating system's staunch absolute refusal to admit that they exist, and to give the user any kind of relevant feedback whatsoever, combined with both companies' equally staunch refusal to allow codecs to be distributed freely.

For example, right-click on a .wmv Explorer on Windows 7. Go ahead, I'll wait. Now, let's see what metadata we've got in the details pane. Hmm. Title, Subtitle, Rating (huh?), Tags, Comments, Length, Frame Width, Frame Height... more esoteric stuff, like data rate, Total Bitrate.... absolutely no mention of codec. Go look under Control Panel for anything about installed codecs. Nothing. (For extra credit, go digging through the raw Registry looking for information about codecs... it's certainly not well documented). So how's even a trained user supposed to understand what she has or hasn't bought the rights to use on her system?

Codecs could be sensible, if they were treated just like programs, file extensions and fonts: things you could easily tell existed, and if they had a neat control panel somewhere showing what was and wasn't installed. But for inexplicable reasons, all the major OS manufacturers seem to have conspired to make codecs both invisible, and yet sold as commercial extensions that you can't just assume are there. Bizarre.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Troll?

This guy has a legitimate questions about what this program does and why he should care, and it's modded 0, Troll?

Obviously some moderators are pretty biased around here, or somebody is abusing the system, because that seems like a pretty normal topic.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[peppepz]

I should have written that in a different way: "It's nice for end users to be able to double-click a file and see it play without needing to know what a codec is".

I do not advocate users' ignorance / walled gardens / software dumbdown, I just think that letting more people take advantage of computers is a nice thing even for us advanced users.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[peppepz]

Amen to that. I usually have to use directx's graph builder (which is itself hard to find, I don't remember if it's currently buried in the Platform SDK or the Directx SDK) to troubleshoot codec problems on Windows.

I'm not against an operating system-wide codec system; I think it's a important piece of a modern OS. I'm disappointed that Windows' one is under-documented, messy and generally not meant to be user-maintainable (just like so many Windows subsystems). This is the kind of complexity which results in OS reinstallation being the time-honoured, quickest solution to fix certain problems on Windows.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[GuB-42]

Now that we have the printing press, the codex is completely outdated.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Kalriath]

That hole hasn't existed for six months.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Registered Coward v2]

That hole hasn't existed for six months.

Unfortunately MacBlurayPlayer isn't a really viable solution (yet) since it needs an Internet connection for decrypting the discs. MakeMKV with its streaming feature works but an all in one solution would be nice and I hope VLC sorts it out.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[cthulhu11]

It used to be. 2.0.0 for me (quad core Mac Pro 10.7.2) locks up way more often and refuses to play files that the previous version played before. The change in behavior of the > buttons is more than a little frustrating, as is the behavior of playing video at the *bottom* of the window stack. The persistent window with the sources sidebar and file history is, as others have said, annoying. Playback stutters on files that played smoothly with 1.1.9. Basically, functionality appears to be eschewed in favor of weird crap that I'll never use, in other words it's become like Linux. Color me Not Impressed.

Re:So what is VideoLAN anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://ffmpeg.org/general.html#File-Formats

Still no frame backward?

[Anonymous Coward]

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:)

Re:Still no frame backward?

[soundguy]

That's the main reason I went to GOMplayer on Windows years ago. VLC simply didn't do what I wanted it to do (stepping forward/backward, perfect vidcapping, pan & scan, speed adjustments, contrast/brightness/saturation/color controls).

Years ago, I tried installing VLC on my video file servers to do vidcaps/thumbnails via scripts, but it simply wouldn't compile without a full X-window installation to solve dependencies. At one point, there was a console-only version, but it had long since been abandoned and wouldn't compile on a REAL server OS (RHE, Centos) because the developers only saw fit to make it work on Fedora and other non-professional and experimental distros. I eventually figured out how to compile Mplayer in the exact console configuration I wanted on ANY flavor of Linux and never looked back.

Sounds to me like VLC is still lacking.

Re:Still no frame backward?

[diego.viola]

Why not use ffmpeg then?

Three ways to seek

[tepples]

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).

Re:Three ways to seek

[Anonymous Coward]

You're overthinking it. The old versions just had bad GUI.

Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[Dwedit]

It still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache".
What exactly is VLC doing when it does this?

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[EdIII]

It still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache".
What exactly is VLC doing when it does this?

Uhhhh... it's rebuilding the font cache dude. It say it right there in the dialog box.

Better question is... why does it need to do it every fucking time? :)

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[hobarrera]

What are you guys talking about? I've never seen any such dialog! :| I've used VLC for the last... 6 years? Or something like that.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing I wondered when I tried the new version is "Will it ever have to rebuild the font cache". Sure enough, the first thing it did when I dragged in a video was... rebuild the font cache! It took three minutes to play the video. Not a good first impression.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[nbehary]

It does happen. "Every time" or even frequently, I haven't seen. I get it about 2-3 times a year, it's a little annoying, but not a big deal.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[BLKMGK]

I see a terminal window for this during install for all of about 5 seconds on Win7. Perhaps you've checked the "clear cache" box during install and shouldn't be?

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[penguinchris]

VLC never does this for me, but Media Player Classic does (on OS X). Every time I start it, a dialog pops up saying it's rebuilding the font cache. It can take 1-2 minutes, or more, and won't let you do anything else while you're waiting!

It's annoying enough that I stopped trying to use MPC, even though it plays some videos smoothly that VLC stutters on (a known VLC OS X issue - not sure if it's fixed in the latest version). Plus the MPC interface and everything kind of sucks too.

If VLC were doing that too, I'd be really, really annoyed. But I'd probably keep using it anyway because despite its faults, it's always been the best player for my purposes, on all OS's.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[Mashiki]

Nah sometimes during a crash, it'll freak out and corrupt your existing font cache. In which case it'll spend about 6 years rebuilding it. Well maybe not 6 years, at least 4 years anyway.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[EdIII]

It gets stuck in a pattern.

When it does start to do it, only letting it complete will get rid of the message. After that, it can get stuck in that pattern and do it every single time. Most likely because the process never completed correctly.

I do long periods in between it though.

What I find the *most* annoying is the complete lack of information regarding it. I assume a cache is made to speed up some process involving subtitles. There should be an option to turn off caching, or the process itself is only required when subtitles are actually activated.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[EdIII]

That's the best explanation yet. VLC crashes quite often for me (10-20% of the time. 100% on some files.). Not surprising since I ask it to play so many different formats and who the hell knows how well it was encoded.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC on my Mac crashes constantly when I stream videos across wireless. I get the impression that it doesn't store that much of a video cache, and if the input stream is broken the whole thing crashes, and since I'm streaming over a wireless in an apartment building crawling with interference, this happens quite frequently. MPlayer OSX Extended is a bit more robust - though I don't like it so much - but still crashes when the input stream is interrupted. Now, MPlayer OSX Extended rebuilds its font cache once every few days, but I've never seen VLC do it.

Most of the videos I play are H264 in an MKV container ripped from my own DVDs - dunno if that counts as weird, though.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[teridon]

Let's say that's true (i.e. font cache is corrupted on crash).

1) Sounds like a bug to me. File a bug report? (after gathering evidence, of course)

2) Possible workaround: Make a known-good copy of the font cache (on Windows it's %APPDATA%\vlc, I believe). Restore it after a VLC crash (before launching VLC again)

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[Mashiki]

I filed a bug report along with a working and corrupted cache back in hmm 0.95 or 0.92 I think it was, which was due to a crash. Never saw anything come from it. So, it doesn't matter too much to me.

The work around option does work though.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[TheRaven64]

I just saw it for the first time, launching VLC 2.0. No idea what it does - the OS has its own font cache, I don't know why VLC feels the need to be special in that regard...

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[hackertourist]

Why does it need to build a cache at all? A quick browse through the interface and preferences show only one place you can specify a font (for the subtitles). A font cache is useful (maybe) when you spend half your time switching between fonts, which clearly isn't the case in VLC.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[X0563511]

Because the OS doesn't need to cache it as some kind of bitmap suitable for video overlay?

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[X0563511]

Another option: after a good cache run, just mark the cache read-only, immutable, or remove write permissions to the user. It might complain when it tries to scribble on the cache during a crash, but it should keep it pristine :)

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[TheRaven64]

It takes a tiny fraction of a second with any vaguely modern OS to generate a bitmap glyph for any character in a given size and typeface. There is no point in pre-rendering them for every font, just generate them on demand and cache them.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[hobarrera]

I just upgraded my laptop to vlc 2.0. No "font cache" dialog. I've never seen it on any computer, even one. That's odd. Maybe you've configure some odd font for it to use by default?

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[hobarrera]

Nope, not ever, not even after a clean reinstall of a new laptop.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[lennier]

It still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache".
What exactly is VLC doing when it does this?

It's actually reticulating the splines.

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[X0563511]

Then there must be something else going on, for that much time and disk activity to be used...

Re:Still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache"

[Anonymous Coward]

noooo!!! dey be stealin mai animes!! :'-(

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[JustOK]

You'll have to buy from someone else until you grow up

i am pleased

[Anonymous Coward]

This player supports brony-related content.

I do nit understand the lack of more hoof print support, but at east t s unicorns

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[f3rret]

[Citation Needed]

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[f3rret]

Will he sell cocaine to me? If not I do not give a fuck!

Arch Linux

[diego.viola]

Already have it on Arch Linux.

Huge thanks to all the developers.

Re:Arch Linux

[hobarrera]

Indeed, this got pushed incredibly fast! :)

better, still not there yet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:better, still not there yet

[X0563511]

Check your deinterlacing settings. You might need to try the IVTC option, snice 29.97fps NTSC DVDs "stutter" naturally without being detelecined.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[psiclops]

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.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC is garbage anyhow. KMPlayer and SPlayer are much better.

Does VLC support DD/DTS passthrough?

[mykos]

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?

Re:Does VLC support DD/DTS passthrough?

[penguinchris]

I was able to do this several years ago, with standard VLC on linux; the options are in there somewhere but I remember it not being obvious how to get it to work, and a lot of trial and error was involved.

Re:Does VLC support DD/DTS passthrough?

[babymac]

It's under the Audio menu - Audio Device sub-menu. Select the encoded audio device.

Re:Does VLC support DD/DTS passthrough?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still haven't found a way to get it to output mono.

Re:Does VLC support DD/DTS passthrough?

[perryizgr8]

right click

Re:Does VLC support DD/DTS passthrough?

[TheRaven64]

I've not tried pass through, but I run VLC on a FreeBSD box connected to a 5.1 analogue speaker system and it has no problems decoding DD and DTS and sending the audio to the correct speakers. It actually worked out of the box, as I discovered after spending an hour searching for documentation to find out how to make it work before considering actually testing it...

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[hcs_$reboot]

I run the lastest VLC it's always the baker's children who have no bread...

OpenSuse

[jeff.j.jeff]

repo: http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/SuSE/ No phonon backend yet it seems

WebM uses MKV

[tepples]

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.

Re:WebM uses MKV

[Microlith]

Are you trying to claim there is no legitimate anime on YouTube?

I am not aware of any. Most streaming anime is hosted at the licensor's website.

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.

And yet shows that do get licensed and sold... sell terribly even if they have large fanbases. Usually with lots of rationalization.

Yes yes, more excuses please. I had my fill 7 years ago and walked away from the fansub world as they wore thin.

Re:WebM uses MKV

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Piracy/copyright infringement boogeyman. Apocalypse is upon us, etc.

Someone, somewhere is copying things! The horror!

Re:WebM uses MKV

[Anonymous Coward]

Until everything I want is available on physical media, I will still have a need for fansubs. Once something gets released in English, I buy it. If it never does, no sale is lost.

I waited three years for Bandai to announce that they were, in fact, not releasing Turn A Gundam. Hell, the guy fansubbing it stopped eight episodes from the end when they announced it, and only finished nearly two years later when there was still no news.

We will never see the rest of Yawara legitimately. Viz will never release the rest of Monster and refuses to answer questions about it, seeing as it has even run in full on Canadian specialty channels.

Things go out of print and licenses expire, and so far only AnimEigo has the decency to inform their customers when this will be occurring. Want anything Bandai has, you better buy it quick. I doubt they'll tell people when they pull the plug on printing what they still have.

The number of people willing to wait for a legit stream or digital copy is so small it doesn't matter, which is fine, since the distribution costs are equally small. But they do affect people who want a physical copy they can keep.

Re:WebM uses MKV

[vAltyR]

Are you trying to claim there is no legitimate anime on YouTube?

I am not aware of any.

Allow me to enlighten you then.

Re:WebM uses MKV

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you trying to claim there is no legitimate anime on YouTube?

I am not aware of any.

Kadokawa used Youtube for a while to distribute promotional shorts. They made 3 to 5 minute short animations to promote the 2nd season of Haruhi a while ago. They even offered engrish subtitles. It was a good way to attract attention to the upcoming show, and in my opinion a bold move.

They're offline now, because they released those on DVD/Blueray as well, and it's needless to say that someone ripped those and subbed those. We can dance around that issue, but let's call it what it is : piracy. Once you go through the motions of ripping a DVD that's been licensed and subbed in the west, there's simply no other word for it.

And yet shows that do get licensed and sold... sell terribly even if they have large fanbases. Usually with lots of rationalization.

The rationalization, if by that you mean "people giving excuses to pirate", I'll agree to an extent. It's a known problem (not just with anime), and as a media company you should just accept the fact that some people will copy your stuff and never pay and move on. This is not unique to anime, and distributors have been faced with this problem long before Napster came along, and it's been an uphill battle ever since most people got broadband connections.

However, just like all other types of entertainment, blaming the decrease in sales simply on piracy (or in this case fansubbing) is in my opinion far too convenient and simplistic.

For starters, the distributors licensing anime have completely lost touch with their target audience. They don't have a clue what their audience wants, and it shows if you look at what shows they license. Look at the entire mess with the recently deceased ADV, what they were paying for the rights to shows where most people are going "Meh, never heard of it". They're sometimes forced to buy rights before a show starts its run in order to compete with the other distributors, and sometimes (legal) online distributors that simulcast shows. You can't even go on the popularity of something in Japan, because the western audience often has far different tastes.

To make things even worse, there's far more content available nowadays than there used to be, with far more variety in genres. With an ever increasing offering, it's no surprise that it's difficult to predict which show will be the next big thing. So with an already niche market there's a fragmentation where certain people will avoid one type of show. If as a distributor you don't realize that someone who buys "mecha anime" in general is not the type of person who buys "slice of life comedy" you don't really know your target audience. The best anecdote of this is that I've got DVDs here of Farscape, with non-skippable ads (yes, I know that you can skip them if you really want to) for those "magical girl"-type animes. The overlap in those demographics is so small that it's pointless to even try. It's like broadcasting ads for Days of our Lives in the middle of a Star Trek episode.

You can add to that the fact that western distributors insist on dubbing everything. They do this in the hope increasing their chances of selling a show to a larger market, but I doubt there is much need for it. If you're going to broadcast it a cable channel, maybe, but in all honesty, most shows don't get broadcasted in the west. Simply drop all the needless dubbing. Google "Johnny Yong Bosch" and read how many people dislike his voice acting and learn from it. If you're already trying to reach a subset of an audience, why make the extra costs? Most viewers ignore the dubs completely, if anything you'll find the worst cases on youtube being ridiculed.

Another matter is price point. You're catering to an audience usually in the mid-teens to mid-twenties (with notable exception being the so called "otaku" audience), so they don't have much disposable income. In order to generate sa

Re:WebM uses MKV

[gknoy]

Holy cow. Thank you.

Re:WebM uses MKV

[Anonymous Coward]

I LOL'ed at this: "Even the great Hayao Miyazaki has gone on record saying that, while he appreciates that his films are enjoyed by non-Japanese fans, he is surprised and baffled that non-Japanese can 'understand' them." as this seems to the the main reason why they don't want much of their stuff released.

I guess what I find interesting, if average as well as intellectual Japanese can say that, I would ask them how it is that they can understand Chopin, Bach, Mozart or Beethoven? Or that the latest Studio Ghibli films are all western books? Perhaps Miyazaki and others should be asked this question to see how they rationalise their xenophobia in response?

Then again anime is 90% pedophilia material so perhaps they are complimenting us after all.

Fantastic!

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes the cocks on my tranny porn look bigger and stiffer! Great improvement!

Just tested this.....

[BLKMGK]

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!

Media Player Classic - Home Cinema

[Aereus]

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.

Re:Media Player Classic - Home Cinema

[drinkypoo]

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.

Now wait a second...

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.

If you really want to play, you know, everything, you're going to need a codec kit. So you have to add that into the size of the player too.

Re:Media Player Classic - Home Cinema

[X0563511]

Let me know when you can run MPC-HC on Linux, Mac, BSD etc.

I'll wait until 2.0.1 or 2.0.2 in a few days

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[Anonymous Coward]

Or all the old linux guys have moved over to Macs for their personal computers...

But...

[Swampash]

"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.

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[timeOday]

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.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Astronomerguy]

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.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Metabolife]

Looking for a new coke dealer, kiddo?

Different kinds of programs

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Different kinds of programs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Except, of course, for all the internal filters based on libavcodec, libavformat and other libraries it contains, which are also available for download as separate DirectShow codecs you can then install system-wide.

An incomplete list would be sources for AVI, MKV, MP4/MOV, MPEG PS/TS and more and decoders for AAC, AC3, MPA, Vorbis, MPEG-1/-2 (w/ DXVA HW-acceleration), H264 (w/ DXVA HW-acceleration), VC1 (w/ DXVA HW-acceleration), XviD/DivX, FLV, WMV, Theora and again more. VC1 with DXVA even supports interlaced video, which libavcodec still doesn't support and which is sadly used on most BBC blu-rays. ffdshow even incorporated part of the DXVA code developed by the MPC-HC devs nowadays.

If don't know which version of MPC (sans -HC) you've used last, but it can't have been less than 5 years old...

Re:Different kinds of programs

[makomk]

Carelessly installing ffmpeg-based DShow filters system-wide tends to have side effects like breaking games - you have to be very careful which formats you enable them for.

Re:Different kinds of programs

[Anonymous Coward]

You're somewhat mistaken. MPC is indeed a directshow player that uses directshow filters. But it has always included some filters that it uses before querying system filters, especially container demuxers. Even when gabest was maintaining mpc, you could play a .mkv or a .mp4 even though the system had no mkv or mp4 demuxing directshow filters. These days MPC-HC really does include internal filters for almost everything, including h264, h263, ogg, aac, and way more, even ion an XP system with no directshow filters for any of those, even without installing it and just running the bare executable from the .zip distribution.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[0mni]

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.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Gaygirlie]

The real question is... does he sell little children for cocaine?

Thanks Majik!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah ha, you learn something new every day! Thanks!

In case someone wants further(possibly incorrect information): Strawman Argument

streaming...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

What?

[ArchieBunker]

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.

Whoa!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Whoa!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooops, looks like it required a restart after first launch..... my bad.....

Bug

[Shifty0x88]

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!

Re:Bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you ever install something when a zip package is provided?

Re:Bug

[X0563511]

Because zip files have a hard time registering themselves as an installed application, updating file associations, creating menu items etc?

Release for iOS

[will_die]

So any news if the licensing has changed and if they will release for iOS. Still have the old version and it works great.

Re:Release for iOS

[WiiVault]

Its on Cydia for jailbroken iOS devices. Well actually 1.11 is, but that is more recent than the AppStore version. 2.0 should be coming out soon though.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Some regression

[peppepz]

After the upgrade, I get video stuttering in WMV files after seeking, and the MP4 videos coming from my old N73 play like a slideshow. The installer also tries to install the Mozilla and ActiveX plugins by default, IIRC this feature was off by default before, and I don't know if I want it, but that's just my personal preference.

Seems to work fine otherwise.

Subtitles/OSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear... is it so hard to get font rendering right? Look at MPC-HC code please, and learn something.

Don't even bother

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the biggest pile of junk that ever polluted my hard drive. Into the trashcan you go!

Icon

[cgomezr]

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).

Re:Icon

[Lennie]

Ones a year it already different during Christmas. That is atleast something right ;-)

Re:Icon

[Anonymous Coward]

At home, if it won't play on Windows Media Player the kids say 'Let's watch it on traffic cone'

Re:Icon

[ToddInSF]

I can't believe readers on a tech site gave someone that can not change an icon a +5.

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[kikito]

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.

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[PiSkyHi]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's available for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just installed VLC 2.0 on my Ubuntu 11.10
Here's the PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/stable-daily

and LINUX

[Anonymous Coward]

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".
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 /. do, they says "For IOS, Android".
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.

Re:and LINUX

[diego.viola]

Agreed.

Re:and LINUX

[diego.viola]

Those anti-Linux editors should get fired IMHO.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Grimbleton]

Man this is going to blow your world... but kids who don't come from poor families regularly get money from their parents.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Johann Lau]

hmm, no.

GPU decoding not so good?

[DigiTechGuy]

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.

Missing glyphs in your chosen subtitle font

[tepples]

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.

Re:Missing glyphs in your chosen subtitle font

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I care how a character in a language I can't read anyway looks like?

And no, English is not my native language. However, when I choose a font that contains the characters for my native language, it does contain the characters that I can read.

Re:Missing glyphs in your chosen subtitle font

[tepples]

I think it might be more for Latin/Greek/Cyrillic, where not all fonts have all the accented characters for all languages that use these scripts.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

you two are obsessed with each other. why don't you two just go get a room already.

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[sjames]

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.

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[X0563511]

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.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[GreatBunzinni]

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.

Vastly improved MKV demuxer?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Trolling campaign by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

We're on to you. There will no more hiding from us. We will be heard.

PowerPC version broken

[kwack]

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.

Definite maybe - opinion is divided

[AliasMarlowe]

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.

The synonym problem

[tepples]

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?

Re:The synonym problem

[Kalriath]

Since Google automatically tries synonyms of a word as well, it doesn't really make a damn difference.

Re:The synonym problem

[tepples]

In general, in a Slashdot discussion, how should I get across that I've already tried searching with Google, but all my queries have failed me?

Re:The synonym problem

[Kalriath]

I'm not sure, to be honest. But synonyms aren't the answer, because Google's already predicted that.

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[evilviper]

I don't believe it's possible to achieve a solid framerate without hardware decoding in the video card hardware

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.

Note in the "this" meme

[gatkinso]

It is very 2011.

Carry on.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

[Anonymous Coward]

www.universe-24.com Free social networking site for friends,family,or dating. Post casting / job /item classifies. Video chat with your friends and family. Create a free account as your self or if your married have 2 people in 1 account registered ! ADD ME

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[nightfell]

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.

The Princess Mononoke example

[dbIII]

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.

Re:It sounds like they've done some great tuning w

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

not working for me

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Video playback

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it work better on porn?

Free alternatives on Windows

[alexo]

In case you want to try other options:
https://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-windows-media-player-replacement.htm