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VLC 2.0 'Twoflower' Released For Windows & Mac
Titus Andronicus writes "Years in the making, the major new release of VideoLAN's media player has better support for multicore processors, GPUs, and much, much more. From the announcement: 'Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental). Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use. Twoflower fixes several hundreds of bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 160 volunteers.'"
So terrible things will continuously happen, but at least the main characters will survive.
Gone is the two window design! Now it's got an iTunes-like single window, but with its own VLC stylings (e.g., the playback controls on the bottom). I dig!
Does it finally correctly skip the video, instead of just skipping to some time near where I clicked?
Yeah. Because a simple, light-weight, video player that plays damn-near anything you throw at it without the need for additional codecs and runs on every OS that matters is specifically for neckbearded, anime-fan virgins. I can't possibly imagine anyone else ever wanting to watch videos on their computer.
Troll much?
he's referring to the section in the change log specifically titled "FOR ANIME FANS"
i laughed too when i saw it
Not surprisingly, most of the work seems to have been for platforms other than Linux, but maybe the upgraded OpenGL rendering pipeline will prove of benefit when full-screening 1080p videos. My box periodically stutters a frame or two when viewing such videos on a 1600x1200 monitor, because I've only got a crufty old P4-3.8GHz CPU with 4G of fast RAM. My video card is more than capable, and I never used to see any frame loss under Windows.
Mind you, I didn't have a pile of servers running when I had this CPU chugging under XP instead of Ubuntu 10.04.1.
Alas, the odds are not in my favour that I'll see this update unless I build from source.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
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).
There are a number of features largely specific to anime fansubs, e.g. heavily styled subtitles (to replace Japanese text on signs, etc) and MKV segment linking. It's not spurious. And "neckbearded virgins" is rather silly when anime as a fandom is hardly gender-specific (unlike, say, Slashdot).
If we can get by the neckbeard virgin jokes, its actually a good idea for them to specifically target anime-watching (especially the fansub community) in their notes. For years, there has been the complaint that, compared to such offerings as Media Player Classic Home Cinema, especially with lots of external filters from something like the Combined Community Codec Pack, VLC was inferior. Subtitles were not rendered as aesthetically pleasingly, image quality may have suffered, and other factors made VLC a second player choice despite its internal filters and easy accessibility.
The anime fansub community has pioneered the usage of initially arcane formats, expecting exacting quality and often utilizing features that would be an afterthought for most other media. Matroska container formats,H.264/ X264 HD video, Ogg Theora/OGM, multi-channel AAC/OGG/ audio, multiple streams of the aforementioned plus multiple softcoded subtitle options, etc.. showed up prominently in anime fansub encodes long before the general population ever saw them. Some would say their pioneering encoding even helped drive pirate rips of SD and HD content out of old-fashioned AVI containers for everything, besides being a huge boon to localization in any form as these advances helped to move from single language audio and subtitle options hardcoded (or hand-selected-and-renamed-manual-subs) to simple container formats with multiple options. Today, we're seeing many fansub release groups offering 1080p high bitrate MKV with lossless FLAC audio channels and 10-bit color pallets...even for porn!
Anime fansubs/localization has been a quiet but important force in driving online video quality from the days of grainy, option-free rips to a single high-bitrate HD file with several lossless audio channels and subtitles for 8 languages available, often using open specifications and open source codecs to do so. VLC setting the bar for these enthusiasts who really move the media forward is certainly commendable in my opinion, compared to saying "Well, if it runs content purchased off iTunes, its good enough!".
Who said anything about gender?
The women anime fans have neckbeards too, in my experience.
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? :)
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.
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.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
In my experience, absolutely not. Quit spreading untrue stereotypes, I mean it.
I run the lastest VLC it's always the baker's children who have no bread...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
the method of reproduction is still in debate. Current theories include: asexual reproduction, fsm-mmm-donuts - which involves drool and hair, and spontaneously.
rewriting history since 2109
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.
Here's why you'd want it: you'd never need to add a codec. VLC plays videos in every codec known to man, and several known only to dolphins. That, and it's a damn good music player, *and* it supports playing videos in the framebuffer in linux.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
What laptop running Windows is competitive in speed, weight, and battery life with a MacBook Air and substantially cheaper?
Basically anything with an AMD E-series. The amount they are slower is more than made up for by the amount they are cheaper.
Wow! I can now skip merrily through a multi-gig MKV file at high bitrates without lag. I can jump halfway through the video and with almost no pause it begins playing with only a little pixelation. This is on Win7 so YMMV on other platforms but I can tell you that compared to even the beta I WAS running this is a giant leap forward - no pun intended. Previously it would hang and slog through the video and was just really awful to skip through big files when I wanted to just check something. Now? Zero issues, clear picture, and plenty of control. I can grab the slider and get pretty good playback too although it obviously jumps some. So far I haven't tried many other video containers or ISO etc. just this one test but for me this was a really big one - very very pleased.
Bravo to the VLC team!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
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.
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
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
VLC 2.0? That's nice. I'll keep using my even lighter weight video player that plays even more "darn near everything" than VLC.
Even the built-in filters for MPC-HC are very good, but extending it with Haali's Splitter and ffdshow or CoreAVC results in even better performance.
"But I use Linux!" Then you're used to video not working.
Have you ever heard of mplayer ?
It's under the Audio menu - Audio Device sub-menu. Select the encoded audio device.
"War makes me sad." - Me
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.
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...
I can't imagine how you have VLC set incorrectly so that it "washes out" color - a default install will reproduce video per-file. I can see no difference between a default install of MPC and a default install of VLC in terms of color.
It sounds like they're using different overlay/buffers and on your system your video has separate settings for each - this is especially common on ATI video cards. It will detect overlay video as "video" and apply its video "enchancements", but then not detect the video for any program which does its own rendering and - naturally, not apply any "enchancements". The same is possible on nVidia, however as a difference, nVidia drivers default to no video enhancement, unlike ATI.
Almost all media programs try to steal all file associations on install. You can simply tell it you don't want to, easy enough. However, this is the norm. Nothing special going on here.
HOWEVER, to answer your question - yes, it seems there are many improvements in VLC, and in my limited testing it's much better at handling very large, very high resolution video with no lag or banding which sometimes appeared in 1.x.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
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.
Aka, for the neckbearded virgins.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
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.
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.
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...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
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.
It's designed to play everything without ever installing any codec. End users shouldn't know what a "codec" is, they should double-click a file and see it play, which is what VLC is all about.
It think that after Mplayer, it's the first free media player getting support for it. Windows Media Player doesn't support Blu-Ray yet, for example.
Many people have. It's very easy to run into problems with codecs if you use them. There is no standard user interface to maintain them, so you have to rely on their installers to do the right thing when you install and uninstall them. Which often doesn't happen.
That's because you only used one of the few formats supported by WMP - in this case you have little to gain from VLC. But suppose your grandmother wants to see some family clips taken with somebody else's digital camera. She will double-click them and they won't play. You can either:
- ask her to dig the FOURCC identification in the video clips, ask her what OS she uses and what version, find a codec online which is good for her case, tell her to download and install it, then cross your fingers and hope it works because there is no well-defined way to debug problems if things don't go well at this point. Note that a broken codec will harm *all* media playback on her machine.
- tell her do download and install VLC and double click those videos again.
"Self contained" seems like a big downside to me. It doesn't even compete with VNC or RDP?? The name is pretty misleading as well.
You can capture your desktop and stream it to another room via IP. Or you can capture a football match from your TV card and stream it into your neighbour's house. Or you can convert a DVD into another format. It's both a generic tool for advanced users and an easy to use player for regular users.
Getting wet after midnight? ;p
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
vlc works *better* on windows than on linux. drag and drop has never been a problem, it plays any damn format you throw at it. it can even capture network streams and encode them into whatever you want. it repairs partially broken avis. it does not care if your file has chunks missing. the ui is the simplest you can get without removing any essential features. it can use your bluetooth earphones to play/pause/next.
once (in ye olde vista days) my fucking graphics driver crashed while watching a movie in vlc. it switched to s/w rendering on the fly, while aero went to fallback mode in the background, error notification appears saying 'your graphics has crashed'. after 30-40 seconds the drive gets restarted, aero comes back and vlc switches back to h/w rendering. all this without any interruption in the playback. i think that is amazing. i dunno why you guys think it crashes hard.
on linux, sometimes right click menu is a bit buggy while in fullscreen.
on windows vlc is the nearest you can get to the ideal video player.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
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).
Or all the old Linux guys care less about consuming content than making something.
I do find Linux a little stunted in the multimedia department - the texture tearing on at least one monitor when using a composite desktop is mildly annoying when using standard applications, but unacceptable when watching video. I'm hoping that Wayland will improve this, but holding my breath for it to arrive would be foolish.
Sounds like a problem in your particular setup. I have used VLC in 5 different Ubuntu machines and it worked great in all of them.
Name one innocent person who has ACTUALLY been extradited by the US on BS chages for copyright violations.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
I'm not saying that its never going to happen, but it just hasn't happened yet, at least not in my life time.
You people just don't fucking get it.
We don't come get you and extradite you when we ACTUALLY want to get you. We just do that when we want to pretend you matter, but you really don't. See Julian Assange. When we actually want to get you, you just cease to exist one night. Its far cleaner and raises FAR fewer questions, even if a CIA agent comes out the next day and tells you he did it.
Richard O'Dwyer
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.
The nice thing about VLC on Windows is that it can be a least common denominator.
I want to give a friend a video to watch. I don't have to research what codecs and container formats it was using, and what my friend has installed on the computer. I just add the VLC installer on the disc and tell him to use that if their default player doesn't handle the video.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I don't watch any anime, but the picture quality in VLC v2.0 has improved quite a bit over v1.1. VLC is still not offloading as many things as I might like to my graphics processor *(HD 6870), but its CPU utilization is not high on my Core i5 based system. I forgot which settings I used before to make some content end up forced to decode on the graphics card; I went ahead & axed the old settings in case they would break things in the new version.
The big positives I noticed right away: The technique VLC uses for dealing with interlaced content improved in terms of output quality in v2.0. I still don't have a solution for the 24 frames issue that causes some HD to stutter a bit, but I imagine that has to do more with how things are encoded than the player.
I've only played around with a few videos with it so far, but I do like the improvements that I can see. I also like the improvements that I can hear!
Its nice when a new version is actually an improvement, and not just more pure bloat that gives the same level of performance at many times the original install size.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Umm... dude, that's not her neck.
You really should get out more.
I can see the fnords!
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.
There's absolutely no truth to that. Several years ago, you couldn't get CPUs fast enough that they could decode high-bitrate highdef H.264 video, but it's been a long time since that was the case. Even low-end CPUs have enough power these days.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.