VLC Reaches 2.1

An anonymous reader writes "With a new audio core, hardware decoding and encoding, port to mobile platforms, preparation for Ultra-HD video and a special care to support more formats, 2.1 is a major upgrade for VLC. The popular video player app also features support for 4K video as well as a partial Windows 8 and WinRT port for all those folks out there who don't know what else to do with their Surface RT."

Comments

Partial port?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a "partial port"? Does it run in an emulator or something?

Re:Partial port?

[Chrisq]

What's a "partial port"? Does it run in an emulator or something?

A good question. I assumed that it meant that not all options, facilities, or codecs are ported yet - but it is not clear from the release notes.

Re:Partial port?

[SJHillman]

I would assume not all features are up and running in the port.

Re:Partial port?

[NatasRevol]

Or will ever be? At least for WinRT.

Re:Partial port?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What's a "partial port"? Does it run in an emulator or something?

A good question. I assumed that it meant that not all options, facilities, or codecs are ported yet - but it is not clear from the release notes.

I'd be more inclined to suspect that it hasn't been bodged into the...um...wonderful new Win8/RT UI-formerly-known-as-metro yet. VLC's codecs and whatnot have already been ported to just about anything with the power to support them and a compiler to suit; but their enthusiasm for artisinally crafted platform specific UIs is less significant.

Re:Partial port?

[hairyfeet]

Isn't Metro apps locked into the appstore? That may be what they mean by partial, if they have the metro look without being tied to the appstore.

BTW is anybody else sick of the words apps and appstore yet? Because I'm REALLY fucking tired of hearing apps to app your app, especially when it comes to non mobile devices like Win 8. The second I hear apps now I think "buzzword hipster crap" and start tuning them out.

As for VLC? Congrats guys, your player has been on my "must install" list for quite some time, it opens virtually any format and uses little resources. all in all a great program, keep up the good work!

First impressions

[MetalliQaZ]

I installed it last night and really the only thing I can say about it so far is that it seems to work the same as I'm used to. That is high praise for a new release with many new features, I think. We'll see what happens when I try to play more exotic files with multiple languages and subtitles, but so far so good.

What is really exciting to me is the claimed support for mobile platforms. That kind of support for video is something I've really missed on Android.

Re:First impressions

[Richard24]

FYI, there's a pretty good free video player for android that supports quite a bit of codecs and such. I'm not sure what you're specifically looking for. It also supports natively browsing/playing from smb shares. I also like they way they created finger swipe controls on the playing video for volume, brightness, and ff/rev. After I used it, I really miss it when I play video in Netflix or somewhere else. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bsplayer.bspandroid.free&hl=en

Re:First impressions

[IDtheTarget]

What is really exciting to me is the claimed support for mobile platforms. That kind of support for video is something I've really missed on Android.

I've been using MX Player. There's a free, Ad-supported version, and a paid version. I happily paid for it and haven't regretted it. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mxtech.videoplayer.pro

Re:First impressions

[SMOKEING]

BSPlayer shows ads. IIRC, VLC has none.

Re:First impressions

[Anonymous Coward]

I too was very happy to find BSPlayer for my Android tablet. However, I hate the swipe controls. I tend to accidentally trigger them when I'm trying to do something with the non-swipe controls.

Re:First impressions

[Anonymous Coward]

On windows bsplayer used to have spyware included unless oyu had the pro version. Don't know if it's still the case now. I avoid it.

Now what about Kermit and ZTerm?

[sandbagger]

I'm still waiting for these to get to beyond V0.99!

Re:Now what about Kermit and ZTerm?

[Hatta]

c-kermit, now fully open source, is at v9.0. ZTerm is at version 1.2. Both were last released in 2011.

Still no CCCP/KCP

[Anonymous Coward]

It still doesn't hold a candle to a properly configured MPC-HC/Lav filters/madVR installation, still has the same banding and washed-out color problems as usual, Daiz agreed, don't bother him about it.

Re:Still no CCCP/KCP

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear this a lot-- VLC sucks, uses bad codecs, supposedly looks worse than XYZ player, etc. But every time I actually try to use MPC-HC, I find that the ability to Seek within a video file is lacking. It either takes a long time to Seek, or it doesn't go exactly to the place I wanted it to. VLC seeks perfectly every time, no matter what video codec/container format I am viewing. And I _never_ have to install any 3rd party codec packs. To me, that's way more important than a minor difference in quality that I have never noticed (or taken the time to _try_ to notice). Then again, I like to download 720p instead of 1080p because the files are smaller, so quality is obviously not 1st priority. I'll keep using VLC, thanks!

Re: Still no CCCP/KCP

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC is one of the best players, and I'm one of those 1080p weenies. There is no detectable loss of quality for them.
The two areas that I have noticed issues are: full DVDs - particularly those that interleave and any interlaced video. For some reason, VLC default settings have noticeable h bands

Re:Still no CCCP/KCP

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll admit I haven't used VLC in a while but I found the opposite to be true. For the longest time VLC insisted on snapping to keyframes when seeking where as MPC-HC would go to the exact frame you wanted. I like recommending VLC to non-technical users as it's the best all in one solution for playing media files but with the right configuration and addons (LAVsplitter, ffdshow, madVR, etc.) mpc-hc does a much better job. It also renders fonts a lot better.

Re:Still no CCCP/KCP

[fermion]

Everyone says that software like VLC can't succeed, but it can and has. And it has in the tradition of Kermit, that provided a good enough, even better, experience than anything else. Both reliability and resilience. Back in the day work would not have gotten done without Kermit. Now media would be useless, particularly on MS Windows machines, without VLC. Everything else is too worried about DRM to be functional. I have even seen corporate caving into the reality that they are going to have to depend on GNU software(I know some Kermit software is closed, but the protocol is open, and the openness is what allowed us to work efficiently).

Re:Still no CCCP/KCP

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. I have the opposite problem. Not only is seeking in VLC slower, but it seems to ignore the preceding keyframe after seeking to a new position, resulting in a smeared mess until the next keyframe (usually a scene change). I've also never installed any codecs, in either Windows 7 or 8. So far plays every file I've throw at it.

Re:Still no CCCP/KCP

[dinfinity]

You should try MPC-BE: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/
It's a fork of MPC-HC and it has thumbnail previews while seeking (like Youtube).

Also: 'codec packs'?
ffdshow-tryouts: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow-tryout/
and/or LAV: https://code.google.com/p/lavfilters/
There hasn't been the need for anything else for years.

Finally: when it comes to 'quality', proper framerate matching is way more noticeable than spatial resolution of the video. Using CTRL+J in MPC-HC or MPC-BE (using the Custom EVR or madVR) helps getting addictively good results.

Still sucks

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

I mean ok, yes, it plays everything under the sun. But not very well.

For something as widely popular and prolific as VLC, I simply don't understand why its not the pre-eminent media player that rivals anything on the market...without any compromise. The UI of VLC sucks, still, especially tablet incarnations of it, and while it might load a video, often the video craps out even though it plays perfectly fine on other dreaded "closed source" media players. Simply being able to load a video format is not "support" of that video format, it should play flawlessly and have all the capabilities to track throughout the movie with having it hang for several minutes. Its the 21st century, I shouldn't have to wait for video to load regardless of what format it is.

VLC is the prime example debunking the myth that open source software is better because its community developed. If the community actually invested more effort into improving VLC code rather than just lauding its superiority then VLC would actually be the best media player on the market.

Re:Still sucks

[kekx]

You do realize that the glitches that you complain about are due to VLC avoiding patented, closed source solutions? In this light they are actually doing awesome work!

Re:Still sucks

[geekoid]

I have none of those issues when using it. Mabye it's you?

Re:Still sucks

[cyber-vandal]

And that's the other major problem with OSS: "I don't have the issue therefore it isn't happening to anyone and you're just an idiot".

Re:Still sucks

[StoneyMahoney]

Show me a commercial media player with better support for video formats than VLC.

Re:Still sucks

[StoneyMahoney]

I have none of those issues when using it. Maybe it's your use case?

Fixed that for both of you.

Re:Still sucks

[contrapunctus]

I don't know why VLC developers hate frame-by-frame.
If I want to read something on a piece of paper in a video let's say, I can't just advance one frame at a time.

Re:Still sucks

[sjames]

I have never had any problem with it, what in the world are you doing to cause it such a problem?

Re:Still sucks

[Hatta]

I'm marking this one WORKSFORME.

Re:Still sucks

[serviscope_minor]

And that's the other major problem with OSS

Seriously, the "waaaa it broke!!11one!" type of bug reports are equally useless for both closed and open software. Not only that, in neither model do they get fixed.

In both models, the developers complain about the stupidity of getting such bug reports---the internet is full of whinging developers of closed software complaining about users.

The *only* difference is that the OSS mailing lists are public so you get to see the whinging.

Re:Still sucks

[Ark42]

I have the same issues he sees, and pretty much gave up on VLC. Why does MPC-HC work so much better, and feel so significantly less bloated? Isn't that all open source too?

Re:Still sucks

[Ark42]

Really? I have no problem with MPC-HC just using the keyboard arrows to do that in just about any video. Some videos don't like going backward one frame though.

Re:Still sucks

[ledow]

As I state time and time and time again to my clients:

If I can't reproduce it, I probably can't do anything to fix it.

- Show me the computer that does it.
- Show me the actions that make it happen (it doesn't have to be PERFECTLY reproducible, just enough that I stand half-a-chance of going through the debug logs. / debugger and finding out WHAT crashed / went wrong).
- Show it happening, right now, in front of me, somehow.

If it's really that prevalent a problem, it's hard to imagine that the above isn't trivially possible. If it's hard to trigger or obscure and requires very particular inputs (e.g. a single example of a particular corrupt file or similar), then a) it's probably not a massive world-wide issue, b) how do you expect anyone to fix it without being in that same situation themselves?

Open/closed source makes NO difference. It's simple debugging. When my network "breaks" and "doesn't work", I need to be able to see it do it. Without seeing it, I can only stab in the dark at potential fixes unless you're describing a problem I know very well already. Without seeing it, I can't even tell if it's not just your computer that's broke and not the network (or application, or website, or whatever).

The amount of "fixes" I see every day just by being in the room with the people who constantly report "major problems" that impact that work every day and stop them working, which resolve themselves by the sheer presence of me standing in the room watching them try to make it happen again is unbelievable. In some cases, I'm sure there is a problem that will trigger eventually and I'll see it and stand a chance of fixing it. But for 99.9% of those problems, we get to that stage because people are ADAMANT that something is broken that I am responsible for and when they come to demonstrate it in front of my superiors to try to explain why they've got NO work done, they are completely unable to. For days on end. With a dozen people around their computers constantly trying to break it deliberately.

The problem evaporates under inspection because - actually - it's usually not a problem at all, or they are doing something they shouldn't (and know full well, so don't reproduce that in their demonstrations), or our offer to replace/rebuild the crappy old machine they insist on using that's the only trigger for the problem is denied because of personal attachment to that broken, crashing, corrupt setup.

If you cannot reproduce a bug, even 1% of the time, in front of someone who has an idea how to debug it then - closed source or not - it's almost impossible to fix. And the more stab-in-the-dark fixes we try, the more frustrated you will be that they don't work.

Demonstrate it. Capture it on video. Provide debug logs. It's not hard on a general-purpose machine capable of running VLC to get such things (on smartphones, etc., it's infinitely more difficult). File a bug. Then we can look at say "Hey, it looks like X is crashing, I wonder why?" or "Can I have a copy of that media file? Oh look, byte X is corrupt... we'll have to handle that case but I suggest you redownload it." or even "God, I don't know! Can we get some other people to try to reproduce this so we can fix it?".

I'm not saying your problem will be fixed. But it stands a better chance that no doing your end of the debug work on the ONLY machine that is exhibiting this problem and interfering with your use of the program (where there are millions of other happy users).

It's not a fob-off. It's not about open-source. It's simple - if you think something is broke, you can't just say "It's broke". You have to give a clue about what's broke or - in the worst case - show us it breaking.

You wouldn't do that to a photocopier engineer. Or a mechanic. Or a doctor. You wouldn't say "It doesn't work" and then not show them what's wrong, or give them the thing to let them play with it and try to reproduce it. What makes you think a software engineer is able to magically and remotely diagnose a problem they can't even see or reproduce?

Re:Still sucks

[tlhIngan]

I mean ok, yes, it plays everything under the sun. But not very well.

For something as widely popular and prolific as VLC, I simply don't understand why its not the pre-eminent media player that rivals anything on the market...without any compromise. The UI of VLC sucks, still, especially tablet incarnations of it, and while it might load a video, often the video craps out even though it plays perfectly fine on other dreaded "closed source" media players. Simply being able to load a video format is not "support" of that video format, it should play flawlessly and have all the capabilities to track throughout the movie with having it hang for several minutes. Its the 21st century, I shouldn't have to wait for video to load regardless of what format it is.

VLC is the prime example debunking the myth that open source software is better because its community developed. If the community actually invested more effort into improving VLC code rather than just lauding its superiority then VLC would actually be the best media player on the market.

The problem with VLC is endemic of a lot of open-source code. It's basically where the programmer is king and everyone else is a peon. Great if you're a developer, but it fails in that a modern non-trivial program needs much more than just a programmer (and that the project lead on most open source is a programmer doesn't help). Hell, programmers and engineers generally are the WORST people you want to develop certain aspects of your application - notably stuff related to UI, UX and documentation.

The issue is that open-source generally "ranks" people in terms of LoC submitted (or commits, or whatever). Designers, technical writers and other stuff don't usually generate things considered "valuable" to the developer - how many times have you heard this refrain - "you have the source, there's your documentation".

And the UI and UX is very important these days but also heavily discounted because they generally make life difficult because implementing a widget here instead of there seems like a pointless exercise. Especially when they want to re-do how things work (see all the pushback to how Apple decided to reinvent how people used computers by doing auto-save (and even allowing versioning and "going back In time" to see how a document looked at a prior point, even allowing one to manipulate a previous save).

That said, VLC's UI is generally sufficient (especially compared to many other media players), though it could use a bit of tweaking (like disassociating the mousewheel from the volume control - Allowing one to reduce the range of the volume control (or peg it at 100% so you don't accidentally set it to 117% or having to live with it at 98 or 105% because you can't get it back to 100%).

You do realize that the glitches that you complain about are due to VLC avoiding patented, closed source solutions? In this light they are actually doing awesome work!

Sorry, I don't buy this, because VLC implements plenty of patented stuff - besides all the MPEG formats (heavily patented) and image formats (most of which are patented), and audio formats (also patented).

If you created a player that was trying to avoid patented stuff, you'd be left with a player that does Vorbis, Theora, WebM and a few other formats. And be of little use because the formats people really use (h.264 currently, DivX/MPEG-4 ASP before) are all heavily patented.

Of course, there's some things where it's understandable - like DVD and Blu-Ray playback where the copy protection on both generally interferes with straight playback as they should. VLC does not have much in the way of fixing issues related to copy protection - being that it's a full time job. (See how much an AnyDVD license is and that you have to subscribe because it changes so much).

Re:Still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Tl;dr

Re:Still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't like it either. Clunky, wonky, slow, bloated. I prefer MPlayerX.

Re:Still sucks

[Bengie]

If I can't reproduce it, I probably can't do anything to fix it.

I fix quite a few issues that are not reproducible, by using my understanding of theory. Detailed logs with timing info, error messages, etc can give good context, then you look at the problems and theorize how the difference systems communicate, their timings, and which popular algorithms are used, and suddenly you have a good shot at solving the non-reproducible pathological case that has been driving everyone nuts.

Re:Still sucks

[the_other_chewey]

I don't know why VLC developers hate frame-by-frame.

They don't.

If I want to read something on a piece of paper in a video let's say, I can't just advance one frame at a time.

You can. Try pressing "E"...

Re:Still sucks

[akahige]

You CAN do frame by frame advance: just hit "e".

Re:Still sucks

[contrapunctus]

Thank you, it wasn't there a few years ago and not easy to find (you just made my life a lot easier). You can find discussion groups with people begging for the feature in 2005 and being told that it's against the very nature of VLC to have that. I guess I stopped waiting for it...

Re:Still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

and no one can prove you wrong since the issue cannot be reproduced....

When they say "I swear it was just doing it... until you came over here." I tell them "That's because I scared it into submission."

Re:Still sucks

[GreyWanderingRogue]

Allowing one to reduce the range of the volume control (or peg it at 100% so you don't accidentally set it to 117% or having to live with it at 98 or 105% because you can't get it back to 100%)

This was driving me nuts. I finally figured a way around it though. For me, each click of the scroll wheel moves it by 1/8, so 8 clicks from the highest or lowest value puts it back at 100%. Scroll wheel all the way to 0 (min) or 200% (max), then scroll wheel back to 100%. It will hit it on the nose.

Re:Still sucks

[infogulch]

Videos are meant to play forward, and codecs take advantage of this for compression. A common way to capitalize on this property of video is to use two different types of frames, usually named A and B frames.

A frames contain the complete data for that frame.
B frames refer to the previous frame and only have data on the changes that need to be made to the previous frame to make the current frame. (e.g. "move this section 2px to the right", "this little section has these completely new pixels...") **Note: B frames can be stacked.**

Why use B frames at all? They greatly improve compression. Think about shots in scenes where very little changes over the course of the shot, like a standoff in a western duel; there could be 10 full seconds where the only thing that changes in the shot is some tumbleweed blowing across the road. With B frames, it only has to store the tumbleweed on each frame along with some other very small changes, and there could be several hundred B frames in a row.

Playing forward is easy, just keep a copy of the current frame; if an A frame comes along, completely overwrite the current frame and display it; if it's a B frame, make the listed changes to the current frame and display it.

But if you're playing in reverse, what happens when you get a B frame? The player doesn't know what the "current" frame is since the current frame is built in forward order, so to do it correctly the player would have to walk back until it finds an A frame, then play all the B frame changes to it until it gets to the frame we want.

There are other complications to playing in reverse as well. For example, frames can have very different lengths. The length of each frame is recorded at the beginning of the frame, so to find the next frame you add the length of the current frame to the current position in the file. What about the previous frame? Where does it start? Since a frame could be any size and any type (A or B) you have to jump back the maximum frame length and search forward until you get some data that looks like the beginning of a frame.

It's not impossible, but playing highly compressed video in reverse (or stepping back frame by frame) can be very complex.

Re:Still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why do all the other video players not suffer from these glitches, while still being unencumbered by patended/commercially licensed portions? Really, step out of the denial - VLC is slow, bloated and wonky.

Re:Still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather, WORKSFORYOU.

Re:Still sucks

[Inda]

Just a quick note: It plays all audio files I chuck at it too.

I know these are used within the AV containers, so there's no reason not to play them, but it's another tick in the box. I stopped using the excellent FooBar2000 a while back because VLC really does plays everything I chuck at it.

That's not to say there aren't problems with it. There have been memory problems in the past, artifacts while seeking, overly complex streaming and converting options, but these are all minor.

I would like more interface options. The minimal interface is not minimal enough in my eyes.

Re:Still sucks

[cyber-vandal]

I've never seen it either but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened to the OP.

Re:Still sucks

[cyber-vandal]

I'm well aware of what you're saying but I see this time and again on here where someone says they have an issue and they are immediately denounced as a liar, shill or idiot. It just gets a bit tiresome.

Re:Still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

The end user doesn't give a shit and rightly so. VLC doesn't work as well as closed source video players, that's all that matters.

You open source zealots need to get it out of your head that simply being "open" is not an excuse for poor quality.

Re:Still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

They are freeware, not commercial, but KMPlayer and PotPlayer have better format support and features built in AND are extensible, which VLC is not. That fact that VLC only recently got hardware acceleration is just pathetic. Also, how are subtitles working in VLC now? The last time I tried it, they didn't work very well. How about pixel shader support? The last time I tried VLC, it was still only capable of simplistic, software based post-processing.

Re:Still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, so VLC added support for MID, MOD, S3M, IT, 669, XM, MO3, D00, D01, ROL, SID, NSF, GYM, VGM, SPC and PSF formats? Or does everything you chuck at it only include MP3 and maybe OGG, thereby making your statements about VLC much less impressive.

Re:Still sucks

[Calabacin]

Cool, so VLC added support for MID, MOD, S3M, IT, 669, XM, MO3, D00, D01, ROL, SID, NSF, GYM, VGM, SPC and PSF formats? Or does everything you chuck at it only include MP3 and maybe OGG, thereby making your statements about VLC much less impressive.

Erm. It's funny that you should ask, as it DOES play most of those formats, if not all. I personally tested MID, MOD, S3M and IT.

Re:Still sucks

[Ark42]

That's great and all, and actually it's typically called I, P, and B frames, with B in this case being a frame that requires both the previous and the future I-frame information to base changes off of. Even with-out B-frames (which I'm not sure are actually used in real-world MPEG-2 or H.264, etc much anyway), the issue is MPC-HC has no trouble frame stepping forward, and VLC does, on the same videos.

Not to be a hater...

[metrix007]

But I've always preferred smplayer.

The client server architecture is generally unneeded for home use, and so is a kind of bloat.

Mplayer supports all codecs and is a statically compiled exe...you can take it with you on a thumbdrive....dont need to install it....works perfectly.

SMplayer is nice, lightweight...again supports all codecs...and has very nice features and is very configurable.

I never got why VNC became as popular as it did.

Re:Not to be a hater...

[TheGratefulNet]

vnc is far better than remote desktop for windows. I've had vnc sessions last for 3 years (finally had to shut the host down after a planned move).

oh wait, you meant vlc, didn't you?

vlc is good, also. ;)

Re:Not to be a hater...

[ledow]

You can take it with you on a thumbdrive, don't need to install it, it works perfectly.

It supports virtually all codecs (I remember some problems with old .RM files in the early days, but they were obsolete even before then).

It's a compiled .exe that has some interchangeable DLL's that sit in the same folder and can be swapped without waiting for a new binary release.

It's nice, lightweight, very nice features, very configurable, free AND has all the client/server stuff too.

Personally, SMPlayer (and MPlayer's) early history on Linux was horrible - there was no one GUI that was nice enough on it (I can remember a dozen "XPlayer" where X was just the GUI someone slapped onto MPlayer, and you often had to download the win32 codecs separately - the codec situation was a bit of a faff at times, and I managed to crash it quite a lot).

By comparison, the VLC I use and install every day on hundreds of computers to be the default DVD and media player? I never really witness it crash. It plays everything I throw at it (including obscure CCTV formats). It's tiny and will even run from a network share. And it works the same on Linux, Windows and everything else.

You can say a lot of the same for both MPlayer and VLC - the question really is which one you preferred when you first used it (and when that was), so it's hardly a surprise that some don't like one or the other.

Re:Not to be a hater...

[Hatta]

Personally, SMPlayer (and MPlayer's) early history on Linux was horrible - there was no one GUI that was nice enough on it

Why does a video player need a GUI anyway?

Re:Not to be a hater...

[Anonymous Coward]

So grandma can use it.

Re:Not to be a hater...

[jedidiah]

> vnc is far better than remote desktop for windows

VNC is a festering pile. It's not better than anything. It's not even better than X. Never mind RDP.

Re:Not to be a hater...

[jedidiah]

Grandma probably won't do anything beyond start it and stop it.

Fancy seeking controls? Grandma will probably look at you like you just grew a second head if you mention any of that stuff.

That's the problem with pandering to the biggest idiot you think you can find. Chances are that their usage of tech will be so limited and rudimentary that even the most basic tool is adequate.

Re:Not to be a hater...

[DanTheManMS]

Replying to clear my karma rating. Put "flamebait" on the wrong reply by mistake.

Re:Not to be a hater...

[metrix007]

All of those positive attributes apply to mplayer,e xcept mplayer doesn't need any additional dll's and is much easier to configure.

And really, Linux doesn't matter here. VLC is popular because of windows users who use it...while Linux users use it to, that isn't why it's popular and famous among non techies...

Basically Mplayer is smaller, easier to manage, more configurable and less buggy. Not sure why VLC holds the title in the peoples eye.

money

[Anonymous Coward]

Is anybody paid to develop vlc? (I mean something except the donations)

Re:Better alternatives:

[Anonymous Coward]

PotPlayer + CoreAVC. There is no better video player and h.264 codec.

Still no US/Canada release for VLC for Android...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any particular reason VLC for Android will run on my friend's UK Nexus 7 but not my US Nexus 7?

Somethings changed

[clickclickdrone]

I have a video which is apparantly MJPEG (according to gSPOT). It plays fine on an older version of VLC on my old PC. On my new PC and new VLC, it plays but colours are all wrong and it's super grainy with interlacing showing. I thought the point of VLC was it used internal CODECs so not sure what's happening here. Even on the old PC, I've not found anything else that could play it so this is a bit of a worry.

Re:Somethings changed

[cellocgw]

I'd recommend you get ffmpeg or a similar converter and turn your old video into some newer filetype. Plus, assuming the conversion works, you'll know for sure exactly what codec the new file is using.

Re:Somethings changed

[Anonymous Coward]

Does your newer PC have a slower hard drive? MJPEGs are pretty big compared to other formats.

Re:Somethings changed

[clickclickdrone]

>Does your newer PC have a slower hard drive?
No, quite the opposite, it's hugely faster all round. Interesting thought though.

Turning off the computer

[enriquevagu]

Yet still it does not support turning off the computer, despite being a feature requested for years. That's the ONLY missing feature which prevents it from being my default video player

Re:Turning off the computer

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you start a video in bed and drift off to sleep & then the player shuts down the machine for you? I'm not sure I understand what this would be for otherwise. But I don't really turn my computer off either.

Re:Turning off the computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Answering my own post, I guess that's the reason for this feature. https://wiki.videolan.org/How_to_shut_down_computer/ has a workaround.

Re:Turning off the computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you on /. ? All you need to do is something like:

vlc mypron.avi && shutdown -h

Re:Turning off the computer

[Anonymous Coward]

That would work if VLC exited after playback is finished. Unfortunately, it doesn't, it just stops playing but continues to run and await further instructions.

Re:Turning off the computer

[the_other_chewey]

You can activate "play and exit" in the playlist settings, which does exactly what you want.

Alternatively, putting "vlc://quit" as the last item in a playlist will also quit VLC after it is done playing.

Re:Turning off the computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not create a .bat file to use task scheduler to do it for you.

Re:Turning off the computer

[hobarrera]

It also doesn't allow me to read my email. I'll stick to emacs, and migrate to VLC only when I can do my email on it!

Great player missing some key things though

[Tronster]

VLC is a fantastic free program, but the attitude some/one of their devs have towards it's users is disheartening for the project as a whole.

A friend recorded a video with her phone, and held it so the video was taken in "portrait mode" vs. "landscape mode". On a PC I was surprised when VLC was unable to correctly orient itself as I was use to my Mac's native application always orienting properly.

I spent the time looking for solutions on their forum and the devs responses is nothing short of arrogant:
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/7766

Essentially users are told this is not a bug in VLC because the videos use a non-standard way of marking the video as rotated. Further they go on to say if a user wants to look at it, as it was shot, they need to manually tweak the rotation on the transform for playback. After a 7 step menu navigation process, this has the side effect of having to change the transform back for the next video you wish to play if it was shot in landscape mode. Essentially this has to be done on a video-by-video basis.

I'm hoping there are some Open Source projects that actually implement this correctly, but from the few I've tried so far, they all seem to have the same bug as VLC when it comes orientation. Standard or not, ignoring this rotation bit is rendering the program as crippled for 100,000's of people shooting videos this way. Coincidentally, I haven't found a commercial program that is subject to the bug, everyone I've tried (e.g., Quicktime, Adobe Premier, etc...) renders it properly.

I can always hope that, eventually, someone on the team will see the value in implementing this fix.

Re:Great player missing some key things though

[cdrnet]

So, what was Apple's attitude when you asked them why they couldn't implement this the standard way? After all, its seems Apple is doing it wrong, not VLC.

Re:Great player missing some key things though

[Blue Stone]

I thought that one of the points to VLC was that it got shit to work.

That's always been my impression of it, when after exhausting all other players to try to get something to work, I used VLC and it just did.

It's one of VLC's USPs (unique selling points) and I thought was why it was (among other things) held in high esteem and has such a good reputation.

Re:Great player missing some key things though

[wonkey_monkey]

Is there any kind of standard to adhere to?

The real solution to this problem is to apply an electric shock to any phone user who tries to record a portrait mode video.

Re:Great player missing some key things though

[Anonymous Coward]

Has this bug been reported? The bug you link to is a completely different problem.

Re:Great player missing some key things though

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC is a fantastic free program, but the attitude some/one of their devs have towards it's users is disheartening for the project as a whole.

A friend recorded a video with her phone, and held it so the video was taken in "portrait mode" vs. "landscape mode". On a PC I was surprised when VLC was unable to correctly orient itself as I was use to my Mac's native application always orienting properly.

I spent the time looking for solutions on their forum and the devs responses is nothing short of arrogant:

Dude, whoever was insistent to reopened an Invalid bug, used an attached word document as their only source for reopening it. I don't know what's in it, nor do I care to. If it was one of those screenshot embeds, a png would have been sufficent, and if their was documentation in could have been in the bug report itself. Doing that on more conservative project would get you ignored or rediculed, since it's a basic courtesy. That dev at least acknowledged that you could submit a fix if you believed it to be that important, instead of tossing your attachment and email to /dev/null.

Nothing personal, but please, read this before submitting another bug.

Re:Great player missing some key things though

[Anonymous Coward]

*there ... in it it could
*ridiculed

Re:Great player missing some key things though

[Tronster]

Thank you, you are correct, in haste I posted a bug which appears to be related to screen rotation but not the one iPhone users have.

IIRC the post was in the forums, and it was answered in a similar manner as these bug reports, e.g., it's not a standard so VLC doesn't consider it a "bug", if a user requires this extra functionality they need to take the appropriate steps to manually change the rotate transform in settings.

Just searching through the forum brings up various threads related to users asking for this functionality (searched on "rotate iphone"):

Reading through them now it appears that the issue, more specifically, is that EXIF tags are stored with the video clips that VLC is not reading.
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=79068&p=260277&hilit=rotate+iphone#p260277

Re:Great player missing some key things though

[caseih]

Maybe it's their wrong-headed way of addressing the scourge of vertical videos. Not sure if I blame the person making the video or the phones for not automatically cropping the video to make the aspect ratio sane (1:1 or 4:3 at the very least). Can't stand vertical videos. It's like looking through a crack in a door.

Seriously until I saw this video, I always thought vertical videos resulted from a bad encoding job: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt9zSfinwFA

Re:Great player missing some key things though

[hobarrera]

Don't fix what's not broken.
VLC plays videos as it should, and respects standards. If you phone saves rotation in a non-standard way, it's your phone's recording app that needs fixing: why don't you go and complain to then instead? You've probably even paid them too, so they have more obligation to fix stuff.

Not pushed to Automatic Update Yet

[neorush]

On 2.0.8 Twoflower: Help -> Check for updates = You have the latest version of VLC media Player :-(

Re:Not pushed to Automatic Update Yet

[hobarrera]

Maybe it's not on your distro's repos yet. Switch to testing, or wait for a day or two (it's already in the main repos for arch).

missing

[Zurd3]

One big missing feature : Playing 3D movie (side by side, top-down)

Re:missing

[sirber]

One big missing feature : Playing 3D movie (side by side, top-down)

sure.. that's wha most people want to do

Re:missing

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be when the Occulus launches.

Re:missing

[BeCre8iv]

VLC has scripting a function

Build it and they will come

Re:Still no US/Canada release for VLC for Android.

[jonr]

I got my Nexus 7 in the USA, and it works fine...

Re:VLC

[Anonymous Coward]

My children would indicate otherwise. Now, if we could just get you out of your mom's basement, you too, could find a women.

Does it fix AirPlay?

[gman003]

I use VLC to stream music to the office AirPort (I flat-out refuse to install iTunes to do so "properly"). There's a way to do so, using some weird streaming flags, and under 1.1 it mainly works, although you can't change volume on the fly. 2.0 broke this, although it also added Blu-Ray support so I ended up having to install both. Being able to go back to a single version would be nice - can anyone confirm whether AirPlay works again?

Re:Does it fix AirPlay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use airfoil. It's not free, but does exactly what you need, quite well, and without the hassle.

Re:Still no US/Canada release for VLC for Android.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the nightlies on my US Nexus 7, Verizon S3 and have previously used them on a Thunderbolt and a rooted Nook Color. I was referring to the Play Store release.

VLC is great

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC is great and just got better: it is portable!!! I love this app and have used it for years. It has played every video codec I have thrown at it, has never crashed, has great features (fix lip sync, slowmo, etc), great shortcut keys (f for fullscreen etc), I have been running it in a XP vbox VM dedicated to multimedia because of VLC's bad habit of taking over audio extensions (foobar's realm). Now, with this portable version that doesn't steal audio file extensions, I'll actually place it on the metal with the rest of my portable apps (textpad, foobar, fsviewer, etc). Open source software proves time & time, it can best commercial sw and VLC is a great contributor to that idea.

Do

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they have a better icon, yet?

Re:Do

[Anonymous Coward]

The icon always reminds me of Toystory 2...

Re:Better alternatives:

[xQuarkDS9x]

K-Lite Mega Codec pack with MPC-HC on Windows is the best video player period. Even offers you the ability to use ffdshow codecs or the newer and better IMHO quality LAV codecs. If you play music on Windows Foobar2000 is also the best. The one thing that pisses me off about VLC is that for year's people have been asking for a reliable bookmark function so that you can add a bookmark while playing a video as an example and it works, but the second you close VLC the bookmarks are lost until you use an evil kludge fix of adding the bookmark, then saving a playlist file and loading said playlist file will make VLC go to the bookmark position. Why it's so hard for them to actually save bookmarks between sessions doesn't make sense.

Add to that in regards to embedded album artwork in OGG Vorbis music files VLC refuses to show it when lots of other players including Foobar2000 and Audacious as well as others show it just fine. Instead the default behaviour of VLC will be to "download" album art which 99% of the time is low quality pixelated crap and more often then not even the right album cover to begin with. If the people behind VLC would stop being assholes and fix these kinds of problems that have been mentioned before and ignored for years then more people would use VLC again. Until they pull heads out of asses though which may never happen I don't care how many "re-writes" or "new cores" they do it's still the same player that "plays practically everything but is brain-dead in some area's".

Youtube links

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC 1.1.11 plays very nicely timestamped signed youtube links like this:

http://r17---sn-h5q7dn7l.c.youtube.com/videoplayback?upn=Iv0wJm9Q968&cp=Kr5T78Le5/9NUUNON19KR0FEOk1fTkl6YVFtMDcz&id=452a6ad11e8a8121&mv=m&sparams=cp,id,ip,ipbits,itag,ratebypass,source,upn,expire&mt=1380106168&sver=3&expire=1380129387&itag=43&ratebypass=yes&ipbits=8&key=yt1&ip=xx.xx.xx.xx&ms=au&fexp=906398,911417,900371,916625,929310,924606,916914,929117,929121,929906,929907,929922,929923,929127,929129,929131,929930,936403,925724,936310,925720,925722,925718,925714,929917,906945,929933,929935,929939,939602,939604,937102,906842,927704,913428,920605,912715,919811,932309,913563,919373,930803,908536,938701,931924,934005,940501,936308,909549,935006,900816,912711,934507,907231,936312,906001&source=youtube&signature=49FFD70C1FE71392DB52CE87BD9579A7E07DEC11.63F1FD9A62E52C6E171FC0231E87BAA96B23EBF2

which I compose them built on the fly for my playlists to play at 2x speed but since VLC 2.0x can't play them. Strangely the downloaded file plays just fine.

And unfortunately the direct youtube links like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clxMoi46NXM seems that are long gone since 1.0x also since it only grabs the video title and stops.

Re:Youtube links

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind, spoke to soon. With 2.1.0 are working fine again and can use the ratebypass version to play them at higher speed!

Re:Youtube links

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, unfortunatelly VLC 1.1.11 still plays better youtube videos at increased speed for me. :/

SMPlayer does a better job.

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that SMPlayer offers better playback on some highly compressed videos than VLC, which suffers from stutter sometimes.

I'll have to try the new one to see if there are any improvements in this area, but I'm already on 2.08, so I sort of doubt it.

It's still a really cool product, though. The fact that it's free is wonderful. Any minor complaints people have need to be weighed against that all encompassing truth.

Re:SMPlayer does a better job.

[soundguy]

Same here. VLC has a hard time with Canon MXF containers, even though the codec inside is plain old mpeg2. The audio drops out after a few seconds and clicking around on the timeline a few times will seize the playback completely. SMplayer/Mplayer has no such issues. Neither one can handle RED's R3D format though.

VLC and MPC-HC shame all commercial apps

[Anonymous Coward]

It is an amazing thought that ONLY free software takes the playing of ALL types of video seriously on the desktop. MPC-HC even supports 'shaders', so if you are any form of competent programmer, you can create your own shader program to create special video output (like converting side-by-side 3D video files to red-cyan anaglyph output for viewing with those old red-blue glasses from the 1930s).

VLC began life as a project at French universities to allow streaming of video files across their networks. Now VLC is the go-to app for all difficult to play video files.

Everyone else's video playback app is usually a very bad joke (especially Apple and Microsoft), or a tiny subset of one of the aforementioned programs. In fairness, one or two other free projects focus on in-built 'super-shader' algorithms to provide the best visual options for up/down-scaling, but these are really for the same 'videophiles' that think gold plated HDMI cables will make a difference to the picture.

The only 'downside' to these free apps is that they hide most of their advanced functionality, and lack decent manuals. Many users curse the lack of certain features that these players *DO* support, but do not make obvious. Did anyone ever document the shader-mode programmability of MPC-HC, for instance?

Re:Better alternatives:

[Anonymous Coward]

PotPlayer is way better than MPC. It doesn't require any codecs even for hardware accelerated AVC/h.264, but it supports external codecs if you want to use better ones, like CoreAVC (the indisputable best) or LAV. You can also use a number of external splitters like Haali or Gabest to handle any oddball container formats. The sheer amount of options and controls PotPlayer offers puts everything else to shame. It supports many different renderers, like surface, overlay, OpenGL, VMR, EVR and Madshi. It has full pixel shader post processing with easily customizable shaders and comes with many different types of colour leveling, smart sharpening, denoise, deinterlace, SBS or OAU 3D shaders. It has direct support for every major subtitle format, including ASS with full font and colour support. There are way too many things that PotPlayer does that I can't even begin to list them all unless I were to write an essay.

I'll agree with you on foobar2000 though. I've been using it for years. No other audio player software even comes close.

Re:Better alternatives:

[jedidiah]

Any option that includes "but you have to hunt down your own codecs" is an immediate usability fail.

VLC is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO it's the best free player out there.
My experience is that it plays everything I need, for free.
It plays the odd obscure thing that turns up, for free.
I think the VLC team does great work, for free.
Keep it up team. Your free work is doing great things.
To the complaining people: like anything in life you get what you pay for. VLC is free - and worth much more than many pay-for products.

Now get back to work on VLMC

[Anonymous Coward]

I would really love them to start working on the Video Lan Media Creator, or whatever those initials stood for. Sadly it died at version 0.1. :-(

Still broken on low-bandwidth streams

[Anonymous Coward]

After opening the TWiT low bandwidth stream it takes 30 seconds to start the stream, picks the higher resolution, then switches to the low resolution that my 256Kbit connection can handle, and after 10 seconds of playing that fine, the video freezes while the audio continues to play and the UI becomes unresponsive.

Re:Better alternatives:

[Anonymous Coward]

Then it's a good thing that nobody said that.

Re:Better alternatives:

[Anonymous Coward]

Any option that includes "but you can't use your own codecs" is an immediate usability fail.