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

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

[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

[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

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

Tl;dr

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: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.