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VLC Acquiring Lots of New Features
jones_supa writes: Two weekends ago an update for VLC media player was shared during a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM. Lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf covered VLC's continued vibrant development, as well as features that are coming for VLC 2.2 and VLC 3.0. VLC 2.2.0 will feature automatic, GPU-accelerated video rotation support, extension improvements, resume handling, support for new codecs/formats and rewrites to some of the existing formats, VDPAU GPU zero-copy support, x265 encoder support, etc. Further out is VLC 3.0.0, which is planned to have Wayland support, GPU zero-copy support for OpenMAX IL, ARIB subtitle support, HEVC / VP9 hardware decoding on Android, a rework of the MP4 and TS demuxers, and browsing improvements. The VLC FOSDEM 2015 presentation is available in PDF form. The VLC Git shortlog can be used to follow the development of the project.
VLC has always performed pretty badly compared to other media players, but whatever file I throw at it, it Just Works
Well maybe subtitle support could be better too.
No news about supporting Google Chromecast? The discussion on the forum[1] has been dead quite some time. I can see in the git repo that there actually *is* code present (cast.cpp) and I would guess that this would be a really appreciated feature.
[1]: https://forum.videolan.org/vie...
...fix the totally cluttered preferences please.
Have they fixed the issue where other software transitioning to fill screen mode sometimes causes VLC to crash? Pretty sure I've been reporting that crash for about 5 years now.
Good candidate for Zawinski's law. This thing needs email support.
Task Mangler
NT
This has not been working for ages on OSX and other platforms.
A listing of new technical features and not a listing of UX 'upgrades'.
What can this do that emacs can't?
Play audio/video files.
What can this do that emacs can't?
Keyboard shortcuts that don't give you carpal tunnel in 2 minutes flat.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It crashes a LOT, and has a really hard time playing a lot of files. Gray screen, stuttering, long time to start, etc...
Personally, I would like to see them add frame-interpolation to VLC. There is Smooth Video Project that can be used with several other players and you could use it even with XBMC, though I don't know if it works with Kodi anymore, but SVP doesn't work with VLC. I really do enjoy watching videos in 60 fps, it's like a night and day compared to the usual 23.976 or 25 fps, even if it's just interpolated.
Is it just me?
"VLC 2.2.0 will feature automatic, GPU-accelerated video rotation support, extension improvements, resume handling, support for new codecs/formats and rewrites to some of the existing formats, VDPAU GPU zero-copy support, x265 encoder support, etc."
I have little interest in this. It seems to be performance improvements. As someone who just rolls out VLC in preference to WMP on all my domain-connected machines, some of them with only Intel-video, I don't actually have any performance problems. I have ten times more problems with just random crashes etc. but fortunately VLC is small enough to just load up again. But performance? What I throw at it, gets rendered to the screen.
So what's new in VLC 3?
"Further out is VLC 3.0.0, which is planned to have Wayland support, GPU zero-copy support for OpenMAX IL, ARIB subtitle support, HEVC / VP9 hardware decoding on Android, a rework of the MP4 and TS demuxers, and browsing improvements."
Again, mostly "performance improvements". The support for other formats is unlikely to ever be used by any of my users but that's the reason I use VLC - just throw stuff at it and without needing codec packs, it just plays what it can.
I'm sure there's someone out there doing 4K on multi-screens and needs a beefy setup and a top-notch bunch of hardware accelerated features. But, to me, I'd rather we didn't have that and instead fixed the crashes in VLC which seem common enough that someone on a VLC team just loading in random web videos all day would hit several a day at least, that they could then start down to road to debug,
If anything, all this passing off to hardware is probably MORE likely to cause me problems than anything else - no doubt the support won't be perfect and it'll put the onus of rendering properly on the graphics driver rather than the VLC software itself.
While I agree that the prefs interface could use improvement, please don't suggest they reduce the number of preferences. I use VLC because it's configurable to my tastes.
Or howabout a playlist function that doesnt choke when you toss more than 10 files at it.
mplayer and plain commandline ?
Sadly, it doesn't fucking work
I have a supported video card (nvidia 2xx) and errythang
But when I try to play a video in MPC, I just get the audio. Works fine in VLC.
Maybe when SVP works, VLC can worry about working with it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
More time spent on more features? How about fixing long standing bugs eg browsing uPnP on Win 7 64bit crashes VLC. Everytime.
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=117206
Been at least 12 months
...but its been missing some basic features for years (in the windows and android versions):
1) preserve playlist between invocations of the programme (playlist resets every time you close vlc)
2) preserve state of music library as soon as you make changes to it (add music to vlc library, don't close vlc, library never gets saved)
SURELY NOT!!!!!
I wish they would implement the ability to stream to UPnP devices like a TV over ethernet/wireless. I can't watch movies without the audio compressor plugin. The music and movie sound engineers need to trade places. Going from whispers to ear blasting volumes does not make movies any better. And before you ask no I don't have a surround setup, only left and right Infinity Qe speakers. Surround sound is a cheap gimmick.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Still no word on gapless playback for audio files? It would be a great music player, but lack of gapless playback is a showstopper. No one can listen to side 2 of Abbey Road with gaps and stay sane.
It is hard to design a really good preferences interface. Much easier to just rip everything out and pretend that's good enough for everyone. ... 2 ... 1.
Kind of like it is hard to govern well, easier to just starve the beast and pretend that's good enough for everyone. Initiate hackertarian cognitive dissonance in 3
x264 video (on Windows, at least, but I'm not sure why it would be any different on another OS) stutters on playback unless you disable one of the postprocessing options, and it's been that way for ages, so I ditched it and went with MPC-HC.
It's subtle, and I think most people just don't notice it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I understand the main developer is mostly deaf, but please start accepting patches to fix the bad audio. I work in IT for a company that makes Facebook and casual games, and VLC has gotten so bad that I can typically tell when a coworker is using it just by the way the distorted audio sounds. The idea that it is OK to add a slider that adds massive clipping to the audio is ridiculous. With digital audio, you can't go past 100% without bad distortion. The odd order harmonics on speech are especially grating.
Just spent a good deal of time looking for solutions for Linux and I can't seem to find one, that's too bad. SVP is windows-only :(
Twinstiq, game news
Posting AC cuz I just don't care anymore.
I know this is probably redundant since others may have mentioned it, but I think this deserves its own topic... you know... a playlist that remembers where it was the last time?
Zoom player does it.
Winamp does it.
How hard is it to set a currently playing flag in the playlist, and when you close the program it saves the playlist with the current file marked? The only way it will remember for me is to delete the files I just watched from the playlist, and then save it.
I am not a programmer. I am not a computer scientist. I am not a math nut. I am not a rocket scientist. I am not a frickin lawyer for that matter...
This does NOT sound difficult to me!
Edit text?
Too bad as VLC has become so slow to start that I have to set an alarm clock to let me know when it is ready to play a video.
With these enhancements I'll probably have to get a calendar.
I wish VLC would acquire a usable interface. I keep switching back and forth between MPC-HC and VLC (on Windows) because MPC has a decent UI and VLC has features that I need sometimes, but I can't use VLC as my everyday player because the interface drives me mad.
I guess it'd do like smart TVs with their "motion flow" or "soap opera mode": guess the motion vector between successive frames and interpolate along it.
I wonder if/when they might get blu-ray support? DVD support has tended to be a gray area for a lot of things, but VLC happily supported it. No such luck for Blu-Ray BD+ yet (I thought it had been cracked, but perhaps not).
VLC's biggest problems is it has horrible response lag (500ms to respond to a pause?!), take friggin' ages to load compared to every other media player you can get.
Other stupid problems include broken hardware MPEG1 acceleration (Which they always blame on the graphics chip and drivers...), and general random crashiness when manipulating the playlist, not to mention a weird UI hijacking thing that seems to trigger if more than one VLC instance is loaded.
They need to fix the core functions before they start adding feature bloat IMHO...
And when are they going to bring back MIDI support?!
Even with the excuse that Fluidsynth has some vague security exploit, I have a friggin' hardware MIDI chip on my soundcard that it could off-load soundfont and MIDI playback to!
At the moment I tend to use XMPlay and Mediaplayer Classic Home Cinema - In combination they blow VLC out the water in terms of responsiveness and performance.
I do still use VLC, but mainly for things that don't work properly in either of the other two.
There's a lot of hidden stuff in VLC, but these hot keys come from it's beginnings, it started as a music player something I hadn't known.
I'm coming close to claiming there isn't much you can't do with VLC, the problem is the program changes so much it doesn't keep up with the Wiki or other sources of how to's.
Can't rip that movie, heck VLC will copy it for you, not capture it but copy it to your specs. It is mentioned it's not a good choice and references a couple of programs that would serve you better.
VLC is a must have on hand for me - but the damnedest thing for me is while it's in my path and I know it is
C:\Windows\system32>path
PATH=C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysX\Common;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Window
s\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;D:\MISCPRGS;D:\MISCPRGS\aUPX;C:\Program
Files(x86)\VideoLAN\VLC;D:\MISCPRGS\BATfiles;C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\bin;C:\Program Files (x86)\Ult
raEdit\;D:\MISGPRGS\Audacity2x6\LV2
it won't start by calling it.
Target from Icon: "C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe"
Even put quotes on each end in the path, I'm embarrassed to say but was trying anything. It will run if called from it's own directory. It's the only program I've come across that won't run from a path. Mayhap's a syntax error, you'll never see it, but one showing to the better half and they spot it right off.
Process Explorer shows it's command line as simply: VLC. I just made a hot key for it.
I use VLC when I have to, because even with all the tweaking and technical magic I do, I cannot get Windows MP to reliably play all video formats, and/or reliably display all subs. I have gotten to the point that I can get MP to handle 90% of things, but there are still 10% of things that I have to boot up VLC.
Why use MP? Only one reason: Media Center uses MP. That's it. If I had a media center, and here's the important part, that I could use with a standard windows remote, that wasn't Windows and was't MP, I would do it in a heartbeat. While I have to do all sorts of trickery to get MP to work with anything, VLC just works, without a lot of fooling around.
So the ONE feature they could have added to VLC that would made a huge difference (and I am sure for a lot of others) it would be to add a Media Center interface and remote support. I have tried a number of third party VLC addons and skins that pretend to do the same, but unfortunately they all suck, and they all seem to be half done. Currently I can use my remote a little bit with VLC, but it is limited to play/stop and volume, that is it. I can't browse my library of videos, I have to physically walk over to my computer and click with a mouse to start the thing.
Anyway if they are looking to take over market share, that would be the way to do it. Frankly I am amazed they haven't yet.
I use VLC for anything video and it always works fine. A few weekends ago I tried its streaming feature. Not only is it needlessly complicated to configure, there appears to be no way to save the settings and after a few hours streaming it just dies. Currently settling on Plex, which is great when it works, but it often takes many tries to make it work.