Slashdot Mirror
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...
I would test a nightly build and then report your experience to bug #11060.
...fix the totally cluttered preferences please.
Hey! If a product isn't popular enough, it's because it doesn't have enough features!
The more features you have, the more likely someone will want to use the product for that feature. Look at Mozilla, for example.
Were you asleep in your "marketing for engineers" class?
(My personal foible: I stop and start videos a lot, and hunting with the slider to find out where I left off is a royal pain, so I googled "how to make VLC remember position". Big mistake.
VLC doesn't implement this simple feature, but you can get a plugin that does. Download and install the plugin (copy a DLL library to the install directory? That's totally something the end user should be doing in a mature product!)
The plugin creates a checkbox which you can then check to save your place when you stop viewing a movie. Woohoo! ...except that now VLC won't run at all, and you have to forcefully delete the plugins and reboot your system just to go back to the old version.
Who implements some of the obscure, little-used, weird options in VLC but doesn't give the user the option of saving their place?
VLC is totally something Franz Kafka would design.)
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.
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