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Ask VideoLAN President and Lead VLC Developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf Your Questions
VLC remains one of the most popular applications. First released over 15 years ago, VLC is open-source, and is available across multiple platforms including Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, ChromeOS, iOS, and it's coming to the Xbox One later this year. We thought it would be great to have Jean-Baptiste Kempf, President of VideoLAN non-profit organization (the maker of VLC media player). In addition, he is also a lead developer of VLC.
Leave your questions in the comments section below. Let's get this going.
Leave your questions in the comments section below. Let's get this going.
I recently installed the VLC app for FireTV stick and figured out how to stream from VLC on my PC. But I found that the VLC app couldn't work with a stream; it could only play files from network accessible storage like an SMB shared drive.
I'm not necessarily asking the developers here - can anyone tell me how to stream to my three FireTV sticks across the house? Do I need to replace the FireTV sticks with some other more capable device? Will the FireTV VLC app ever support streaming?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Greetings and many thanks for making such a great program, available on all my platforms!
Besides Christmas/winter holiday time, are there other special VLC Cone icons I've not seen yet?
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
VLV needs to add audio volume control to the iOS version of the app. Most of my videos have been recorded with a lower volume and not being able to increase it when needed limits the usefulness of mobile VLC. Also would be nice to resume the video playback in the mobile app.
Thanks. We use VLC a lot around here.
Although VLC is excellent in many areas the subtitle system I believe needs a lot of improvement. Why does the end user have to select the decoding of a particular subtitle, can it not be autodeteted?
Is it possible to make these requests to the VLC developer community and is it likely anyone would develop these specific feature enhancement?
Can you add an "Always do this" toggle to the Broken AVI index error dialogue? I run VLC on shuffle all day and this dialog breaks playback.
I would want to know how they keep VLC media player sustainable. As far as I know, there are no ads in the program, and they certainly don't bundle stupid programs with VLC.
I hate to ask for this because overall I'm anti-Microsoft, but I'm a systems administrator at a company and I can't seem to teach my users much of anything, any time I do they have turnover and it's lost. It would be great if there were some way to make VLC the player that worked with Power Point. For some gawd-aweful reason Microsoft thinks you need an Apple product to playback h.264 video in a Power Point presentation and we don't allow that anymore since it's pwned.
I just want to thank you for an awesome product. I use it as a baby monitor with an IP cam at home (no MS products there). I use it on my phone to play podcasts in my car, I love the ability to increase playback speed (that's a little "non-sticky" of a setting). I
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Apart from VLC -- and I can't thank you enough for this media player, it has made lives of millions easy -- what other projects you guys at VideoLAN are working on currently?
Did any company ever approach you guys for buying VLC?
Why isn't VLC on my Samsung Smart TV?
Why does VLC take so damn long to start up? When will you fix that?
I use VLC on my laptop for playing movies on planes. It'd be kind of nice to have a touchscreen-friendly UI for those situations. It's kind of a nuisance to remember keybindings or use the touchpad.
With Chrome dropping support for the NPAPI plugin interface, it's effective no longer supporting VLC in chrome. Mozilla has also started the process of deprecating the NPAPI interface as well.
Is there a plan to migrate the VLC plugin to work in Chrome and other browsers sans NPAPI? Or will I need to find a new favorite video plugin to use with RTSP video streams?
When will VLC be able to read 708 captions embedded in MXF wrappers, or other embedded pro-level broadcast formats?
Why is the UI so poor and counter-intuitive? Are there any UI specialists working on the project?
I don't respond to AC's.
I have an Xbox One, and its built-in media player just sucks. And there's no alternative! I know you guys have promised that VLC will be available later this year on Microsoft's gaming platform, but can you share exactly how long we have to wait. Also will VLC support HEVC files?
VLC 2.2.x has been out for some time now. Do you know when will VLC 3.0.0 released?
Since you already provide supportfor CSS encryption, in violation of the DMCA and similar laws, do you plan to provide support for playing files with DTCP encryption?
Currently, we live in an era where media players have become quite a bit more sophisticated. For example, Windows Media Player or iTunes offer some pretty advanced features for managing large libraries, integrate heavily within their ecosystems, and some even come with complete stores, where you can buy songs with a single click. On the other end, there's players such as Audacious that focus on playing music, and only on that - and the result is that you get a very speedy and lightweight player, and the support of winamp skins makes it possible to heavily personalize. What role do you think VLC plays in the ecosystem, and more specifically, where do you think you want to take the project in the future?
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
I heard a very long time ago there was development effort to support Chromecast, any idea on the time frame before it's released?
Are there plans to support streaming to Chromecast? the nightly builds for v3 contained at some point an experimental implementation but now it has disappeared. Is this something on the roadmap?
I hate signatures
VLC would be a great program if the playlist worked.
Video
Lan
C?
I gitz ta no!
Are you able to suck your own dick?
Why are you so hostile towards organisations? I run I.T. for a school and everytime I see the question of MSIs being brought up you take an "anti-enterprise" approach and reject it. Everything about VLC for Windows (configuration, installation, upgrading) seems hostile towards organisations and industry standard practices.
Thank you for the my favourite player. Are there any plans for seamless playing in VLC. I have some playlists with continuous tracks and it would be nice to not have the break.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
A video player can evolve only so much. You can add new codecs, but after a while, you really can't just keep adding new features, and I have noticed that VLC hasn't changed in years. What do you see as the future of VLC player? Is it in mostly maintenance mode from now on? Not that that is a bad thing.
Hi, great program! Thank you - longtime user here. Any plans to support streaming to ("fling to") players using DLNA or UPnP?
Many devices like WDTV, FireStick/Kodi, etc. support this protocol, and I can control them very easily from a media "player" PC. I prefer the PC's user interface over the crummy remote control UI's of the playing device(s).
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Hello and TYVM for VLC.
Would you consider implementing:
1) Step back one frame (useful when paired with step forward one frame).
2) Rewind (especially variable speed rewind, and with audio).
3) Manually seek to location even if media doesn't support seeking (by simply playing the file up to that point).
4) Finish at set time (automatically adjust play rate so that media will end at requested time) - I saw this on a DVD player once.
#1 and #3 I find myself wanting on a fairly regular basis.
Thanks.
Make sense, you stupid motherfucker. Your post is fucking incoherent.
OpenGL is fine and all, but VLC feels like it's being held back performance-wise. How are you guys planning to optimize playback at resolutions greater than 1080p?
Love the program, by the way... but like so many open source programs, there is a certain aesthetic panache that is lacking... the "community" should look into getting some real designers to finish off the UIs to their products in general, and for VLC in particular.
Why is it e.g. that when doing format conversion sometimes it just stops with an empty file. Where is the sanity checking? Also no options for working with particular systems, e.g. codecs that'll work with given combination of operating systems out of the box? It's annoying to convert to something that you reckon should open on other systems but only ever opens in VLC.
With operating systems becoming more and more secure, hackers are increasingly focusing on end user programs, such as VLC. Do you think the project needs work in this regard? If so, may I ask what your plans and ideas for improving it would be?
By the way, thank you for all of your hard work! VLC isn't my day to day player, but nonetheless it has come in handy many, many times, and my life is much easier because of it. I heavily appreciate your taking time out of your day to answer our questions! :)
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Can we ever expect VLC to "just work" with an off-the-shelf Blu-ray movie disc (AACS/BD+) ?
Any plans to support 360 degree videos, with or without a VR headset, especially under Linux (since Windows already has several players)? Support for 360 degree video without a VR headset would involve de-warping the image for display on a regular monitor and allowing scrolling. As for VR headsets, the Razer OSVR HDK 2 has Linux support now, and Valve claims to be working on Linux support for the Vive (but no ETA).
Related feature request entry:
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/16559
SPHVR is the only 360 degree video player for Linux that I have heard of so far, but it is still in early development:
http://www.vronlinux.com/articles/vr-on-linux-with-gst-plugins-vr-and-sphvr.18
As opposed to your completely worthless inane comments? I flamed you because you've contributed nothing of substance to the discussion, but made a destructive comment. Yes, the OP (which I didn't write) is obviously trolling, but your reply was incoherent nonsense. As for minorities and women not being interested, that's an absurd assumption to make.
Let's say that I live in a town and there's just one Mexican restaurant in the town. And let's say I go there a few times because I like Mexican food, and the owner berates me because he can. Because I find that interaction unpleasant, I stop going to that restaurant and instead just go to McDonald's. You might assume that, because I go to McDonald's frequently but never go to the Mexican restaurant, that I'm not interested in Mexican food. The reality is that I am interested, but the interaction with the owner is so unpleasant that it overwhelms my desire to eat Mexican food.
Assuming that women and minorities have no interest in STEM fields is really stupid. Maybe it's because of the unpleasant interactions with other people in those fields. Perhaps it's also because they're directed to other fields when they're young because people assume they shouldn't be in STEM fields.
You earned the flame for your ridiculously stupid comments and assumptions.
I use VLC to listen to audio streams every day (Thanx!). Sometimes I hear a new song and want to rewind to the beginning and save it locally. Is this something you might implement? Saving a video stream would be a nice benefit, but I find myself wishing to rewind (and optionally save) audio frequently.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
When is VideoLan Movie Creator gonna enter beta?
Probably when they've got developers working on it again :)
Legally they have to be an equal opportunity employer, what else are they supposed to do? I guess you should be asking more women and minorities to get CompSci degrees and applying. Thanks for playing the SJW bait game.
Do VLC has any particular approach to handling obsolescence? For example is a particular encoding is supported today, how likely is it to be supported in future versions? Are encodings deemed obsolete or historical removed? Or under what cases is support dropped?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf told me that he has been reading Slashdot pretty much every day since 2003!
When will VideoLan Movie Creator be released as beta?
Jean-Claude Van Dam?
Will there be an "official" way of playing blu-ray any day ?
What does he think about the answers of Hadopi (French content right management agency) ?
I thought that was the point of beta, get lots of developers working to refine a piece of software.
In a few months TTIP will be ratified and all development of FOSS will be banned as "anti-competitive". Given the retroactive nature of the compensative punishment as dictated by the treaties, how are you and your families going to cope with the millions of dollars in damages the industry will fine you with?
"Kempf" sounds a little too close to "Drumpf" for anyone's liking.
No more VLC!
You would have been better off biting the Godwin and saying "Kempf" sounds too close to "Mein Kampf".
Are you having problems with Windows 10 compatibility (and for that matter Windows Phone), or is MS just messing with you?
VLC worked in my Win8.1 phone, then stopped for no apparent reason (no Win update came through to do that). Can't find most of the music that's on the SD card. Xbox music has no problem. Tried de/reinstalling ... no joy.
Then there's W10. VLC worked great on Win7, but in 10 the Win32 client seems to have many problems with stream failures and broken/clicky sound, even from the local disk. Groove of course works fine. I need VLC in W10 to watch movies since Media Center is now dead. Don't make me use the de-contented app client, please!
rekt
Any plans to implement support for MPEG-4 Part 25?
There are other problems, For example that you can't have a black background bar around each line of the subtitles, just around the complete subtitle, which makes it way too large. My guess is that most developers don't care about subtitles much or come from countries where TV doesn't care about doing them right, either.
Also too close to voight-kampff. He must be a replicant.
Or to stick with the surname sitch "Moins Kempfs"
Bearing in mind how often we receive VLC updates, what is your opinion of Google's decision to "carve in stone" the StageFright media libraries into the /system read-only mount point on Android?
Stagefright patch breakdowns were of surprising number and duration: "...over the course of the last year of Android updates, Google has issued patches for 115 media server-related CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) flaws. Of those, 49 were found directly in libstagefright, with 35 in libmedia and 31 in libraries on which libstagefright depends."
A related question: if Google had approached you with the intention of burning the VLC player into the equivalent of ROM, would you have asked them to choose another player?
Thank you for creating and maintaining this great program
Don't be stupid; he's far too articulate and coherent - not to mention grammatically correct - to be any less than thirty.
Why is VLC so hideously bloated, slow, sluggish, compared to premium offerings like MPlayerX or MPV?
1. Why does not VLC allow selecting external sound track? Could support be added, please.
2. Why does not VLC support privilidged queuing in playlist? For example, playing music on random, but wanting to play few songs in order at some point. You select the songs and give them queue number, which the VLC then plays in order and after playing the queue, continues playing the playlist in random.
3. The VLC random needs either an additional or separate random mode, where songs are played only once, until the whole playlist is played through. It's annoying to have certain songs play many many times and others seem to never be played.
There are some plex channels that allegedly allow you to stream from vlc to plex.
I'd love to see something official from you guys that actually works well.
I could have vlc in so many places if it supported plex.
I suppose I can guess what your opinion of software patents is. :) However, how does it affect the VideoLAN project in practice? For example, how does it affect distribution to jurisdictions like the USA, and does it impact open-source contributions from developers in the USA? Do you have any practical advice for open-source projects that may come up against software patents?
If VLC were being redesigned from scratch today, what would you do differently? Are there any technical decisions or design choices in VLC's past that you now feel are mistakes?
Do you have any practical advice for those developing a highly modular plugin-based software architecture like VLC? The last time I tried to create a design like that it went horribly wrong and turned into a big hairball. How do you create a design that lets plugins transparently work together without creating a dependency hell?
How did the FBI at Slashdot get you to answer questions on Slashdot?
Cool program by the way. Best out there. Take care to keep it a cross-platform local / remote media player that doesn't do any connections that are not implicitly intended to be connected to ok?
Also do not hook into any of the Windows spyware features that would do this on behalf of an installed app. This is not a concern of course in Linux and FreeBSD, but do be aware that the FBI are in Debian staffing as well. They did kill Ian Murdock.
samefag
Any intention to move VLC to a media centre/media server type application?
With windows 10 nixing the WMC, many users have had to find alternatives, it might be a prime opportunity. While WMC was terrible in many respects it was pretty widely used. You really had to work your codecs in magical ways to make it play most formats. I've since moved to Plex, which is great, but has some of its own issues with some formats. VLC however plays everything and the kitchen sink I've found, if nothing else will play it, VLC will. That said however, most of us don't want to sit in front of our computers anymore and watch videos either.
When will AC3 audio decoding be added back? I hate using 2.3
Thank you.
Now that Android apps are heading to ChromeOS, do you plan to maintain dedicated (ARC based) ChromeOS version of VLC?
What's your favorite codec, past or present?
Are there any motions or intentions to adopt sandboxing, perhaps with the Chrome model of forking untrusted decoders?
FWIW, VMs have saved me from both ffmpeg and vlc exploits...
Just about every site that has a VLC video link or a VLC video file or program has been excruciatingly difficult to use, at least for me. Either nothing happens or have to download all kinds of extensions I don't recognize, etc. It seems one has to be a Linux/Scripting/Network guru to make it work. I pretty much don't even bother to view anything that is VLC, I consider it not available and look to alternate means.
mfwright@batnet.com
Dear me, remember our nice guests from VLC, whatever will they think of us? I know it's really that naughty troll's fault for asking about women and minorities like that - he knows how it upsets our basement-dwelling denizens - but that's really not an excuse for you to join in. I expected better of you, anon.
Love your team's work! Thank you!
Similar to toggling through subtitle languages and audio languages, it would be lovely if I could adjust the subtitle font size with a keyboard shortcut, instead of going through the menu then restarting VLC.
Also, what upcoming features are you most proud of?
How do you manage your code development? With so many proliferating codecs to manage out there, and so many different hardware products to Just Work on, how do you keep everything straight? on a shoestring budget?
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
I'd like to know if there are any plans for improvement to DLNA/uPnP media server playback in the future. I have at least 2-3 different media servers running on my FreeNAS for various media types, and I think the only time I see a uPnP server on VLC that works well is when I use the Microsoft Windows media sharing feature on another computer instead. Occasionally the program will pick up the presence of another server, but getting folder listing or playing back media doesn't work. These servers work find on my blu-ray player, though.
How on earth did you find the spec's and actually code for the huge variety of codec's VLC supports.
Where did you start your research and figure out these things?
but thanx for the program, its awesome
try not to hire too many social justice warriors so your program can be awesome FOREVER
What about libbdplus, will there be any further features/releases in future?
Add ability to cast to chromecastt!! :)
Currently can only cast with a chrome extension, and tell it to cast whole desktop, and vlc plays verry choppy that way. Please add this ability and if its already there, please advise where is the 'How To', lol.
Thx in advance,
*User of VLC since VLC came out. Never have, nor never will use another video player. I even install it on client PC's and set as default to override media player, lol*
VLC is an excellent program, and it's one of the first things I always install on any new system.
If I must ask a question - when might we see a fix for the issue with VLC on Windows, whereby the
Windows taskbar often appears on top of the video when VLC's in full-screen mode?
I have heard that the newest video code, H.265 (or HEVC), is extremely complex, while only offering minor performance gains. What is your opinion on this? Do you think it will catch on or go the way of JPEG2000?
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
1. The most hated feature of VLC by far is the Rebuilding Font Cache message. Why does VLC persist with it?
2. Why does your rival MPC Home Theater play high-def videos so much smoother than VLC?
3. Why does the Continue video button disappear so quickly before you can click on it? Why did it take you so long to add it? Does it disappear so quickly because you are philosophically opposed to it?
4. The progress bar is the spoiler bar because you can predict how something will end. How about a way to disable it without disabling on screen volume?
5. Is it true Cray is relaunching with a new line of supercomputers so people can watch H.265?
VLC is the only player out of several I use that always chops the start of a track, and the end. WinAmp plays the whole thing. VLC misses enough to miss the start of the first percussive sound if there isn't a leading buffer of silence. I've standardised on adding about 100ms of silence at the start of all my mp3's but even that isn't always enough. On short sound FX clips it's not even worth trying to play them with VLC!
Will this ever be corrected?
I know there are some 3rd party ones but why not make an official one?
Why does VLC load so much slower than it used to?
I'd like to see more commercial products using VLC. I don't mind that we wouldn't get the code inside these products.
When will VLC support Dolby TrueHD Atmos 7.1 streams without stuttering like MPC-HC does? I'd be fine with getting only the core played back. Thx!
Will we ever see gapless audio playlists in VLC?
I used to watch video streams from network websites like CBS, NBC, Discovery and the like. I would look for the .m3u8 file and copy/paste that to VideoLAN. Worked great for years.
Now most free content on network websites require a semi login before serving up .ts files. Do you have any plans to do the semi login and save the cookie in VideoLAN so I can go back to playing the free content especially from the Discovery channel?
When is dvd playback gonna work without stuttering and pausing out of the box so to say.
What are the impediments to getting DVD playback on ChromeOS? Is it purely a licensing issue, or are these technical reasons?
How do you know I'm not a woman? Maybe I'm disinterested in tech because of vitriol filled comments like yours. Maybe... **you** are the problem.
Are there any plans to fix the DLNA / uPNP client in VLC? It's been broken for as long as I can remember. As far as I can tell there are no decent DLNA renderers on the desktop.
Are you planning to change the sparkle feed to HTTPS?
why doesn't V-SYNC work?
ok check this idea, i use VLC to monitor some IP security cams i have set up around the house, would it be possible to view up to 4 cams within one instance of VLC and have it utilize the motion detection feature to grab a screen shot, so when i get home i can see what triggered the motion detector, i did have a screen shot app included in a script that would launch with VLC but it would leave thousands of screenshots in my ~/ directory, and if VLC could trigger any generic screenshot app like scrot by the motion detector feature that would be great!!! Thanks:
P.S. i bet a lot of people besides me would find that useful
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Do you have any plans to scale the UI to support high-DPI displays, such as on the Surface Pro 4?
Could you implement a "private mode"?
On OSX there is no way to prevent the playlist and recently played items to be populated.
For TV consumption I moved to XBMC which is much more friendly to be used with a remote and plays most content. But I really like the film-grain filter to hide blocks in overly compressed MPEG, would it be possible to integrate VLC with XBMC/KODI so I can use this filter and play (SCM, ASF) content that XBMC is unable to play?
Please for the love of God implement click in the main video window to pause/play!
We need to know, at least i would like to ...please...
Hi!
Will VLC ever adopt a winamp style ui and plugin architecture?
Thanks!
I was only wondering if you plan to make VLC be able to burn media to CDs and DVDs just like Nero and other cd burning programs.
Why the stupid Orange Traffic Cone?
Does someone there have an obsession with them or something? Its just weird.
Its useless as an indicator of what it represents. People new to computers think its a warning of some kind.
Its just stupid.
May I look forward to developped VLC version for Ubuntu Touch? Extremely needed...
VLC media player is used widely in my organization (a large university) because of its broad coverage of media formats. Several separate players from different vendors would be needed to cover the media formats playable in VLC media player, and this level of capability is to be applauded. As someone responsible for software deployment, updating, and management on Windows, though, I find the product frustrating to manage. The program and its installer suffer from a number of bad behaviors: (1) installation options are not customizable (other than the language); (2) no way is provided to eliminate first-run prompts on a per-computer basis—a critical capability in classrooms and labs; (3) it attempts to steal file associations, prompting recent versions of Windows to change them back and then inform the user (IIRC, though, this behavior may have been changed in the latest version of VLC media player); and (4) it does not uninstall cleanly because the uninstaller resides within the program folder, preventing that folder's deletion.
Does VideoLAN have plans to improve the enterprise deployment and management story of VLC media player? Are you receptive to contributions in this area, such as development of a Windows Installer package to replace the current executable installer?
Hello I'am Software developer using delphi on my project is possible to implement pitch function (Sound Men to chilt / child to man) on PasLibVlcPlayer ?