Slashdot Mirror
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!
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?
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 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?
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.
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.
Why isn't VLC on my Samsung Smart TV?
It's a TV. All you need is to plug a computer on it and enjoy VLC.
Be or ben't
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."
Client. Video LAN Client.
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
Probably when they've got developers working on it again :)
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?
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) ?
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.
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?
Don't be stupid; he's far too articulate and coherent - not to mention grammatically correct - to be any less than thirty.
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?
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.
Thank you.
My money says it'll be released before version 4.0.0
Audio volume control has been a feature in the iOS version of the app for over a year. Slide your finger up and down on the right half of the video while it's playing. Similarly, sliding up and down on the left half adjusts the screen brightness.
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
Be careful for what you wish - VLC could end up an unusable POS like Unity.
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?
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*
I'm going to assume this was meant as a sarcastic joke.
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
I know there are some 3rd party ones but why not make an official one?
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!
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?
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.
VLC is clean and simple. If you want to get the interface all fucked up and douchey, there's already a skinning system, apparently.
see also my signature
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Why is VLC so hideously bloated, slow, sluggish, compared to premium offerings like MPlayerX or MPV?
Seconded. Corollary: Why would anyone need VLC, or indeed any other program, when they have vi?
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
If anything, they should just turn the pylon sideways so it looks like a "Play" symbol, maybe that will silence the complainers :-P
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No indeed.
But I'd like to amend his question to this: Can we ever expect VLC to "just work" with off-the-shelf Blu-ray movie discs which have already been decrypted by other means? At present Blu-ray menu support is super spotty, whereas DVDs decrypted by other means tend to work fine.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Indeed... I love VLC and can't thank the developers enough for it, but why does it need to be so ugly?
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 ?