Slashdot Mirror
VLC Passes 3 Billion Downloads (venturebeat.com)
VLC has reached a rare milestone: It has been downloaded more than 3 billion times across various platforms, up from 1 billion downloads in May 2012. VentureBeat reports of the milestone and the new features coming to the media player: VLC today rolled out a minor update -- v3.0.6 -- that adds support for HDR videos in AV1, an emerging video format. But in the coming months, VLC has bigger things planned. First up is a major update to VLC's Android app in about a month, which will introduce support for AirPlay. This will enable Android users to beam video files from their Android phones to the Apple TV. [Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the president and lead developer of VLC's parent company VideoLan] then plans to update the VR app, which will enable native support for VR videos. He said his team reverse-engineered popular VR headsets so that developers no longer need to rely on the SDKs offered by vendors. The app will also receive support for 3D interactions and stereo sound, and add a virtual theater feature.
After that, a major update will be pushed to VLC across all popular platforms. The update, dubbed version 4.0, will offer playback improvements in scaling and video quality of HDR video files. But that's not all. Kempf says he plans to bring VLC to more platforms. He said he is thinking about bringing the media player to Sony's PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Roku devices. Kempf participated in Slashdot's interview a couple of years ago, offering some insight into how he's able to keep VLC sustainable (since VideoLan is a nonprofit that runs entirely on donations) and the various projects that were in the works at the time, among other things.
After that, a major update will be pushed to VLC across all popular platforms. The update, dubbed version 4.0, will offer playback improvements in scaling and video quality of HDR video files. But that's not all. Kempf says he plans to bring VLC to more platforms. He said he is thinking about bringing the media player to Sony's PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Roku devices. Kempf participated in Slashdot's interview a couple of years ago, offering some insight into how he's able to keep VLC sustainable (since VideoLan is a nonprofit that runs entirely on donations) and the various projects that were in the works at the time, among other things.
Probably make 5 million... maybe?
[($)]
no actual link to download vlc in the summary. I didn't see one in the linked article either.
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
There's way more in vlc than just playing videos.
Yet it explodes, at least on ios and maybe other platforms, when you try to play the roundhay garden scene OGV file thats on wikipedia. Whats up with that? Some sort of exploit possible?
Version 3.0 of VLC is the last version that will play MKV files and nobody wants to address it.
I wonder when VLC will add support for stepping through videos frame by frame?
All good here, except "webm" (VP9) seems a little buggy. I'm using clipgrab.org's video downloader to watch youtube videos. On Windows with a dual core CPU, webm is pretty much unwatchable. On Linux it seems to play video fine most of the time, but occasional moments the video goes completely haywire for a few seconds and then recovers back to a clear picture.
a small fraction of those are actual and currently-used installations, however.
Smooth seeking in a keyframe based CODEC is choppy- who'd have thunk it. Low IQ dribblers (the only people who think Slashdot is worth visiting for any reason other than propaganda watching) are always too thick to inform themselves on subjects very well covered on multiple internet resources.
Most modern CODECs are keyframe based and mono-directional. Editors with smooth seeking re-encode the video clips in a per frame form (essentially each frame becomes its own JPG picture). Either the re-encoded pictures are low rez or the system has to have a LOT of memory. Of course edit operations are applied to the original video data, not the re-encode.
VLC player is many things, but an editor it is not. It COULD offer an option to re-encode for seeking purposes, but that would take an unpredictable time based on source rez and CODEC. The same dribbler who 'wants' VLC player to smooth seek is not going to want to wait maybe minutes before the video can even play, while a re-encode for seeking purposes is created.
PS VLC player, unlike most commercial players, has the support of every CODEC as an essential feature. This means UI optimising for the possibility of a given CODEC won't happen. By design. Even a Slashdot dribbler should be able to work out why.
...they fix the damn sound stretching first and then make a better playlist (like Amarok 1.4 had), then after that they can make it work on PS4?
I use VLC a lot myself, but those things bother me a lot. I still have not found anything else for Android, they all suck in so many ways, mostly playlist is a complete crap on each android media player i've used. On Desktop i use VLC too, but come on.
VLC still canâ(TM)t seem some mp4 files on iOS more than once - you need to kill the app if you want to fast forward again. Open Sores.
How awesome is it that there are 3 Billion people using VLC!!!
People.. number of downloads is a meaningless figure...
VLC has had a blocking/blurring issue with most videos on every system I've ever used it on since it was first released. Literally no other player does this.
Kind of strange. Plus the codecs from Romania (nux.ro). Plus windows codecs
from Russia (elecard). go figure.
the newer versiones sometimes crash, it did not happen to my old ass version
lesson learned, if you have a program that works, never update it
VLC is a good open source player. My only gripe is its shitty orange safety cone for an icon. Come on guys, you can do better than that! In all seriousness, VLC is a quality video player that I use both on my desktop and phone.
Why can't Apple add that feature to their petty attempt to make a mediaplayer?
...does it very easily - and quickly.
On my Mac at least, it crashes on launch. Ditching prefs doesn't help. Went back to 3.0.4.
Does this mean it runs on more devices than Java now?
Ezekiel 23:20
Can it play baby shark?
He has not reverse engineered all the technology in the Oculus SDK. He's just reverse-engineered some of it. Get ready for headaches, people.
And they'll catch up to the number of views that the Psy's Gangnam Style video has.
What a glorious milestone.
I'm a long time user of VLC and I have a love-hate relationship with it. On the one hand, I have a lot of loyalty and personal affection to the software, having used it to play back videos that could not be played by anything else. During the past couple of years, I feel that VLC has been falling back and feels harder to use compared to the other software I routinely use.
First of all, the interface is clunky and awkward, still looking like it was written for CDE using X primitives instead of modern toolkits. This is jarringly off-putting, especially for new users. My wife and daughter refuse to use VLC and stick to other windows-based players as it `looks ugly'. Furthermore:
1) The configuration menus are very non-intuitive.
2) Simple functions like zoom, rotate, brightness controls etc are hard to access and buggy.
3) The `variable zoom' interface is particularly awful, seriously who came up with that one? It is hard to imagine something more awkward to use.
4) The configuration options may make sense to VLC programmers, but is REALLY hard for non-experts to use. For example, I want to map the `short step forward' to a non-default value, say 3 seconds. This took me nearly 30 minutes of experimentation to find out. There is no help for any of the options.
5) VLC is missing a number of key functions that are absolutely must haves in 2019. For example, the ability to hold the mouse over the slider bar and see the frame corresponding to that position. I know this is possible because ExMplayer has had that feature for multiple years. Unfortunately that software seems to be dead, having not had an update for years.
6) I don't want VLC to be another Kodi, but it should support some basic `media manager' features. Tagging, integrated searching, thumbnail management, ability to hover over a thumbnail and see video summaries etc are critically important when you are dealing with hundreds of videos. Ideally I would like something like Geeqie for videos.
7) VLC should support `basic' video editiing. It does not have to compete with full-fledged non-linear video editors like Kdenlive or Openshot, but I should be able to (say) increase the brightness of a video, perform basic cropping etc and save the output to disk with reasonable quality. VLC can use ffmpeg to do the hard work, it just needs to provide an easy to use interface.
I can go on and on, but you get the idea. My feeling is that the VLC developers are more focused on backend features like supporting the latest codecs and less on interface functionality. It would be great if someone could take the VLC core and wrap a better interface around it.
Magnus.
VLC is the current popular player for the masses. Anyone with technical acumen uses mpv.
SystemD is putting that feature out in the next version.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Not just free but it looks nice and still hasn't turned into bloatware after all this time.
blocky gray & green cut-screens.
wonkey menus & wrong offset highlights.
broken disney dvd's with freezing, sound & image skipping.
non working auto language selection on windows (works on older mac version)
and the configuration/settings menu/tree dialog is even worse
I like ripping my DVDs and archiving them, so I use VLC to play them from my drive.
Recently VLC has been flickering green when I play the ripped DVD folder. Not all movies do this, but if it happens to you, go to Video ---> Deinterlace and set it from "auto" to "off".
That helped for me. Apparently this is an edge case for some people, and I only found the answer after some deep-dive searching.
Hope it helps someone.
I have some videos that have frames at the end that only VLC used to play - all others would end a second or two earlier, as if they didn't exist at all. Video editors would show the extra frames.
Then at some point in the 3.x branch, I believe, VLC has started dropping those frames as well. Even stepping ahead frame-by-frame no longer shows them.
Were a very sensitive lot...
[($)]