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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?
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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.
I wonder when VLC will add support for stepping through videos frame by frame?
Their latest nightly of 4.0 still plays MKV files for me. Where are you getting this info from?
Buzzfeed?
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.
Why on earth do you think they'd drop one of the most popular, open container formats?
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?
And the organisation is French.
Almost like it's an international collaborative software project...
Screenshot it.
Because I watch all my TV via VLC, broadcast and recorded, all my video library, anything off the net, and anything locally saved or created, plus all the work stuff.
Literally never had an issue.
VLC was my 1st real player. But sadly, its randomly defined features make it difficult to take
seriously beyond the simple playing of flac, mp3, and most video formats and their containers.
Randomly? Take snapshots, for example, use to include the soft subtitle (if present). Didn't want it,
just disable the subtitle stream. N.P. Now, it's always w/o the subtitle.
I think the problem is the reluctance to shore-up existing features, fix bugs, and remain consistent
with VLC as a tool rather than a toy. I follow its development thread, and it's a cluster-f*** to say
the least. It has gone so far from its roots - it's not even maintained in / as C code (which is why it
fails horribly at 4k unless you have a ungodly fast hardware). There's a little bit of the Pottering
mentality in their development. And no sound regression testing or framework is in place.
I mean, it's "his" baby and he can certainly develop it along any path he chooses. His drive seems ... I still use it (vlc-2.2.1),
to have it run (poorly) on as many devices as possible. Well, whatever
but the "newer" versions are: slower, broken, or have important features (to me) removed. I wrote
a snapshot enhancement that writes a watermark on the image, saves the image locally (to the video
rather than a global location) that I rely on. It's just not trivial to port it to the latest version because
the infrastructure is a moving target.
Trying to build the latest requires the latest release of your OS. Why are the newest libraries
required in the build if there's no dependency on any "new" feature in said library?
It's just stupid. Really...
CAP === 'transmit'
...does it very easily - and quickly.
Does this mean it runs on more devices than Java now?
Ezekiel 23:20
Can it play baby shark?
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.
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.
Basically it's exactly as the AC posted. This goes for lots of stuff I've tried playing on it across multiple PCs. Even DVDs/BluRays.
Disable Time-Stretching audio in the audio tab, it seems like it's enabled by default because it drops frames and slows the audio down to compensate, but nowadays it's really not needed unless your machine is slow as molasses.
Were a very sensitive lot...
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