VLC Reaches 2.1

An anonymous reader writes "With a new audio core, hardware decoding and encoding, port to mobile platforms, preparation for Ultra-HD video and a special care to support more formats, 2.1 is a major upgrade for VLC. The popular video player app also features support for 4K video as well as a partial Windows 8 and WinRT port for all those folks out there who don't know what else to do with their Surface RT."

First impressions

[MetalliQaZ]

I installed it last night and really the only thing I can say about it so far is that it seems to work the same as I'm used to. That is high praise for a new release with many new features, I think. We'll see what happens when I try to play more exotic files with multiple languages and subtitles, but so far so good.

What is really exciting to me is the claimed support for mobile platforms. That kind of support for video is something I've really missed on Android.

Re:Partial port?

[SJHillman]

I would assume not all features are up and running in the port.

Re:First impressions

[Richard24]

FYI, there's a pretty good free video player for android that supports quite a bit of codecs and such. I'm not sure what you're specifically looking for. It also supports natively browsing/playing from smb shares. I also like they way they created finger swipe controls on the playing video for volume, brightness, and ff/rev. After I used it, I really miss it when I play video in Netflix or somewhere else. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bsplayer.bspandroid.free&hl=en [google.com]

Re:First impressions

[SMOKEING]

BSPlayer shows ads. IIRC, VLC has none.

Re:Still sucks

[tlhIngan]

I mean ok, yes, it plays everything under the sun. But not very well.

For something as widely popular and prolific as VLC, I simply don't understand why its not the pre-eminent media player that rivals anything on the market...without any compromise. The UI of VLC sucks, still, especially tablet incarnations of it, and while it might load a video, often the video craps out even though it plays perfectly fine on other dreaded "closed source" media players. Simply being able to load a video format is not "support" of that video format, it should play flawlessly and have all the capabilities to track throughout the movie with having it hang for several minutes. Its the 21st century, I shouldn't have to wait for video to load regardless of what format it is.

VLC is the prime example debunking the myth that open source software is better because its community developed. If the community actually invested more effort into improving VLC code rather than just lauding its superiority then VLC would actually be the best media player on the market.

The problem with VLC is endemic of a lot of open-source code. It's basically where the programmer is king and everyone else is a peon. Great if you're a developer, but it fails in that a modern non-trivial program needs much more than just a programmer (and that the project lead on most open source is a programmer doesn't help). Hell, programmers and engineers generally are the WORST people you want to develop certain aspects of your application - notably stuff related to UI, UX and documentation.

The issue is that open-source generally "ranks" people in terms of LoC submitted (or commits, or whatever). Designers, technical writers and other stuff don't usually generate things considered "valuable" to the developer - how many times have you heard this refrain - "you have the source, there's your documentation".

And the UI and UX is very important these days but also heavily discounted because they generally make life difficult because implementing a widget here instead of there seems like a pointless exercise. Especially when they want to re-do how things work (see all the pushback to how Apple decided to reinvent how people used computers by doing auto-save (and even allowing versioning and "going back In time" to see how a document looked at a prior point, even allowing one to manipulate a previous save).

That said, VLC's UI is generally sufficient (especially compared to many other media players), though it could use a bit of tweaking (like disassociating the mousewheel from the volume control - Allowing one to reduce the range of the volume control (or peg it at 100% so you don't accidentally set it to 117% or having to live with it at 98 or 105% because you can't get it back to 100%).

You do realize that the glitches that you complain about are due to VLC avoiding patented, closed source solutions? In this light they are actually doing awesome work!

Sorry, I don't buy this, because VLC implements plenty of patented stuff - besides all the MPEG formats (heavily patented) and image formats (most of which are patented), and audio formats (also patented).

If you created a player that was trying to avoid patented stuff, you'd be left with a player that does Vorbis, Theora, WebM and a few other formats. And be of little use because the formats people really use (h.264 currently, DivX/MPEG-4 ASP before) are all heavily patented.

Of course, there's some things where it's understandable - like DVD and Blu-Ray playback where the copy protection on both generally interferes with straight playback as they should. VLC does not have much in the way of fixing issues related to copy protection - being that it's a full time job. (See how much an AnyDVD license is and that you have to subscribe because it changes so much).

Re:Still sucks

[the_other_chewey]

I don't know why VLC developers hate frame-by-frame.

They don't.

If I want to read something on a piece of paper in a video let's say, I can't just advance one frame at a time.

You can. Try pressing "E"...

Re:Turning off the computer

[the_other_chewey]

You can activate "play and exit" in the playlist settings, which does exactly what you want.

Alternatively, putting "vlc://quit" as the last item in a playlist will also quit VLC after it is done playing.