VLC Reaches 2.1 127
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."
Re:Still no CCCP/KCP (Score:5, Interesting)
I hear this a lot-- VLC sucks, uses bad codecs, supposedly looks worse than XYZ player, etc. But every time I actually try to use MPC-HC, I find that the ability to Seek within a video file is lacking. It either takes a long time to Seek, or it doesn't go exactly to the place I wanted it to. VLC seeks perfectly every time, no matter what video codec/container format I am viewing. And I _never_ have to install any 3rd party codec packs. To me, that's way more important than a minor difference in quality that I have never noticed (or taken the time to _try_ to notice). Then again, I like to download 720p instead of 1080p because the files are smaller, so quality is obviously not 1st priority. I'll keep using VLC, thanks!
Re:Better alternatives: (Score:1, Interesting)
PotPlayer + CoreAVC. There is no better video player and h.264 codec.
Great player missing some key things though (Score:5, Interesting)
VLC is a fantastic free program, but the attitude some/one of their devs have towards it's users is disheartening for the project as a whole.
A friend recorded a video with her phone, and held it so the video was taken in "portrait mode" vs. "landscape mode". On a PC I was surprised when VLC was unable to correctly orient itself as I was use to my Mac's native application always orienting properly.
I spent the time looking for solutions on their forum and the devs responses is nothing short of arrogant:
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/7766 [videolan.org]
Essentially users are told this is not a bug in VLC because the videos use a non-standard way of marking the video as rotated. Further they go on to say if a user wants to look at it, as it was shot, they need to manually tweak the rotation on the transform for playback. After a 7 step menu navigation process, this has the side effect of having to change the transform back for the next video you wish to play if it was shot in landscape mode. Essentially this has to be done on a video-by-video basis.
I'm hoping there are some Open Source projects that actually implement this correctly, but from the few I've tried so far, they all seem to have the same bug as VLC when it comes orientation. Standard or not, ignoring this rotation bit is rendering the program as crippled for 100,000's of people shooting videos this way. Coincidentally, I haven't found a commercial program that is subject to the bug, everyone I've tried (e.g., Quicktime, Adobe Premier, etc...) renders it properly.
I can always hope that, eventually, someone on the team will see the value in implementing this fix.
Re:Still sucks (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't like it either. Clunky, wonky, slow, bloated. I prefer MPlayerX.