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Media Open Source Software

VLC Gets First Major Cross-Platform Release 85

Posted by Soulskill from the now-available-on-palm-pilots-and-apple-newtons dept.
An anonymous reader writes VideoLAN today launched what is arguably the biggest release of VLC to date: an update for the desktop coordinated with new versions across all major mobile platforms. The world's most-used media player just got a massive cross-platform push. The organization says the releases are the result of more than a year of volunteer work on the VLC engine and the libVLC library. As a result, VLC has gained numerous new features, has seen more than 1,000 bugs fixed, and has significantly increased its scope of supported formats.
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VLC Gets First Major Cross-Platform Release More

VLC Gets First Major Cross-Platform Release

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  • Hopefully they support older platforms (Score:3)

    by MetalliQaZ ( 539913 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @01:30PM (#49148457)

    I'm excited to try this new release. I will load some obscure videos from my collection to see how codec support is holding up. From the looks of the press release, they have a bunch of great features, some of which can take advantage of hardware acceleration. One big test of the new software is how well older platforms without the new hardware are able to keep up. Too many times I've seen codec libraries get slower and slower on old hardware as the features are 'improved' on more powerful hardware. If this newer version works as well as the old, I'll be impressed.

  • Video over LAN (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @01:30PM (#49148461)
    I hope they improved the original purpose, to play video over a LAN. Gave up on it after a while, too many bugs to track down.

    • I think they have long since abandoned the original intent of the project. Who cares about video over LAN anymore? Now it's Video over WAN, or more importantly, cloud to mobile device. And that works pretty darn well already.

      • A lot of people care about video over LAN, which has many uses. Why wouldnt they? There are those who want to be able to have their own video station or use video conferencing capabilities. This is an application layer thing so can work over LANs or WANs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hadlock ( 143607 )

        I guess you're not familiar with XBMC (Now "Kodi")? Video over LAN is still a thing, people just want a file browser with a 20 ft GUI. VLC never really made it off the desktop which I guess is why XBMC was able to succeed in the HTPC market where VLC failed miserably and it's plugin system never really took off.

        • Never really made it off the desktop?

          This thread is about such a "made it off" release, plus a previous version has been on iOS for quite a while. I've been using it for a year or two on iOS.. (I use it to watch documentaries and news shows faster than realtime, just like how I listen to podcasts.)

      • WTF are you talking about? We develop VOIP systems and use VLC to both host and client streaming video all the time, both over LAN and WAN, and it works just fine under both UDP and RTP.

        So GOML and HAND.

    • lately, I'm having a lot of trouble with vlc on win7. not sure why.

      when I use wired ethernet, things seem fine (source of data is my nas box). I can play hd files that were downloaded (...) and those play great, even at 1920/120hz native refresh.

      BUT - if I dare play a dvd with a video_ts style standard folder, even local playback shows lots of blockiness. I can copy the files to my local ssd and it still acts that way. playing dvd should be EASIER than high def mkv or mp4, right? so what's going on?

      sys

      • Try the Intel Driver Update Utility. [intel.com] Possibly a newer version of the driver for the on-board video would help.

        A next step would be to visit the web site of the manufacturer of the motherboard and install any newer versions of the BIOS or chipset drivers.

        Sometimes motherboard manufacturers modify the Intel software, so it is necessary to deal with that. For example, the RAID drivers may have been modified.

        • thanks for the idea.

          but if win media player can play dvd data files perfectly, I'm thinking the video layer is fine as it is, and its vlc's buffering or queueing that seems broken.

          if you FF to skip across compressed video, it will take some settle time to deblock, but on vlc it takes an absurd amount of timeto do that on mkv and mp4. and on dvd files, it never seems to play well, no matter what.

          very odd that 'hard' files (such as hd) play with clocklike perfection and yet the lower res, lower bandwidth 'ea

          • Other people are not having that problem. That's what makes me think the problem is due to some weird interaction with the video driver. Maybe, instead of storing the video in memory, it is writing it to the paging file.

            I just tried an 82 megabyte MP4 file with VLC 2.1.5 and had no problems selecting a time in the video well past the middle.

            Then I tried a 3-hour VIDEO_TS on a dual layer DVD. I was able to select any time in the video instantly.

            Ivy Bridge, i7-3770, 16 GB of memory, Win 7 Ultimate.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        BUT - if I dare play a dvd with a video_ts style standard folder, even local playback shows lots of blockiness. I can copy the files to my local ssd and it still acts that way. playing dvd should be EASIER than high def mkv or mp4, right? so what's going on?

        Are you playing a DVD rip or a DVD?

        If it's a DVD, what you're seeing is DVD copy protection - since you're using Windows, you need to get AnyDVD to remove the copy protection.

        Yes, besides the CSS protection, there are other copy protections on DVDs too.

        W

      • update: why didn't I try the simple thing, first? sigh. do a full uninstall, then install the new and this does not carry over previous 'settings'. it seems that even installing the new one over my older one was not so great. had to do a full remove and then add.

        but after that, all is well! amazing. none of the problems I had are now there. loading an mkv file can take a long time over ac-rated wifi (sometimes 10 secs of the screen just sitting there, no status or anything) but then the video plays a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jandrese ( 485 )
      On a LAN I usually try to go for the most primitive video mode possible (raw UDP frames) and it usually works, even Multicast. It's not efficient, but my LAN is usually way faster than it technically needs to be anyway.

  • Not a company (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27, 2015 @01:50PM (#49148639)

    Well, VideoLAN is not a company: it's a not profit organization, driven by volonteers to work on free software.

  • An interesting talk on the new VLC (Score:5, Informative)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @01:57PM (#49148695)

    Hopefully this link holds up:

    Jean-Baptiste Kempf on VLC at FOSDEM [belnet.be]

    He's one of the developers that has been on VLC the longest, it was pretty interesting I thought.

  • The VideoLan website still says VLC for Android is a beta at version 0.9.10.

    Someone is talking bollocks and, this time, it's not me...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      https://get.videolan.org/vlc-android/1.1.0/

    • The VideoLan website still says VLC for Android is a beta at version 0.9.10.

      Someone is talking bollocks and, this time, it's not me...

      It's listed at 1.1.0 at the Google Play Store, which might be considered more authoritative that what it says on a web page someone forgot to update.

      F-Droid was a 1.0.1 a month ago, so same argument. F-Droid lags a bit behind with their releases, so I suspect they will be updating to 1.1.0 soon.

      https://f-droid.org/repository... [f-droid.org]

      • Call me old-fashioned, but I'd expect the creator of the software to be able to update their website to reflect a new version before, or at the same time as, pushing out a press-release... not after.

        Oh, and the Play store says it's not even supported on my Nexus 7 running 5.02, so I've now lost any confidence I had in them.
  • Has it finally implemented some of the standard functionality everyone expects from a video player? Can I finally just click the screen to pause/unpause? Does ALT-ENTER finally work to fullscreen? These don't sound all that important, but they're both constant minor irritants every time I end up using VLC for something.

    And yes, I know you can install some third-party plugin to enable click-to-pause, but it's rather strange that it isn't just supported out of the box.

    • If you want those "features" bad enough, break out your favor editor and download the source.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        Don't like your government? Replace it. Don't like your opensource software, add a feature.

    • Has it finally implemented some of the standard functionality everyone expects from a video player? Can I finally just click the screen to pause/unpause? Does ALT-ENTER finally work to fullscreen? These don't sound all that important, but they're both constant minor irritants every time I end up using VLC for something.

      by Anonymous Coward: "Well, VideoLAN is not a company: it's a not profit organization, driven by volonteers to work on free software."

      As such it's documentation (help file) or menus aren't updated accordingly. VLC will do just about anything, but you might have to search for many of these features.

      I use PMS to stream from my PC to PS3 using VLC, this was all done using outside documentation. Ripping DVD/CD's? best done searching for a VLC how to.

      It apparently started as a music player this from a set of key

  • Kudos to the dev team! This is one of open source's great success examples. Now, since I am posting anyway...

    Why does VLC use an orange traffic cone for its icon? It has always seemed misplaced to me.

    • Why does VLC use an orange traffic cone for its icon? It has always seemed misplaced to me.

      On the wiki page for VLC:

      The cone icon used in VLC is a reference to the traffic cones collected by École Centrale's Networking Students' Association.[12] The cone icon design was changed from a hand drawn low resolution icon[13] to a higher resolution CGI-rendered version in 2006, illustrated by Richard Øiestad.[14]

  • And blu ray menus! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kethinov ( 636034 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:27PM (#49148963) Homepage Journal

    This release also comes with massively improved support for blu ray menus! (It existed before, but didn't work very well.)

    This is exciting to me because it makes full support for (unencrypted) blu ray disk playback including blu ray menus finally possible on Linux and OS X. No more transcoding required!

    It will also free Windows users from having to use all those terrible proprietary blu ray players.

    This is a terrific release!

  • None of this click that you have read the Privacy Policy, showing the top of ToS it says now your aware of it click to continue :)

  • It's causing nothing but problems, it's due to IcarosDebug, heck I wasn't even using a media file when I was blocked from a partition.
    You've been warned.

    One of many post on it
    http://www.sevenforums.com/gen... [sevenforums.com]

    • It's causing nothing but problems,

      Or K-Lite_Codec_Pack_10.45 sry just read the link myself.

    • Re:FWIW don't download K-lite_Codec_Pack-10.9.5 (Score:5, Informative)

      by denis-The-menace ( 471988 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @03:06PM (#49149287)

      FYI:
      K-Lite is a codec pack for players that use "system" codecs.
      System Codec packs do not upgrade/play with others well.
      One version => Video A works, Video B is broken.
      New Codec pack => Video A broken, Video B is works.
      FSCK that!

      VLC only uses its own built-in codecs and almost always works.
      Chances are if VLC won't play it, the video is corrupt.

      • -> Chances are if VLC won't play it, the video is corrupt.

        I'm sorry, but this is not the case; there are numerous formats that VLC does not support well, which other open source media players handle just fine. For example, mplayer supports real formats reasonably well. VLC has only partial support. VLC does not work well with files that have been spliced/joined with ffmpeg (stuttering, pausing, time-jumping). Mplayer works fine.

        I'm a big fan of VLC, but saying that it is perfect helps nobody.

  • VLC, the BEST (Score:3)

    by ikhider ( 2837593 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @03:09PM (#49149309)
    I am always blown away by how great VLC is. Whether on a Libre or proprietary OS platform, I know VLC is always has by back for audio/video playback. I recall when I first started watching movies on a computer, VLC played the file, ANY file! Also DVD's in whatever region(!!!) played. Sure, the proprietary OS's grumble, but the Libre OS version played the DVD, region one or two just fine. Now that I am in school working with audio/video and VLC constantly reminds me of its value. Our of all the proprietary media players out there, VLC blows them out of the water. Thanks VLC!

  • Increased Scope? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ThatsNotPudding ( 1045640 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @03:10PM (#49149317)
    Heck, can't VLC play damn near everything already? I half expect you could open a spreadsheet in VLC and have it carry a tune.

  • And we still can't play Dolby Digital audio on iOS (Score:3)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @03:49PM (#49149633)

    ... unless we pretend we aren't in the U.S.
    Hooray for patents!

    https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/... [videolan.org]

    • One of the developers gave a talk (in a link I posted earlier) that said they would have Dolby support in iOS in just a few months, I think that's when the patents expire.

  • While it's commendable that VLC would make that push for a big cross-platform release, the Android side is still dismal compared to their desktop counterpart. The Android app is still limited in what devices is able to install it (can be installed on my now-dead Nexus 7 2013). A quick glance at the Google Play Store page revealed that it cannot be installed on my Nexus 6, 2012 Nexus 7, or my Samsung Galaxy S3, the latter two can play 720p videos to some extent.

    This isn't a big release. So whoever thought th

  • Chromecast Yet? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Its supposedly been in the pipeline, Being able to broadcast local video files/DVD's from a PC to a TV attached device would be nice. Sure you can run cables (VGA/HDMI) but I've done that for years and its a pain.

  • All I care about is whether or not they've fixed jerky playback with the default settings. There's some loop filter you have to disable if you want smooth playback of x264 video - I don't know whether it's because the loop filter takes place after read-ahead caching, or what, but it's a pain.

  • UPnP (Score:1)

    by rrp ( 537287 )
    Still haven't fixed UPnP in Mac OS X. I wonder if they'll ever fix it.

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