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Open Source

VideoLAN, Maker of Popular Media Player VLC, Turns 20 53

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
VideoLAN, in a blog post: The VideoLAN project and the VideoLAN non-profit organization are happy to celebrate today the 20th anniversary of the open-sourcing of the project. VideoLAN originally started as a project from the Via Centrale Reseaux student association, after the successful Network 2000 project. But the true release of the project to the world was on 1st of February 2001, the Ecole Centrale Paris director, Mr. Gourisse, allowed the open-sourcing of the whole VideoLAN project under the GNU GPL. This open sourcing concerned all the software developed by the VideoLAN project, including VideoLAN Client, VideoLAN Server, VideoLAN Bridge, VideoLAN Channel Switcher, but also libraries to decode DVDs, like libdca, liba52 or libmpeg2. At that time, this was a risky decision for the Ecole Centrale Paris, and the VideoLAN project is very grateful.

Since then, the project evolved to become a French non-profit organization, and continued developing numerous solutions around the free software multimedia world. Today, VLC media player is used regularly by hundreds of millions of users, and has been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times over the years. VLC is today available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android (including TV and Auto versions), iOS (and AppleTV), OS/2 and BSD. Over the years, around 1000 volunteers worked to make VLC a reality.
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VideoLAN, Maker of Popular Media Player VLC, Turns 20 More

VideoLAN, Maker of Popular Media Player VLC, Turns 20

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  • And you still can't have both spacebar and left click pause and play a video. Having two things bound to one action is after all a new feature that has only been around since...I dunno...Wolfenstein 3d.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ...a new feature that has only been around since...I dunno...Wolfenstein 3d.

      For those left wondering about this random complaint, this is how long he's been trying to coordinate porn playback functionality and jerking off...

  • Codec situation was bad 20 years ago (Score:5, Informative)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Monday February 01, 2021 @04:54PM (#61016806)
    Linux users couldn’t watch common video formats, and on Windows codec packs were full of malware. VLC, Xine, Mplayer, FFMpeg and the others all worked hard to liberate video files.

    • Oh, man. I remember codec packs. That is one thing I'm thrilled to have left behind.

      Me: "Just install VLC, it's kind of clunky, but it'll probably play that file just fine."
      Person: "But I like ."
      Me: "Okay, have fun with your K-Lite Mega Codec Pack."

      Not that they're perfect, of course. How many years did they refuse to release the Android version in the US because "we don't know if it works on CDMA phones or not?"

  • Tried to use VLC recently for a corporate streaming solution. It couldn't stay connected to the stream, failed randomly. Another tool is completely seamless. Left it installed on some desktops, where it began to have shell integration issues and do funny things on the desktop. Had to uninstall it and use something else.

    • Yup - VLC is much like Windows XP: Clunky and buggy, but it provides a quick solution that mostly works.
  • They are delaying the application startup as a celebration. This makes much more sense than bad programming.

    VLC, if you want me to go back to using your product then get it to start in the 1 second it used to take on slower machines. My above-average gaming style rig takes 20 seconds to start VLC with NVME, zillions of gigs, 4+ghz CPU, more threads than I can count, etc. WTF?

    • Re:I see why It takes 20 seconds to start VLC. (Score:4, Informative)

      by MagusSlurpy ( 592575 ) on Monday February 01, 2021 @05:05PM (#61016866) Homepage

      It takes under 2 seconds to start on my SATA-3, 3570k system with 16 GB DDR3. I think your problem is elsewhere.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rnws ( 554280 )
        Ditto. Two seconds on a dual-core from 2015. 14 seconds on a bad day when there's an update to download.

        • Three seconds on macOS 10.13 on an old 2010 Mac mini with an entry-level Kingston SSD, a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz and 16GB RAM.

      • I timed it at 7 seconds on first open after reboot and well under 1 second on subsequent opens.
    • You've got some serious problems if VLC takes longer than a second or two to start.

    • The latest version seems to start faster. Even on Windows it never took more than two seconds to start for me.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TypoNAM ( 695420 )

      Started seeing slow startup since they moved to using Qt for front end. Qt is a cross platform fully configurable GUI framework that has multiple plugins that it scans for, initializes each one at a time, and then is ready for use which is noticeably slow at first run.

    • My above-average gaming style rig takes 20 seconds to start VLC with NVME, zillions of gigs, 4+ghz CPU, more threads than I can count, etc.

      There is something VERY wrong with your system then. Probably multiple A/V scanners or malware in the background. Seriously, back up your player data/settings, format the drive and do a clean reinstall of your preferred Windows version. And on the off hand your using Linux try a base install of Devuan/Debian, RedHat/Ubuntu installs too much extra junk.

      My 15 year Linux laptop (1.3Ghz, 4GBRAM, SATAI)takes about 6 seconds to start VLC, and my 4 year old gaming rig, only 3.3Ghz, 16Gb RAM, SATA II SSD, runnin

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      I often have several VLC windows open, and I use it on mobile, tablet and desktop for:

      - Live TV (my only live TV) via tvHeadend
      - Prerecorded TV
      - DVD playing
      - Plex playing (you can switch the internal player to VLC)
      - RTSP streams from several CCTV cameras and a separate CCTV NAS system.
      - Every media file on my storage.

      I deploy it in work as the default video player.

      I don't see 20-second startups on any of those. I'm on a shitty old work machine now and it's damn-near instantaneous (from clicking Enter on th

  • So many OSS projects of this scale would have died by now. VLC is amazing. When I started using Linux, video support was terrible. Now VLC will play content that many devices will not.

  • One of my favorites (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Monday February 01, 2021 @05:10PM (#61016886)

    A long time ago I switched to VLC for pretty much all video playing and I've never looked back. What I like about it:

    - it plays almost anything
    - lots of flexibility to handle munged video (crop and aspect ratio can be changed, interlace settings are accessible, etc.) Video that's unplayable anywhere else can be viewed in VLC.
    - lots of flexibility in the interface. You can set keyboard shortcuts for anything, so I've made a bunch of custom shortcuts for all of the functions I use regularly.
    - it gets out of my way

    I wish more programs were like this.

  • I have been using VLC for many years, but a couple of times recently it hasn't played a video well or atall and I had to use Windows "Films & TV" ( what sort of a stupid name for a progrma is that?! ) or even Windows Media Player.

    • I'm just surprised Windows has an application to view films. Does it pass it through a reel-to-reel-scanner first, digitize it, and then display it on the monitor? And television? How do you get something like that to work without a broadcast antenna/cable receiver card? Truly, Microsoft is ahead of (or totally retro) its time.

  • I must have started using VLC shortly after they opened it up. Command line options to stream to multiple clients was pretty slick in the days before streaming was normal. Sure is easier to use these days, and I haven't used the server/client model in years, but back then there was no convenient way to accomplish similar results in a mixed OS house like mine. The ability to use the client on Mac, Linux and Windows was great, as was the ability to reencode using different codecs/parameters. I don't remem

  • The compression feature (Score:5, Informative)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Monday February 01, 2021 @05:14PM (#61016902)

    I can't begin to describe how wonderful the audio compressor plugin is. Forget all that normalization bullshit, this is a true compressor. You set a hard limit and a high ratio and nothing can ever be louder. Crank up the makeup gain too if you want quiet parts to be louder. Now enjoy watching movies that don't assault your ears with music or explosions while being able to hear every word of dialogue. You know like the good old days where things were mixed properly.

  • Try playing the roundhay garden scene from the wikipedia page. That bug has existed for decades, I've reported it a billion times. Wouldn't be surprised if some kind of exploit were possible.

  • I would say this is one of the best applications ever made for Windows, and it's free! For every Windows install I have ever done - this is the first thing that gets installed. I remember wrestling with codec packs, shitty pay-to-play downloads, and all sorts of crap just to get videos to play.

    Then came VLC and made the world a better place.

    Now if they can just finish this [videolan.org] I will be even happier! Although Hitfim Express is extraordinarily good as well.

  • Well done VLC (Score:3)

    by ihaveamo ( 989662 ) on Monday February 01, 2021 @06:14PM (#61017146)
    I'm not sure why all the hate - I see VLC as one of the pivotal open source success stories. I don't care that it may take a few more seconds to start up - When I have moms and pops calling me to ask "what do I need to watch this video file?" , Mac/Win/Nix . . . doesn't matter... VLC is always the answer. "It Just Works (tm)"

    • Not really, try playing the roundhay garden scene OGV file from Wikipedia. The file plays fine in Chrome and many other players.

      • Not really, try playing the roundhay garden scene OGV file from Wikipedia. The file plays fine in Chrome and many other players.

        good thing it's free software then, so you (or someone else) can fix it.

    • VLC is a good mon-and-pop solution, so that people who want a Windows-style GUI can enjoy all the codecs and filters from the opensource world. I myself prefer to watch the video itself rather than the GUI. Pressing keys on the keyboard isn't any harder than pressing buttons on a remote control, which people have been doing on their AV gear for decades.

      I've used MPlayer since about 2001. Back in the day, the simple user interface also made sense because video decoding was so CPU-heavy. I now use a fork c

  • When no other player works, use VLC.

  • Wait, yes, I do! xmplayer and... xine, I think?
    But, yes. VLC quickly became the de facto player for Linux, which was HUGE, because as much as I love Linux, it was a PITA to play video reliably before VLC.

  • Maybe in the next 20 years they can figure out how to make VLC render 4k video in 4k on my 4k Sony "Android" TV, instead of 1080p.

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