VLC 1.0.0 Released 419
rift321 writes "VLC media player, which we all know for simplifying the playback of pretty much any codec out there, has finally released version 1.0.0. Here's a quick list of improvements: live recording, instant pausing and frame-by-frame support, finer speed controls, new HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0), new formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS) and major improvements in many formats, new Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder, video scaling in fullscreen, RTSP Trickplay support, zipped file playback, customizable toolbars, easier encoding GUI in Qt interface, better integration in Gtk environments, MTP devices on Linux, and AirTunes streaming."
Re:So it plays back media (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2 (Score:5, Insightful)
VLC didn't pay them, so if you need a patent license then yes. But then the most popular MPEG2-encoded content is DVDs, and to play those you'll be a criminal as well so why bother.
Re:So it plays back media (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that it?
These days, if all you do is one thing, no matter how well you do it, you're always only going to be known for that one thing.
To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?
What in the hell are you talking about? I hope your attitude is not commonplace. I am not afraid to stand up for VLC for I've never found something that has worked so flawlessly crossplatform (Win XP, Linux) for me that allows me to record streams and shoutcasts of any nature to any codec with any number of parameters ... and a decent GUI interface so far. In VLC, I can open any WMV or AVI file without any fear of some messed up virus destroying my WinXP machine.
You know it's funny. You make media playback sound so trivial. Yet the number of solutions out there prove that nobody has perfected it. VLC has impressed me time and time again. I worship it for its simplicity. Have you even used said software? Or are you just bitter about something?
It plays every freaking codec under the sun with dead simplicity! That's such a herculean task, what more could you ask from it!?
Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2 (Score:3, Insightful)
It probably depends on your jurisdiction, and on whether you care about violating the license. You certainly don't need a license to make the software work.
Re:Talk to the frog (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
What's broken about it? I'm using 0.9.9 now (or whatever the last release was), and I don't have any issues with the volume control.
Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, in a way it does.
I'd been adjusting the volume up to 100% but for some unknown reason, I kept rotating the mouse-wheel and it went up to 200%, 300%, and finally 400% of the default volume the .avi provided.
I'd had trouble getting it loud enough before using the standard system audio controls.
Re:Better DVD menu support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Awesome but where is the Symbian version? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's all in the codecs. VLC uses ffmpeg quite heavily. A full port of the ffmpeg library might help.
Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:4, Insightful)
Well that doesn't really matter as the linux folks who would be afraid to try and compile an app will get it via their distro package manager, and it's almost certain that distros like ubuntu will compile in video acceleration support. The others will have the choice, and that's what OSS's all about :)
Re:Better DVD menu support? (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't do what they want, either.
Re:Consolidation (Score:4, Insightful)
If they did a double blind test between LPCM, FLAC, Apple Lossless, TrueHD and DTS-HD Master I swear they'd find a ton of differences.
Apparently you don't know what "lossless" actually means. There is no point in doing audio-comparisons between files which are bit-for-bit identical after decompression, unless you are are in the same class of people who believe that homeopathy works because of "water memory".
Re:So it plays back media (Score:5, Insightful)
Well to be fair they can always make a system tray app that loads about 1/2 of the 200MG in memory on system start up and can check for updates every 10 minutes by downloading and uploading about 1MB of data.
The system tray app should only delay your system start up by 20 seconds and will shave a good 2 seconds off every time you load VLC. So it is a win-win scenario.
Maybe they could also throw in a few services for good measure as well, I know any app is helped by have a couple extra services running always in the background. They could each chew up around 32MB of memory and could reall help to shave a few microseconds off of the loading time of the parent application, plus every time you update the main software you have to update the services and who doesn't like to reboot every time your media player updates???
Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:5, Insightful)
That does not help. Saying "well, you can just compile in support for ____" shouldn't be acceptable in this day and age. You shoudn't have to compile in support for a given piece of hardware into a player: this is why we have things called "drivers" and "APIs".
Video on non-MacOS/Windows is in an awful state, even when using the same player. If I use VLC on a Macintosh or Windows machine, I can play back content without skipping, sync, artifacts, tearing or stuttering as long as it's within reasonable processing limits. On Linux, it's a crapshoot, completely dependent on the player, video card, window manager and version of X and/or video drivers. I know it's supposedly getting better, but there's still no unified video acceleration API, it looks like nVidia and ATI are going to propose competing (VDPAU, XvBA) standards, and it looks like players are going to need to know about them in order to get reasonable performance. That's akin to having to code applications to support SoundBlaster or AdLib cards, which, I feel the need to point out, was the case in the late 1980s.
There's something seriously wrong when I can watch, say, YouTube content or a simple video file on an Intel Atom-based netbook running Windows and it plays more smoothly than on a Xeon 5520-equipped workstation running Linux. Video on Linux makes the current Audio on Linux clusterf_ck look simple by comparison; it's an unacceptable state of affairs for what is a very important consumer-level aspect of computing.
I don't want to seem as if I'm coming down on the people doing some very, very good work on this. Watching the progress on X/DRM/Mesa and the various drives is impressive and they've made great strides, but posts that talk about compiling in support for a piece of hardware into a player and/or getting bleeding-edge drivers and/or turning off things like compositing are the wrong way to address the problem.
Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:5, Insightful)
You have the oddest definition of "Just Work" that I've ever seen.
Re:Better DVD menu support? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4 (Score:1, Insightful)
Because there is nothing worth $129 in 10.5.
Because 10.4 works.
Because 10.5 is a bloated warthog.
Because I have a machine that has the cojones for 10.4 but not 10.5.
Because 10.5 breaks things that I use. Please note, I'm not complaining, I'm explaining.
To sum up: I have 10.4, no reason to go to 10.5, several reasons not to go to 10.5.
However, if you do not find my reasons compelling for me, write me a check for $129 x 4 machines (the family pack will be cheaper) and I'll be glad to purchase 10.5, even if I don't install it on all my machines.
I'm personally sad that VLC doesn't support 10.4. 10.5 is the Vista of Mac OS X (well, not quite THAT bad) and 10.4 is still a supported OS. If they are going to support Mac OS X, they should support 10.4. But hey, VLC 1.0 isn't enough to get to me to upgrade and any paid-for program that doesn't have a 10.4 version (I'm looking at you "Delicious Library") doesn't get my money.
10.6 I might actually get, once it gets out of beta around 10.6.2, if it is good as promised.
Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems pretty valid to me. On the more recent linux systems, installing the latest video driver is a matter of going to the install program of whatever stripe, selecting the video driver, and saying "install it". Given that, then installing the video player, it should indeed "Just Work". It's not a matter of having to compile your own, if you're using a distribution that does relatively recent compiles of code (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch all the popular ones).
Re:Better DVD menu support? (Score:3, Insightful)
For the record, this works *incredibly* poorly with my (aforementioned) girlfriend.
Re:Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey - go ahead and mod him Funny, but porn is srs bsns. Wankers are the power user of video players. We need:
If VLC can at least manage the first four, I may pay for an upgrade to OS X 10.5 - I'm getting tired of Quicktime Player and DVD Player.
Re:Zipped file playback (Score:5, Insightful)
OMG. I loathe those multi-RAR torrents. They are made by total retards! Especially those with an extra checksum file.
BitTorrent already contains checksums, splitting, compression, directories, and much more. So the whole point of multi-RARs is gone.
Maybe they still use alt.binary to share their stuff. But then I have to say: Welcome to the 21st century!! ^^
Re:Better DVD menu support? (Score:2, Insightful)
This plan would work well with:
1. Lawyers.
2. Completely perfect individuals.
This plan would not work well with:
1. Everyone else.
Most people have to take what they can get when it comes to friends. They've got some good points and some bad points. One thing friends start to do after a while is depend on each other somewhat for expertise. I'll fix your computer virus problem if you'll help me figure out what's making this weird noise in my car, etc. Involving money unnecessarily in a friendship like that is a good way to make it fade away.
If you're really not willing to help your friend when he asks you, the problem is that the friend is either too needy or you're too stingy, or both. But adding money to the picture (especially such petty amounts... $5? You wouldn't just let a friend HAVE five dollars?) doesn't do anything about the root problem.
Re:Consolidation (Score:3, Insightful)
But which of the lossless codecs will support my Denon Ethernet cable [denon.com]? I can't just let any old codec provide a jittery bitstream that's worse than a cheap Ethernet cable would produce.
Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:1, Insightful)
but if you want the latest and greatest direct from the developers as soon as it's released then you can't complain about having to get your hands a bit dirty.
Why not? I don't have to 'get my hands dirty' for the Windows or Mac version.
Re:So it plays back media (Score:3, Insightful)
No so much "get it right" as "another less commonly version of the quote goes this way:".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades,_master_of_none [wikipedia.org]
Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:3, Insightful)
Everybody who has replied to me used words that, if uttered anywhere near a locker room, would earn the speaker a thorough wedgie. Yet they are unanimous in their assertion that it's non-trivial.
Nerds.
Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is that there's no really good way to seamlessly handle even low-bitrate and/or trivially-compressed video on a large range of cards without artifacts, stuttering or tearing because the API situation is terrifically bad. And yes, that the drivers are closed doesn't help, but it would probably be a lot easier for driver and application authors if they didn't have to worry about each other, or the X/Mesa/Gallium/DRM mess in between. The fact that tearing even happens is a deplorable on the state of video playback on X.
Put it this way: Windows has had DirectX video acceleration for a decade, it works well, and virtually every card and driver supports it, and all VLC et al have to worry about it supporting DirectX. X has, at best, Xv on most cards, and it's not guaranteed to perform even remotely as well either in terms of quality or performance. Again, we're not even talking about H.264 here, just basic MPEG.
I'm glad you can do this on an AppleTV. I can get video working if I'm very specific about which card and driver I use, but I really ought not to have to pay that kind of attention to it because it ought to be something that's abstracted from the application playing the video.
Has anyone fixed Pulseaudio? (Score:4, Insightful)
Pulseaudio = Pain in the ass hate machine.