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Comments: 419 +- Technology: VLC 1.0.0 Released on Tuesday July 07, @09:16AM
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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."
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Yes, yes, all very impressive (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that good enought for you?
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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.
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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.
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Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive (Score:5, Funny)
If you don't turn it up enough you can't hear the whoooosh!
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Re:Yes, yes, all very impressive (Score:5, Informative)
I know Winamp was (is?) like that. When you adjust the volume, it adjusts the Wave output in Windows. This is fine if you're using Winamp all the time, but if you switch to another media player (I used to be a big fan of The Core Media Player until it died), you're left with turning your volume to max and still not being able to hear anything.
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Has anyone fixed Pulseaudio? (Score:4, Insightful)
Pulseaudio = Pain in the ass hate machine.
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Hardware acceleration (Score:5, Interesting)
Without hardware accelerated h.264 playback, I'm not going back to VLC.
Still, it's a great do it all player / streamer.
Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:5, Informative)
VLC 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 can be compiled with VAAPI to get hardware acceleration.
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Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 :)
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Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:5, Funny)
That's intirely possible.
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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.
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Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:5, Informative)
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".
That's what the 'API' part of VAAPI is :-)
There's nothing wrong with having compile-time options in open-source software. It's the job of the package and distribution maintainers to abstract this kind of thing away from end users. It'll be a while before this 1.0.0 release filters down to users' desktops through their package managers, which you could wait for and not have to worry about it (this is certainly what I'll be doing)... 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.
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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.
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Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Hardware acceleration (Score:5, Insightful)
You have the oddest definition of "Just Work" that I've ever seen.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
VLC media player and MPEG-2 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2 (Score:5, Informative)
Software patents are afaik not valid anywhere else in the world (luckily),
They are valid in Japan. Some other countries too, try wikipedia.
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Re:VLC media player and MPEG-2 (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, and you'd be joining the other person who paid royalties.
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Re: (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:VLC media player and MPEG-2 (Score:5, Funny)
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No longer in beta? (Score:5, Funny)
So much for being acquired by Google.
Instant Pausing, Frame By Frame (Score:5, Funny)
Thank god for Instant Pausing and Frame by Frame support. I needed more granularity over the location bar while watching porn videos. The old versions seem to be skipping to and from "keyframes" during seeking. It was very frustrating.
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.
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Better DVD menu support? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Better DVD menu support? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Better DVD menu support? (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't do what they want, either.
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Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does not work on Mac OS X 10.4 (Score:4, Informative)
How is this (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html) not obvious?
"VLC media player for Mac OS X
Latest Mac OS X package for 10.5 and 10.6 (release 1.0.0)
universal binary (29MB)
latest platform specific packages for 10.5 and 10.6 (release 1.0.0)
intel package (17.9MB)
powerpc package (17.8MB)
Last Mac OS X package for 10.4 (release 0.9.9a)"
I mean yeah, I had to scroll to the bottom of the page for the 10.4 info but.... /shrug
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Sticking with mplayer, thank you (Score:5, Interesting)
I like VLC, I really do. For that matter, I like xine too. But neither one, as far as I can tell, can do one thing that mplayer does: Display closed captioning. No, that's not DVD subtitles. It's purely a US American thing, so is routinely ignored, or at least misunderstood, by the international communities that maintain these products.
I watched a thread on a VLC (or was it xine?) discussion forum where somebody asked about closed captioning support. After about twelve messages, they finally determined that no, it really wasn't the same as subtitles (some participants never were convinced of that fact), but was "some American thing", at which point amidst a lot of tongue clucking and regrets, the thread fizzled out.
So until a media player can display closed captions, I'm not really able to use it. But nice try, guys, and keep up the good work.
(Yes, I am sure I could dive into the mplayer code, locate the closed-captioning bits, extract them, and submit them to both VLC and xine as patches. I'll get right on that, mmm-hmmm!)
Re:Sticking with mplayer, thank you (Score:4, Informative)
From the release notes:
Changes between 0.9.9a and 1.0.0:
* Closed Captions using the SCTE-20 standard are now correctly decoded
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Re:So it plays back media (Score:5, Funny)
To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?
Pissed on your grave, you ungrateful whiner.
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Re:So it plays back media (Score:5, Insightful)
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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???
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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!?
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Re:So it plays back media (Score:5, Funny)
To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?
Ah, nope, that's Janet. Ms. Jackson if you're nasty.
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Re:So it plays back media (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd rather have a dozen tools, each of which excells at it's one thing, than one tool that does a half-assed job at a dozen things.
No matter what OS I'm on, I always seem to use one app for audio, and one app for video. What constitutes a clean and useful interface for audio rarely does for video, and vice-versa. I've yet to see an app that auto-switches on media type.
Heck, in FreeBSD, I usually have three video apps (noatun, vlc and mplayer) because none of them works well on everything, but at least one will work for whatever I watch.
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Re:So it plays back media (Score:5, Funny)
... Which is why you did not install a Firefox spell-checker, I presume?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Download Broken (Score:4, Informative)
I had that happen with the Canadian mirror. I refreshed the page (as instructed at the very top), got a U.S. mirror, and everything was fine.
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Re:Consolidation (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, we are approaching some consolidation, H.264 seems to reign supreme for almost all video, I guess that's run by people with eyes. Audio, meh. 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. And apart from those that want the kitchen sink general programming environment, MKV is doing a pretty damn good job on video, audio, subtitles, chapters, multiple angles etc. BluRay for example is a whole JavaVM, there's a full OS running inside the machine just to play the damn disc. Now I'm just hoping that all the browser plugins will die and be replaced with HTML5 video elements.
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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".
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Re:Consolidation (Score:4, Funny)
You just don't get it. You have to use the right lossless format that's harmonically balanced with your speakers and cabling or you're just going to get trash out. With a mismatch, at best you'll get a limited sound stage and lack of presence especially when playing punk or thrash metal.
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Re:Consolidation (Score:5, Interesting)
This may not be entirely untrue, but for different reasons than you might imagine. Lossless means lossless, yes, but I hear rumors (definitely don't take my word for this) that DTS does apply some sweetening to the signal when they process it (boost the bass, widen the surround field). Not sure if this is true or not (and if it is true it is a really dumb idea), but for all intents and purposes, lossless is lossless and I can prove it -- with science!!
1. Step 1 -- Take an audio track, rip it as WAV, and dump it into any sound editing software.
2. Step 2 -- Duplicate that track and flip the phase on it.
What you are (not) hearing is perfect digital silence, as the waveforms are 100%, perfectly identical and cancelling each other out. This same trick sort of works in the analog realm (ie noise cancelling headphones), but you can never really get a perfectly opposing waveform and the effect thereby never works perfectly. In the digital realm however, the effect is flawless.
When two waveforms are similar, however, all of the similar parts of the waveform will cancel out, leaving only the differing bits. If you extrapolate this out, we can figure out what (if anything) is lost to different encoding processes. If you rip that same track as a 128k MP3 and repeat the experiment, you will hear everything that is lost to the encoding (that's where that hi-hat went!). When you repeat this same experiment (I know, I have done it) with Apple Lossless or FLAC, you will again get perfect digital silence, as the lossless track is bit-for-bit identical to the CD track. Science FTW!
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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!! ^^
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