51–60 of 153 posts
I love VLC's engine, but have never been a fan of its UI, especially the configuration interface. How well separated are the UI and engine? Building a new UI for VLC seems like a fun project.
> How well separated are the UI and engine? Completely. VLC can be run headless from command line.
In the earlier days of mainstream desktop linux (~2005), video codecs were a complete shitshow. VLC was a godsend during those times - it just worked. Still the first thing I apt-get after a fresh install. If you're reading this team VLC, thank you for your work. Ways to contribute to VLC: http://www.videolan.org/contribute.html
Quicktime on Mac OS remains a shitshow to this day. I still have not figured out how to use third party srt files for subtitles.
I used to promote VLC at every corner, until they dropped the ball on 4K support big time. Even with a good mid-price graphics card, they're unable to utilize the GPU hardware effectively, and if you don't have a good amount of CPU power, the app chokes when it's asked to play 4K video. Ridiculous, since even the integrated Intel graphics on CPUs are now capable of playing 4K without any trouble.
I used to promote VLC at every corner, until they dropped the ball on 4K support big time. Even with a good mid-price graphics card, they're unable to utilize the GPU hardware effectively, and if you don't have a good amount of CPU power, the app chokes when it's asked to play 4K video. Ridiculous, since even the integrated Intel graphics on CPUs are now capable of playing 4K without any trouble.
VDPAU allows my 7 year old weedy 1.6ghz atom to play 1080p without breaking a sweat (around 2% CPU usage).
VLC lagged behind a lot of other players (e.g mplayer, my personal favourite player; which added support in ~2009 or so), but has had decent VDPAU/VAAPI support since 2.1 (2013?).
In the case of VDPAU on nvidia, support for 4K is a hardware limitation (the purevideo chip that actually does the decoding). It's supported on purevideo 5 and later (present on some later fermi and most Kepler architecture cards).
It's the same story with Intel. Generally speaking, only Haswell and later architecture CPUs have support for 4K.
vlc 2.2.1, latest desktop release, has a possible code execution bug relating to 3gp (which doesn't have to be the file extension). Most distros have patched it, but the videolan releases don't appear to be patched since they're 2.2.1 and since the file modification for one mirror of win32 2.2.1 is last April (of course it would be pathologically stupid to release patched binaries without a new release, but it's poss…
A little know fact about the VideoLAN project is that it was started so that the student organization could justify the need to replace the old networking infrastructure of the campus with a brand new high-bandwidth fiber optics network. They really wanted to deploy a fiber optic network but the school would have never approved it so they thought "OK, we need something that uses a ton of bandwidth, let's make a video…
The old network was TokenRing based, and therefore, the more people connected, the bigger the lag for LAN games was. So they wanted an Ethernet one :)
A little know fact about the VideoLAN project is that it was started so that the student organization could justify the need to replace the old networking infrastructure of the campus with a brand new high-bandwidth fiber optics network. They really wanted to deploy a fiber optic network but the school would have never approved it so they thought "OK, we need something that uses a ton of bandwidth, let's make a video…
On a related note, VLC's traffic cone icon comes from a club member drunkenly stealing one, which then ballooned into the organization collecting them and eventually inspired the icon. https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=9792
A little know fact about the VideoLAN project is that it was started so that the student organization could justify the need to replace the old networking infrastructure of the campus with a brand new high-bandwidth fiber optics network. They really wanted to deploy a fiber optic network but the school would have never approved it so they thought "OK, we need something that uses a ton of bandwidth, let's make a video…
Over the years when I've opened VLC I've occasionally wondered what the LAN part meant in VideoLAN. I thought it must be something other than Local Area Network. Thanks for sharing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It plays literally everything In the ten or so years I've used it, I've only come across one file that VLC wouldn't play (excluded DRMed files) - a (possibly malformed) 24hr long MP4 I recorded a few years ago. Pretty much everything chokes on it (VLC crashes straight away), though oddly enough Windows Media Player handles it fine until you try to seek to a different time. I've dabbled with other media players/code…
I have quite a few files VLC doesn't play that MPlayer does. I use VLC as my main viewer but I get a file that doesn't work I try MPlayer.
The most difficult challenge was to survive constant pressures from crapware for bundling deals. Filezilla and alikes succumbed to that long time ago while VLC stand above the crowd. Kudos, hats off and happy birthday!
We receive 5 of those offers per week, with VLC. And the amounts proposed are very very tempting.