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15 years of VLC and VideoLAN

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101–110 of 153 posts

Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN

#101
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please share them with us :)

Lots of modern anime rips have had corruption issues with VLC in the past[0]. It's actually become a meme in those communities[1]. As x264 and 10bit encodings became ubiquitous, I think VLC's support also became fairly sufficient. However, the anime community is known for being early adopters of new encoding strategies. I believe it would benefit the development of VLC if some developers could check out what those en…

One big change was VLC switching to use mplayer's libass rather than their own (buggy, quite likely to the extent of allowing remote code execution) ass parser. These days VLC mostly seems alright, though it'll take a while for it to gain my trust.

Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN

#102

I briefly operated an audiovisual services company (that lost a tremendous amount of money, but that had nothing to do with VLC), and after trying loads of players, came back to VLC. It allowed all of the stuff I needed and that many other players (including expensive commercial ones) failed at. It plays literally everything . We regularly had sponsors show up the day of the show and hand me a USB drive with their ad…

> 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…

What bothers me are the crashes. A crash probably translates into an arbitrary code execution when a malicious file exploits it.

I've seen files that mplayer won't play that VLC will (though I've seen more of the opposite), but when mplayer can't parse a file it tends to simply not play it rather than crashing. So I'm not going to use VLC on files from the untrusted internet.

Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN

#103
post #5

Still wished I could have VLC as an engine inside QuickTime or whatever's native to the platform/OS. Is that possible or do you have to source the web for several obscure codecs?

OS-specific things are OS-specific. ffmpeg (the primary backend decoder used by VLC and many other OS projects) is a great cross-platform library that can play most things, but you need some kind of platform-specific wrapper (e.g. ffdshow on windows) to hook it into the OS' native services and make it available inside other apps.

Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN

#105
post #60
post #49

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!

> The most difficult challenge was to survive constant pressures from crapware for bundling deals. We receive 5 of those offers per week, with VLC. And the amounts proposed are very very tempting.

Are all of those really crapware? Maybe you can hand-pick some useful utilities and bundle with default unchecked (checkbox) install option?

Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use VLC on OSX as well. It works great!

When watching h.264 VLC consumes lots of CPU when QuickTime doesn't. I don't know why.

I assume that it is because QuickTime is using your GPU to decode the h.264 but VLC isn't.

There is support for hardware accelerated h.264 decoding in VLC; you just need to enable it. I think the option is in Input and Codecs tab in the preferences.

Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use VLC on OSX as well. It works great!

When watching h.264 VLC consumes lots of CPU when QuickTime doesn't. I don't know why.

Maybe QuickTime knows how to leverage hardware decoding?

Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN

#108
post #80
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please share them with us :)

I was going to say: an example that's fairly reproducible, any video recorded with Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is playable in WMP but not VLC. However, I just tried it is fixed already, I love VLC.

I had the same problem, and the fix was quite obvious once you read it: if you have 64bits OBS and 32bits VLC, VLC crashes when you open the video. Use both 64bits or 32 bits software, and you're fine.

Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use VLC on OSX as well. It works great!

When watching h.264 VLC consumes lots of CPU when QuickTime doesn't. I don't know why.

You might have hardware acceleration in the Input/Codecs menu disabled.

Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN

#110
post #96
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please keep staying away from it. FileZilla burned them-self, everyone moved to alternatives

everyone moved to alternatives Like? I want to move to an alternative, but nothing reasonably easy to use and deploy on windows comes close FileZilla for performance.

client-side, you can use WinSCP, free, supports SCP, SFTP and FTP protocols. You can also use any piece of software on your computer to edit remote files, you juste have to configure file extensions in the parameters (like MSWord for .doc/.docx, notepad++ for .txt/.log/whatever, etc)
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