I use VLC every day. A great multi platform app, very useful contribution to the open source community. Keep up the fantastic work.
15 years of VLC and VideoLAN
121–130 of 153 posts
Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN
#122In 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
Even until the last few years on Windows, codecs were a shit show. You could download codec packs, but it was pretty hit and miss. VLC was amazing - it would open everything, audio just worked, and subtitles just worked.
That's true even today, maybe I'm getting old and I don't play much with other tools like I used to do, but VLC is the only one that always "just work".
Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN
#123A 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…
That's odd because the way VLC operated made it bandwidth efficient. A rare feature at the time and the reason for its early success I believe.
Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN
#124Is it me only who experiences a rather slow startup time with VLC on Windows 10? Once it's loaded it rocks (as long as I want to watch videos). For music, it's not the best tool, but it does the job.
Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN
#125I'm not entirely sure, but it seems that http://formation-debian.via.ecp.fr/, a famous debian tutorial (at least in early 2Ks) came from that school too. That's what made me get into debian without too much pain.
Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN
#126A client once gave me a lecture about how FOSS couldn't possibly produce software with the quality of commercial and was really just a parasitic element on software development. He pulled up a video talk by some "expert" on the topic. Oh yes, he used VLC. Thanks for the classic "umm.. you know..." moment VLC project.
> FOSS couldn't possibly produce software with the quality of commercial
Sometimes it's quite true, sometimes it's not, while I dislike extremist opinions probably his problems weren't solved by FOSS :) It depends on the task you want to solve.
Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN
#127Seems that vlc 3 would have chromecast support. I'm looking foward for that.
Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN
#128I 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.
Out of interest, which media player do you use now? Are they cross-platform like VLC?
mpv is fast and plays just about everything, but it takes a bit getting used to, since its GUI is very minimalistic (by design). Configuration is via text files, and it is scriptable in Lua.
Available for Linux, Mac and Windows: https://mpv.io/
Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
One "if" here a "dirty bool flag" there and sooner or later your code is unmaintainable, I think OpenSource + Review prevents this kind of code.
If you figure out early enough that you need this kind of feature, you can architecture your code in such a way that those "drive-by fixes" are actually pluggable and maintainable.
Indeed - at my last job, we built a js widget that would go on customers websites, and we learned pretty quickly that we would need pluggable, sometimes customers-specific hacks. Things like old versions of Prototype.js that broke JSON.stringify or forcing Internet Explorer 8+ into IE7 emulation mode. One customer overwrote Array.prototype.forEach with a broken version that lost the scope. Fun times.
Re: 15 years of VLC and VideoLAN
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general, it seems like FOSS multimedia software blows proprietary software out of the water with regards to format support, and that proprietary software works at a disadvantage, because for them, adding support for a new format means navigating a patent minefield and paying licence fees, but for FOSS, supporting every format is as simple as including FFmpeg.
I have a theory that I call "just one small fix". I think FOSS media players can handle more video files (not just formats) because most of the times the errors that makes them unplayable are just small mistakes in the way things are encoded. Does a certain camera produces only even timestamps? Let's check for that fix it, it is "just one small fix: one if and a division". Is that MPEG encoded with swapped croma? Let…
Your theory definitely has some weight to it. You should peruse the FFmpeg git server and see what the commits consist of. Most of the time, the changes comprise no more than one line, and involve the changing of an operator or adding on to an if statement.
Media codecs take a really long time to disrupt the continuum, and often times, decoders can play back other kinds of media by just changing some header information in the file.