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VLC media player banned in India

indiatoday.in

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Re: VLC media player banned in India

#91

Post by pessimizer »

zmmmmm wrote: post #82

It's fascinating that attempts at censorship often seem to quickly founder in incompetence of all things. It turns out that actually banning the right things and not the wrong things seems simple on the surface and then turns out to be problem of nearly unsolvable scale and complexity, to the point where the system often falls down through the utter humiliation of how badly it is working.

Banning quickly, then unbanning slowly, usually by special request, works just fine for authoritarians. If it matters to enough people, you'll hear about it, and if it matters to important or wealthy people it will create an opportunity for graft/partnership. So, now that VLC (for example) has called you to get you to unban their software, you can call them later to get a feature removed or put in, or just free/discounted consulting on how to block objectionable streams (for example), with a vague threat of rebanning hanging over the discussion.

Indonesia just banned the entire foreign internet (without the west caring), and is requiring sites that want to operate within the country to apply for whitelisting.

edit: https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/internet-freedom-in-indonesi...

background: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/indonesias-proposed-on...

Re: VLC media player banned in India

#92

Post by alfiedotwtf »

kubatyszko wrote: post #89
jbk wrote: post #45

President of VideoLAN here: we got banned since a few months, and we don’t know why. (According to my stats, it is since the 13 February 2022) . We’ve asked the Indian government and we got no answer. We probably did not ask the right place though. I wish I knew how to ask properly. The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are not. So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the government? V…

It must be because VLC allows people to watch pirated content. Which would be the most ridiculous reason to get banned for.

Sssshh! Please keep that opinion to yourself... we dont want thr Australian Government to get any ideas!

Re: VLC media player banned in India

#93

Post by dr_dshiv »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #88
UberFly wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny and painfully ubiquitous. Probably really well-paid monkey astrologers too.

governments write their own checks and set their own pay rate. You can bet they are quite rich.

Actually, that’d be great. The most likely reason it got banned is because of corruption. One reason for corruption is that politicians aren’t paid well. What smart competent sane person would rationally choose to be a politician? Maybe if it paid competitively. I wonder if there is a study on the ROI?

Re: VLC media player banned in India

#94

Post by cheeze »

jbk wrote: post #67
nindalf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunate, sorry you had to go through that. The article made a claim that VLC is owned by a Chinese entity. That surprised me because I thought VideoLAN was and is French. Is that the case?

> That surprised me because I thought VideoLAN was and is French. It is a French non-profit whose address is my parents place :)

Thanks for all of your hard work and for not selling out. I love you folks.

Re: VLC media player banned in India

#95

Post by opan »

Jach wrote: post #49
kitsunesoba wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How is this done? Without additional information the claim sounds like hdmi cable advertising to me. Differences in the video/audio decoding process. VLC optimizes for playing media over a network connection (hence its name Video LAN Client), where temporary dropouts and data loss are common and might cause other players to choke. The cost of this is sometimes less accurate playback. mpv is optimized primarily for a…

Just laughing to myself at this. A friend and I started copying long movies from the NAS to the media PC's local storage, since if I use my preferred smplayer (mpv) sometimes some hiccup will cause it to crash, but his preferred vlc will limp along and happily put out corrupted playback. Neither is a good experience. (Anyway the problem is likely the media PC itself since the issue doesn't happen on either of our per…

I've had a good experience with playing files in mpv via sshfs, both local and remote. Helps a bit to enable a generous cache in mpv also. (I let it take a few GB so that the average episode of something can be entirely cached if I let it sit)

Re: VLC media player banned in India

#96

Post by hakube »

kubatyszko wrote: post #89
jbk wrote: post #45

President of VideoLAN here: we got banned since a few months, and we don’t know why. (According to my stats, it is since the 13 February 2022) . We’ve asked the Indian government and we got no answer. We probably did not ask the right place though. I wish I knew how to ask properly. The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are not. So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the government? V…

It must be because VLC allows people to watch pirated content. Which would be the most ridiculous reason to get banned for.

Well if that is the case they would ban torrent clients and other video players

Re: VLC media player banned in India

#97

Post by gtirloni »

xNeil wrote: post #53
jbk wrote: post #45

President of VideoLAN here: we got banned since a few months, and we don’t know why. (According to my stats, it is since the 13 February 2022) . We’ve asked the Indian government and we got no answer. We probably did not ask the right place though. I wish I knew how to ask properly. The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are not. So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the government? V…

>The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are not. So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the government? Pretty much. My ISP doesn't block half the stuff the Indian government has banned, while my mobile data provider has - it's genuinely very weird. Regarding contacting the government - maybe https://pgportal.gov.in should help? File your grievance with the section of the government yo…

> My ISP doesn't block half the stuff the Indian government has banned, while my mobile data provider has - it's genuinely very weird

That's quite normal. Your ISP is probably much smaller than a telco and so drives much less scrutiny from law enforcement.

Re: VLC media player banned in India

#98

Post by YetAnotherNick »

xNeil wrote: post #60
p49k wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they corrected it, but for me it says the opposite. > Notably, VLC Media Player is not backed by a Chinese company. It is developed by VideoLAN, a Paris-based firm.

The article basically states that the reason the government banned it was because Chinese actors were using VideoLAN products (VLC) to deploy malware loaders onto citizens' devices. I don't understand why they banned videolan.org though. It's a French website, and I'd assume the Chinese actors were bundling malware when VLC was installed from another website and not videolan.org. Videolan.org is EXACTLY where VLC sho…

It says

> The reason behind blocking these apps is that the government feared these platforms were sending user data to China

Maybe they have some CDN or some service in China?

Re: VLC media player banned in India

#99

Post by jeroenhd »

redox99 wrote: post #90
unixbane wrote: post #7

Quoted post unavailable.

Somewhat cheeky but you're right. mpv is much better than VLC.

I disagree. I've had many issues with MPV over the years, ranging from lack of hardware decoding support on some hardware to plain crashes for files that VLC and even web browsers played flawlessly.

I see people claim that VLC somehow produces inferior output but I've never experienced this. The only way mpv seems superior is that it can deal with Syncplay better than VLC, in all other cases it's just a more crashy, less intuitive media player in my experience.

Re: VLC media player banned in India

#100

Post by YetAnotherNick »

My guess of what would have happened is this:

Some movie producer tried to find places in which their movies were pirated, and did google search and made a list and did a court case. Now some random judge who doesn't understand/like internet asked the sites to be blocked. And videolan.org was middle in that list and it got overlooked. Then they handed that list to ISP. Few ISP found the issue and decided not to block it, but many blocked it without looking.

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