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VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced

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Re: VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced

#41

That's all good and fine, but I've backed the Kickstarter project for porting VLC to Windows RT, and... where is it?

You probably missed it then: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for-the-n...

Unless you were being facetious.

Re: VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced

#42
post #15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's been my default video app since I can remember. Curious as to what you think about MPlayer, MPC-HC, or mpv, which have mostly taken the crown in nerd circles as being the de facto video players.

The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior. (Especially subbing groups) I use FooBar2K for audio and VLC for video.

There are many rendering filters and pipelines available for DirectShow (and therefore MPC-HC) that VLC does not have. For example MadVR[1] improves upscaling and display rendering quality dramatically and xy-VSFilter can render subtitles many times faster than libass which is used in VLC.

These are just two examples that I came up with off the top of my head, but there are countless more. The advantage of VLC is that it's simple and just works out of the box for 95% of stuff, but MPC/Directshow gives you far more flexibility as you can construct a very custom filter chain (eg. using different decoders and renderers).

[1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228 [2] https://code.google.com/p/xy-vsfilter/

Re: VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced

#43
post #35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full source code is provided and all the build script, see the beginning of 6.a. Any user can rebuild it.

The original GPL licensed version had full source code and build scripts provided. How is this different? The LGPLv2 still contains a clause which prevents you from adding additional restrictions, which Apple do in their policy. ( 10: ... You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. ) I believe, even if you compile from source, you still have additional restric…

There is no limit on number of devices for iOS apps (provided they are devics you own or control for your own use). The 5 device limit is for DRM protected iTunes media.

Re: VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced

#45
post #7
post #2

I'm a big fan of VLC, it's been my default video app since I can remember. Can't wait to see it again on iOS. The "big" feature I would like to see is some kind of "super-easy" drag and drop feature where I could easily send video files to my iPad/iPhone without doing the whole Browser->IP:Port->Choose file, etc. A "video file right click -> VLC -> Send file to iPad (upload in background)" would put a smile on my fac…

>it's been my default video app since I can remember. Curious as to what you think about MPlayer, MPC-HC, or mpv, which have mostly taken the crown in nerd circles as being the de facto video players.

Movist for Mac, MPC-HC for Windows.

VLC has gotten heavy and some defaults have me thinking the user is not in mind. Holding CTRL / ALT with arrow keys to skip? This is awkward with one hand. The arrows default to "Navigate" for DVD menus. DVD's! Rebuilding font cache? Yes, yes these are all customizable...

Re: VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced

#46
post #15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's been my default video app since I can remember. Curious as to what you think about MPlayer, MPC-HC, or mpv, which have mostly taken the crown in nerd circles as being the de facto video players.

The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior. (Especially subbing groups) I use FooBar2K for audio and VLC for video.

Kinda surprised that the grandparent (asked an honest question) is getting downvoted while this post (made a baseless claim) isn't.

>The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior.

VLC is built largely around the cross-platform ffmpeg libraries and does not seem to have the ability to use native Windows DirectShow filters, in the interest of being portable and removing a source of configuration errors. Like it or not, a number of high quality open-source "audio/videophile" (for lack of a better term) media player plugins exist solely as Windows DirectShow filters. The most important that springs to mind is MadVR, a video renderer with support for high-quality GPU-accelerated upscaling filters, and the ability to set separate upscaling filters for the chroma and luma channels. That's more than enough for me, but there's also ReClock (similar to the RetroArch emulator, perfectly syncs the video to the display and slightly shifts the pitch of the audio to compensate), various vendor-specific hardware-accelerated video decoders, xy-VSFilter, the LAV filter suite (which support, amongst other things, bitstreaming, the ability to pass compressed audio streams through to a digital receiver), and others I'm probably forgetting.

These plugins can be used in any media playing software for Windows that supports DirectShow filters, such as the official Windows Media Player. MPC just happens to be a really lightweight, stable, and customizable DirectShow-based media player.

VLC is good software and probably the best solution for people who just want to watch some videos without configuring anything. I haven't looked at a stock MPC install in a while, but it's possible that stock VLC works better than that. However, for those that actually want to put some effort into tweaking their AV-setup, and want to make use of Windows-specific software, MPC is a great media player, one of the few programs (including Foobar) that I sorely miss on Linux. The people that look down on VLC users are silly, but it's not like the only reason to use MPC is elitism.

Re: VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced

#47
post #2

I'm a big fan of VLC, it's been my default video app since I can remember. Can't wait to see it again on iOS. The "big" feature I would like to see is some kind of "super-easy" drag and drop feature where I could easily send video files to my iPad/iPhone without doing the whole Browser->IP:Port->Choose file, etc. A "video file right click -> VLC -> Send file to iPad (upload in background)" would put a smile on my fac…

Plex is almost this, if you're looking for something that has this feature now.

Re: VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced

#48
post #26
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior. (Especially subbing groups) I use FooBar2K for audio and VLC for video.

So, if you're going to say that about otakus then can you explain why your choices are superior?

I'll let someone else handle VLC, but fb2k is good because:

* Extremely fast startup and snappy interface

* Supports a wide variety of formats

* Uses existing ID3 tags & Vorbis comments and doesn't try creating its own

* Mature plugin interface

* Reasonably simple

Downsides are that you have to be willing to spend a little extra time organizing your music and it's weak with playlists and device synchronization.

Re: VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced

#49
post #5
post #2

I'm a big fan of VLC, it's been my default video app since I can remember. Can't wait to see it again on iOS. The "big" feature I would like to see is some kind of "super-easy" drag and drop feature where I could easily send video files to my iPad/iPhone without doing the whole Browser->IP:Port->Choose file, etc. A "video file right click -> VLC -> Send file to iPad (upload in background)" would put a smile on my fac…

I wish we could do that, but it is really annoying to do, since it almost needs a special desktop app to do so. And the iDevice must be in the listening mode... Drag'n drop in the browser is the best we have so far. Maybe a later version with Bonjour will come... Patches welcome :)

Bonjour is easy to implement. But why a special desktop app? Isn't there VLC for desktop already?

I haven't used the original VLC for iOS. Do you run an HTTP server on the device for file uploading? You could go one step further and add WebDAV on top of HTTP. That would allow mounting the app as an external disk. It can also be integrated with desktop VLC for automatic discovery and file sharing.

Can't wait to start contributing!

Re: VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced

#50
post #2

I'm a big fan of VLC, it's been my default video app since I can remember. Can't wait to see it again on iOS. The "big" feature I would like to see is some kind of "super-easy" drag and drop feature where I could easily send video files to my iPad/iPhone without doing the whole Browser->IP:Port->Choose file, etc. A "video file right click -> VLC -> Send file to iPad (upload in background)" would put a smile on my fac…

Plex is almost this, if you're looking for something that has this feature now.

Plex is great. I'm on vacation with access to my full movie collection. Streams perfectly.
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