Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thenextweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 85 posts

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

#61

Post by hrktb »

Camillo wrote: post #38
mehrzad wrote: 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.

I don't want to go off-topic, but since VLC developers are reading this thread, here's where MPlayer (I use MPlayerX) is still better than VLC: - MPlayer starts much faster. - MPlayer loads videos much faster. - MPlayer has very convenient shortcuts for skipping forward or backward by 10 seconds (just press the right or left arrow), which are a godsend when you're watching something in a foreign language and you need…

I've been using both for weird format files and codecs (anything more or less standard is streamed to the tv directly) and felt that VLC tends to try as much as possible to read everything, while MPlayerX is more tolerant towards garbage in the stream and won't bother recovering mildly invalid data.

Part of the lag in VLC when starting a stream might come from a more heavy handed init process.

This can be a curse or a blessing, I'm happy both approaches are available.

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

#63

Post by jbk »

0x0 wrote: post #30
kansas wrote: post #24

VLC app used to drain my battery. I moved to Plex and Tonido after the removal. Hopefully this release doesn't drain the battery.

As I understand, VLC is unable to leverage the hardware codecs of the iPhone, because it doesn't use the official media frameworks, so it has to run stuff less efficiently in software.

No, it's just that the official frameworks are either all or none. VideoToolbox framework exist but is private so far.

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

#64

Post by darkstalker »

antr wrote: 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…

If you jailbreak you can use SFTP

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

#66

Post by GuiA »

"VideoLAN revealed some very exciting news today: VLC for iOS will be back in Apple’s App Store by tomorrow (July 19). The company tells TNW the app will be available for free worldwide"

The original iOS port was made by Applidium; is this still Applidium, or a separate VideoLan initiative?

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

#67

Post by feepk »

GuiA wrote: post #66

"VideoLAN revealed some very exciting news today: VLC for iOS will be back in Apple’s App Store by tomorrow (July 19). The company tells TNW the app will be available for free worldwide" The original iOS port was made by Applidium; is this still Applidium, or a separate VideoLan initiative?

75% are written by me with major contributions by https://twitter.com/gpinigin and some improvements by Applidium :)

So, it's a VideoLAN initiative.

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

#68

Post by feepk »

emehrkay wrote: post #65
jbk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are working on that for a later version :)

Let me pay for this app to help you guys out. I love VLC

VLC is free (both as in beer and in speech) and will always be :)

However, you can donate to our non-profit organization, which e.g. paid the iPad I used for development, as well as a whole lot of other things around VLC and further VideoLAN projects.

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

#69

Post by chj »

air wrote: post #27
jbk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my blogposts on LGPL relicensing of VLC engine http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/I-did-it Note that the relicensing was not done for the iOS port. And the app above the VLC engine is dual licensed GPLv2/MPLv2

Bradley Kuhn (who has worked for FSF for license stuff) says LGPL does not help. http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/11/22/vlc-lgpl.html

Oh, then fuck FSF and drop LGPL. It's their product after all. If they can get a license change, they can get another, can't they?

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

#70

Post by JohnTHaller »

simcop2387 wrote: post #39
JohnTHaller wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MPlayer works in the Linux world, but the app itself has no stable releases outside of that so it doesn't have traction beyond Linux. Unless you count things like SMPlayer (Windows-specific front-end and MPlayer backend) and the like. MPC-HC is pretty popular in the Windows world. But neither of them come close to approaching VLC's userbase. We make SMPlayer, MPC-HC and VLC all available in portable form at PortableA…

smplayer isn't windows only. It does work on linux fairly well too. That being said, I have grown to like VLC more lately.

Quite right, my mistake. The point still stands, though, as Windows (the dominant OS by a huge margin) has no stable releases of the base MPlayer app, so there's no one version people can grab. Whereas VLC runs quite well on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Post reply on HN