8 ms·
That's me. However, I am not the VLC creator, just the one working on it since 10+ years. And I created the non-profit organization. See the AMA for more deta
by jbk 9y ago
That's me.
However, I am not the VLC creator, just the one working on it since 10+ years. And I created the non-profit organization.
See the AMA for more details ;)
- agumonkey 9y agoAny new funding attempts btw ?
- jbk 9y agoSerious people offering money? A couple. Clean business models? none. Spyware and hacking is not a clean business model, as far as I am concerned. But, you know, you can invest in my startup, if you prefer :)
- agumonkey 9y agoOh no I meant like kickstarter, or any other similar platform. Emacs Magit author just finished one. People gave enough for him to work for about a year.
- ekimekim 9y agoI feel like Patreon would be a good fit here.
- agumonkey 9y agoIt's the most cited in the recent months.
- tiernano 9y agoI’d back it!
- foepys 9y agoWhy? Just setup a recurring donation via Paypal or something else. Giving Patreon 30% (or whatever they take) is completely unnecessary. Patreon also requires creators to regularly post updates and provide goodies to their subscribers. What could the VLC developers even give to their subscribers except publicly available changelogs? The devs should - and I believe also want to - rather develop the player instead of thinking about what to give to maybe 50 people on Patreon every other week.
- michaelmrose 9y agoIt's aprox 5%. Are you a PayPal employee or just making stuff up for no good reason.
- foepys 9y agoNo, I am not, I don't even have a Paypal account because I personally don't trust them. But even 5% is too much, Paypal takes about 2% without the _mandatory_ goodie stuff for subscribers. Furthermore, Patreon actually takes 10% because of "5% transaction fees" plus their 5% share - following your logic, you must be a Patreon employee... It's better to send donations via SWIFT anyway but most Americans here can use Paypal a lot easier right now instead of waiting for a never coming Patreon campaign or complicated wire transfers with high fees.
- DonbunEf7 9y agoIn the USA, people are used to 5% off the top. Relax already.
- ekimekim 9y agoSource on 'mandatory goodies'? I know of plenty of patreon pages where the only tier is "Reward ($1.00): My thanks for your support"
- hackbinary 9y agoAndrew Godwin who wrote South, then the built-in Django migrations library did a very successful kickstarter. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migrations-for-django https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-mig...
- slipstream- 9y agoI'd actually be interested to see the pitches made by these kinds of people...
- Iv 9y agoOn te le redit ici, t'es un putain de héros mec.
- sametmax 9y ago+1 And all the VLC people are. I made a donation to VLC and encourage every people to do so. You rock.
- makapuf 9y agohey, nice seeing some of the usual suspects of the french internet here (aka the real french tech ;)
- jbk 9y agoAhah. No. Les héros de l'Internet, c'est Aaron Swartz, Jimmy Wales et Sam Hocevar. Pas moi :)
- throwawayknecht 9y agoIf the VLC project maintainer still holds one of those people in such high esteem, I can't donate in good faith.
- Spare_account 9y agoForgive my naivety, but which one?
- NicoJuicy 9y agoTime to donate https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money Thanks VLC team for all the good years !
- VMG 9y agoI love it when the Bitcoin QR code is just right there. Donated 10mbtc
- jbk 9y agoThanks a lot. Really cool.
- mrb 9y agoDitto, I donated 5 mbtc. I love the zero-friction experience of paying in bitcoins. Click the link, instantly opens my wallet, type amount and hit send. Done. No need to wait for a slow site to load and having to click through multiple confirmation screens (Paypal)...
- KekDemaga 9y agoPaypal is two clicks now. Click buy on the site you are buying from, PayPal loads and logs you in automatically, confirm the amount and click pay.
- hujokilom 9y agoGod forbid you attempt a donation to a party PayPal doesn't like, they will just seize your assets.
- KekDemaga 9y agoI can only talk about Paypal from the payer side it's virtually frictionless in my experience and transactions can be disputed via Paypal or my bank. Buying and using bitcoin adds a number of extra steps as well as transaction costs in moving dollars into bitcoin as well as giving me no dispute mechanism.
- amigoingtodie 9y agoCan you fix uPNP browsing?
- jbk 9y agoYep. Fixed in 3.0. Along with FTP, SFTP, SMB and NFS browsing.
- trapperkeeper74 9y agoCool! Google Drive integration on iOS stopped working. Other than that, works awesome.
- jbk 9y agoNo, it is fixed for 2.8.4
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- amigoingtodie 9y agoAwesome work, sir.
- johnhenry 9y agoTranslated AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/73awjd/vlc_president_jeanbaptiste_kempf_did_an_ama_over/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/73awjd/vlc_pres...
- senectus1 9y agoyou, sir are a legend
- sharpercoder 9y agoHave you considered accepting money on certain terms and subsequently using that money to do improvements? A couple millions can get quite far in improving certain aspects of the software, like UX, documentation etc. It seems to me that your response was seemingly the right moral thing to do. However, I can also see a lot of practical benefits of having a pile of cash to improve open software.
- jbk 9y ago> Have you considered accepting money on certain terms and subsequently using that money to do improvements? A couple millions can get quite far in improving certain aspects of the software, like UX, documentation etc. Yes, I did. But only if the terms are fine and moral. That never happened.
- AsyncAwait 9y agoThanks for taking the moral stance, even in the face of loosing access to millions of euros, much appreciated!
- malmsteen 9y agoEt euh, pourquoi ne pas accepter et ten foutre car c'est open source donc qqun le forke ou tu le fais toi même ? translate: why not accept and not care because opensource so someone fork or even yourself on the long term
- KGIII 9y agoJust the other day, I was commenting about how VLC is pretty much the embodiment of perfect settings/preferences/options. While many folks have reduced settings to just selecting a theme, VLC has settings for preferences that I don't even understand. And that is perfect. You've now been added to my regular donation cycle. I'd rather provide for longevity than a lump sum where I forget to keep contributing. VLC should be the goal for most every application's settings menu. It is not just a menu to change settings, it's a menu that leads to discovery and learning. It's pretty much perfection.
- sagichmal 9y agoBizarre. I have completely the opposite reaction. VLC settings is UX nightmare, I have actual negative emotional response when I have to go in there.
- jbk 9y agoWhy? Simple preferences is close to Firefox or other software. Advanced preferences are complex, so it's like about:config
- KGIII 9y agoIn the conversation where I brought up VLC as having the perfect preferences aspect, it started off with a poster saying, "the customer should be able to use the product fully without having to read any documentation." I used that to segue into quite a rant about how I lamented the lack of complexity in software. I extended it quite broadly into things like it being a sign of declining intellectual curiosity, about how aiming for the lowest common denominator was bad for those who understand computers, and even extended it to my dismay at the lack of decent help files. It was long and rambling, touching on many subjects, and I think I should turn it into a more formal essay. Anyhow, VLC gets the preferences options perfect. The UI can use a bit of work and the UX is a bit rough, but the multitude of options makes up for any shortcomings it may otherwise have. I haven't even really bothered to learn the command line options, which is actually a little strange for me. I spend quite a bit of time in the terminal. And no, no... I made it a point to inform people that I wasn't wanting computing to revert to the older days. No, software wasn't better back twenty years ago. The Internet wasn't better and computers weren't better. What was better was that programs actually had options. They had preferences. They had multiple ways that they could be configured. They could output and process work differently. I guess my final message was a plaintive request that developers bring back my buttons. I miss those buttons. I get a hamburger icon that expands and the entire options, if it exists at all, is actually just a theme picker. Some software doesn't even have exit as a menu option. If I want to close an app on a mobile, it may actually mean finding a task manager just to close it. It gets even worse if there is no back option and I want to begin anew at the application's start screen. So, I just wanted to take an extra minute and explain a bit more and to thank you. I already set up a donation and the project should get a donation every month, assuming I did it properly. VLC doesn't just do what it says on the box, it inspires me to learn, to discover, and to keep being curious. I think all of those things are much more valuable than a video player. Anyone can write a video player. It takes someone special to write one that plays videos and encourages curiosity, growth, and learning. Which is rather a long way to say, "Thanks, again!"
- camus2 9y agoMerci pour le taff! fallait prendre la thune ;) Thanks for your work, you should have taken the money ;) Seriously it just means that your work is that valuable.
- trapperkeeper74 9y agoVLC is awesome! :D I use the iOS and macOS versions often. Thank you^10.
- vintageseltzer 9y agoThank you. VLC is a near-perfect product. I love the focus on utility, speed, and simplicity and nothing else. It is the WinAmp of video. It seems like you know what you're doing, but please resist pressure to iTunes-ify what you've built.
- jbk 9y ago> but please resist pressure to iTunes-ify what you've built. What would be iTunes-ifying it?
- vintageseltzer 9y agoEarly iTunes was pretty nice — a lightweight, focused music player and not much else. Over time it became slow, unusable bloatware — an iPhone/iPad backup / sync manager, an e-commerce / ad platform (iTunes store), a social media platform (Ping), a way for Apple to automatically tag/categorize/mess up your library, among others. I'm not sure if it's better now, I abandoned it years ago.
- sdenton4 9y agoI imagine they mean adding a pile of content management bloat...
- jbk 9y agoOK, but a media library can be lean, can it not?
- Can_Not 9y agoI associate iTunes with useless bloat and loss of user control. My experience has exclusively been with windows and I've never purchased a device that requires iTunes to sync. Before iTunes came out, applications like foobar/winamp/Windows Media player were already loaded fast, used low resources, stable, and performant. iTunes was not. Before iTunes, you would copy your mp3s to your device. With iTunes you had a mysterious syncing process. Stories about requiring a 3 hour sync to add one new song or your entire collection being deleted were not uncommon. There was DRM in the early days. I surely wasn't going to switch from my pre-iTunes system to a system with DRM for literally no other additional value. If I knew that advanced options were missing, I'd include that in my complaints, too.
- gpvos 9y agoSo, how about the several offers to have your babies, did you accept any?
- punnerud 9y agoActually reinstalled VLC two days ago, after two years without it. Still freel I use Google a lot to find settings/features I know VLC have (also one of the reasons back). jbk, you have a lot of good submissions. To bad I haven’t seen more of them up on the HN-board. Added to my donation list too.
- jbk 9y ago> jbk, you have a lot of good submissions. To bad I haven’t seen more of them up on the HN-board. Well, I'm not pushing a lot...
- hmate9 9y agoI will appreciate VLC 100x as much from now on.
- cgb223 9y agoThanks so much for doing this I’ve been using VLC for 6 years and nothing has compared. When do you expect the cast to chromecast feature to make it into the stable build for Mac?
- bigbugbag 9y agoVLC creator is an ass, stole my gf.
- make3 9y agoyou mean she decided to leave you for him. girlfriends are people who make their own decisions, not things, and as such can't be stolen.
- bigbugbag 9y agoOf course people are not things, this is an expression. Allow me to rephrase that: When you fuck an other guy girlfriend behind his back, you're an ass. Specially when you fuck the girl at her boyfriend place and later get her to leave him for you. VLC creator did exactly that.
- make3 9y agoHe didn't get her to leave for you is what I'm saying. She would be the ass for deciding to have sex with someone else behind your back. He his surely not responsible for her decisions, as she is a human being with full decision making capabilities. And he didn't get her to leave. She chose to leave. All of this is her responsibility, not his.
- bigbugbag 9y agoI understand your point and it would make sense about a general hypothetical case, but it start to unravel quickly when you get into the real world, for example would you still consider a drunk human being as having full decision making capabilities ? Would you consider fucking a drunk girl to be some kind of abuse or that she used her full decision making capabilities and the responsibility lies with her exclusively ? I'm pretty sure you're talking about something you don't even know the beginning of. I won't get into details, let's just say I know what happened and how it happened and that I know what I'm saying when I say what I say.
- productboy 9y agoIn awe of your fine work, gracias. BTW: The settings UX is my favorite aspect of VLC. It's like if NASA designed a video player. I only have ETH in my wallet... will try to donate later.
- ericd 9y agoThanks for ending what used to be a bimonthly cycle of trying to find codecs while trying to avoid malware. VLC is now one of my first downloads on any fresh OS install.