18 ms·

The one who kept VLC free

455 points by elorant 7y ago

SaturateDK 7y ago
I don't understand the "When a mistake becomes a genius move" part... cool that is was a mistake, but I feel like there's missing something, how was this mistake made? What was the mistake?
- Bootvis 7y ago
  I'm guessing here that the perceived mistake was that it was better to have a plugin based architecture where you can use all those codecs written by others.
- foobarbecue 7y ago
  Yeah, seems like he forgot to finish writing that. I guess he statically linked the libraries when updating windows deps because he didn't know how to do it dynamically and that meant they were stuck shipping them all together? Is that even how that works (I don't really know C et al well).
- thefz 7y ago
  I think he refers to the fact that by porting VLC to Windows they had to embed all the dependencies (codecs) into the final binary, which is coincidentally why VLC has gained so much popularity.
- quentinp 7y ago
  jbk explained why this initially was a mistake on r/linux, see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d8mhqe/the_one_who_kept_vlc_free/f1c0to5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d8mhqe/the_one_who_k...: > It was the fact that it came from the Linux world. So, when porting to Windows/macOS, the codec packages were part of the binary. It was supposed to temporary. > This interview has cut that part.
- jbk 7y ago
  OK, there are a few things that were done in VLC for reasons that could be puzzling or had unintended excellent consequences. Those are not really mistakes, per se. I can speak about 3 of them: 1) the one mentioned in the interview, where, when VLC was ported to Windows and Mac OS X, instead of using the system codecs, they used the linux-way and bundled the dependencies. It was supposed to be temporary, and we would use the system codecs. This means that we control better our decoders and demuxers than other traditional players, and we did not require codec-pack. That became very popular for VLC. 2) The cone was a temporary icon (and a student joke), and it is sooooo weird for a player, that this became a huge brand because it is so recognizable. 3) The code was split in a lot of modules, to help speed up the compilation time, of the project. That made the code way easier to extend or port to other platforms. Indeed, for example, a lot of modules don't need a lot of maintenance, because they just work. And you can add features or new OS, without understanding the core. There are 2 other technical reasons that helped VLC getting popular, but those were planned. The interview is too short to explain all this.
  - fsckin 7y ago
    2) The cone was a temporary icon Turn it sideways (5 degrees per major release) and keep the colors. Eventually it will be a Play Button.
  - alecmg 7y ago
    Do you know how Media Player Classic solved the same problem? I definitely remember the struggle with codec packs, then a breth of fresh air when ffmpeg codecs would solve most formats, and then just like that forgetting all codec issues by using MPC.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      Media Player Classic usually came in the same installer as a bundle of codecs (like K-Lite), so you likely installed the two at once, but the model is still different from VLC, in that the codecs get independently installed into the system media framework, not embedded in the player.
    - 7y ago
- sharpshadow 7y ago
  One genius move back then was that you could increment the volume over 100%
agumonkey 7y ago
similarly Blender author made a voluntary move to keep blender an open product pretty great outcome :)
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Not just the Blender author, it was the Blender users who saved it by raising $100,000 in seven weeks to buy the rights to open it.
- Pigo 7y ago
  >Sure, more money would be fun, but most of the people I know who have more money are annoying. Like a boss.
pizza234 7y ago
> There are about 500 modules in VLC, which means you can come and work on a very small part and improve it without breaking everything else. This is presented as a positive. Here's the negative: poor maintenance. Virtually nobody knows, for example, how the official SMB plugin works, and there's no documentation. Speaking about "best developers" (a section of the article). Since version 3, video playback suffered from one or more bugs on any of the 4+ machines I've tried it on. I'm talking about video playback, which is a core feature; I had to switch to MPlayer. It seems to me that VLC is the software users love to love. I'm puzzled by the reasons of this; my guess is that products with a zillion of features have a certain charm.
- jbk 7y ago
  > Virtually nobody knows, for example, how the official SMB plugin works, and there's no documentation. Totally BS. We have 4 SMB modules, which ones are you talking about? (Windows, samba, libdsm (v1) and libsmb2). We spent a lot of time lately to fix that and improve it. Sure, with the move to SMBv2/3 we had some issues, but that is normal because it required a new architecture, and they are almost all fixed now. The documentation of those modules is at the same place as usual. > Since version 3, video playback suffered from one or more bugs on any of the 4+ machines I've tried it on. Since version 3, we activated hardware decoding by default, and that means it is very dependent on your linux distribution and your drivers. I think most of those issues are fixed now though.
foobarbecue 7y ago
How does changing wives affect your code??
- lolc 7y ago
  I don't speak from experience but changing spouse may come with a change in priorities.
- jbk 7y ago
  Not your code, but your time to work on VLC.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Insanity 7y ago
  Different family situations can surely impact how much time you have to do OSS. One partner might always be working on weekends whilst another is always free during the weekend. Also if you get a divorce, you might not really be up to working on OSS for some time, which is probably part of changing wives. :P
- foobarbecue 7y ago
  Wow, why all the downvotes? The original article said "People change jobs, change wives, have kids, accidents, and so on. So everything in VLC needs to be done so that we can continue without you." I really don't get how "changing wives" fits here so was asking a legitamate question. And I got some legitamate answers too -- e.g. you might have had a wife that supported your volunteer coding financially or otherwise.
bstar77 7y ago
As much as I love VLC, them blowing off the lack of UI polish is why I have a love/hate relationship with it. For instance, VLC still forces you to kill the process when it can't find all of the files in a playlist (if you deleted them from your desktop). When you restart the app, if you hit play you will have the same problem. This happens to me all the time. It's a shame because it would not take much to address all of the nitpick issues I have with it, but there seems to be no interest.
- jbk 7y ago
  > As much as I love VLC, them blowing off the lack of UI polish is why I have a love/hate relationship with it. Good, you will be happy to know that we're redoing the UI for 4.0, to fix UX issues. And the issue you mentioned is fixed in last version and better fixed in 4.0. > but there seems to be no interest. That is totally not true. We listen a lot to user feedback, but we are understaffed compared to the project size. It is getting better, and the biggest issues (like the one you mentioned) are all getting fixed.
  - valtism 7y ago
    When you say you are going to fix UX issues, do you mean you're going to address concerns, or do you mean you're really doing an overhaul. I personally use IINA, because of its closeness to QuickTime UI, but I would imagine cutting / hiding so much usability would be difficult for VLC. Can you tell me a little about your approach to this problem? I am super interested to hear what your thoughts on it.
    - jbk 7y ago
      > When you say you are going to fix UX issues, do you mean you're going to address concerns, or do you mean you're really doing an overhaul. Both :)
  - dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
    Thanks a lot for VLC.
  - 7y ago
jbk 7y ago
OK, so, this is me talking. This is an old interview that resurfaces lately (no idea why), and it was done by a HR company, and they did a lot of cuts. So, it is far from being technically accurate, and some parts are quite weird. Clearly not for the HN crowd, tbh. I dislike those kind of interviews, because they focus on one person (people-isation trend that we see also in startups) while VLC was done by a collective. It is sure that I'm the person that spent the most time on VLC and other VideoLAN projects than anyone else, but the work is a collective one. Yes, it is true that I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name, or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer. (inb4 mpv, mpc-hc, potplayer is better...)
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  > Yes, it is true that I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name, Thank you. > ... or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer. Thank you a lot.
  - heyoni 7y ago
    I know right? So many good projects have failed to maintain their integrity and changed for the worst. It’s hard to trust software these days but there are exceptions and VLC is one of them.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      It didn't help that at some point on of the main distribution points for FOSS shipped archives stuffed with malware that the authors had no idea about.
      - phkahler 7y ago
        Yeah, I used to place some trust in programs under certain licenses, or downloaded from that place. Now the license is a hard requirement and so is not being from that place.
      - 7y ago
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I’ve mentioned this in other threads on music streaming, but VLC is the center of my music world. The feature that lets you spawn a web server from the mobile app to easily transfer files from a laptop is incredible, so easy that literally my grandma used it to put some old recordings on her phone (and knows VLC is the “recordings app”). I want to pay music artists better for their work than what I can with streaming apps, and I also want my entire library available offline on all devices. VLC makes it not just possible, but easy and fun.
- jbk 7y ago
  > I’ve mentioned this in other threads on music streaming, but VLC is the center of my music world. I got good news for you: next release has better audio quality (less resampling) and gapless playback. Plus more metadata support.
  - Tarsul 7y ago
    ok, I finally registered here to say this: thank you and the VLC team! Also... the only feature that I always missed when playing music with VLC instead of winamp: Enqueue. Meaning: adding a music file that gets put in as the next song and not at the end (or played directly)... is such a thing planned at all? I can't be only one (actually, I haven't found a player that does this since winamp :( )
    - _Tev 7y ago
      On Android, PowerAmp has the functionality, and imo a tad more polished (enqueue is saved as a temporary playlist). On desktop WinAmp is still the only one :(
    - jbk 7y ago
      This is trivial to add. Can you open a ticket?
      - Tarsul 7y ago
        Yes, I have opened a ticket here: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/22914#ticket https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/22914#ticket However, I think my first description here in the comments was not concrete enough. I don't think the (awesome) function from winamp is as trivial to add as it might have appeared :) Thank you again, anyway!
jrochkind1 7y ago
How do the developers that work on VLC get paid? Unrelated, I found this statement (probably a mis-quote by the journalist) amusing: > Because it was done as a student project, it is a very modular program and it is very easy to add a new feature. So many people have found it challenging to make complex software modular and easy to add new features -- turns out, all we need to do is get students to create the projects, and then they'll be so! :)
- jbk 7y ago
  > How do the developers that work on VLC get paid? Most of the time, they don't. But lately, I created a company doing consulting and integration of libVLC inside mobile apps, and it is now employing most core developers of VLC.
- Avamander 7y ago
  > So many people have found it challenging to make complex software modular and easy to add new features -- turns out, all we need to do is get students to create the projects, and then they'll be so! :) Get a student who could be a really good software archidect create the foundation basically. I think it's a small amount of people who could do such things.
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    In my experience, skill at doing that usually comes from... experience. (and ideally experience in similar domains to what you are designing, not just software in general). Certainly there are "students" with software engineering/architecture experience and/or natural amazing talent, but it's def not the first place I'd look!
TecoAndJix 7y ago
When i was much younger, my friends and I use to joke that you could take a handful of mud, put it in the CD tray, and VLC would open and play the file. Thank you so much VLC team for all you have contributed (and continue to contribute)!
- Pigo 7y ago
  Anybody who has every known the pain of running RealPlayer, knows what a Godsend VLC was. A free player that just works and is simple to use, it put those companies that didn't truly offer anything on ice.
  - ryandrake 7y ago
    I don't think a lot of younger folks appreciate the pain we had to go through back in the day to just play a video file on a Windows 95 PC. There were a handful of media players out there and each would only play 1-2 formats... poorly. Want to play AVIs? Windows Media Player. Want to play QuickTime files? Gotta go get QuickTime. Want to play Real format? Download RealPlayer. So if you downloaded a random video from the web and want to play it, you need to figure out what player you need to get in order to play it. Back then, a lot of stuff from the web was garbage, corrupted data, named incorrectly, .mpg files that were actually AVI format, etc. So once you found the right player, you had to worry about whether it would play properly with your PC's video card. There were flaky video cards and not all manufacturers had drivers that worked. Then, if the downloaded file was corrupted in any way, chances are the official player would throw its hands up and refuse to play it. Then, once you actually found the right player and verified that it could play the file back, you were still stuck with that player's horrible UI and feature set. There were brave souls who would download these "codec packs" from super-shady web sites, to act as plug-ins to Windows Media Player, since Microsoft couldn't manage to ship working video playback out of the box for anything but AVI. God knows what else those codec pack installers put on your system. And reliably playing video directly in your browser? LOL, that would be for another 10 years or so with YouTube. VLC was a huge breath of fresh air! Maybe it's not so vital now, since proper video playback is "table stakes" on any platform. You can play any video now with one line of Python, right? But we did sorely need it decades ago.
chirau 7y ago
I just came to say that the VLC app for iOS is absolutely trash
- moviuro 7y ago
  https://github.com/videolan/vlc-ios/pulls https://github.com/videolan/vlc-ios/pulls : Here you go, be useful.
Excel_Wizard 7y ago
I have a question that is more likely to be answered here and now than at any other opportunity I've had before- For a long while now, VLMC has been a work-in-progress. It is a video editor being made by the same organization as VLC. I've been eagerly anticipating having this as a free/open source video editing tool that I can trust will be available in the long term. I haven't seen any evidence that it isn't vaporware in a long time. So to those in the know- when can we expect to see VLMC finished? https://www.videolan.org/vlmc/ https://www.videolan.org/vlmc/
- jbk 7y ago
  > So to those in the know- when can we expect to see VLMC finished? No clue. Noone seems to care enough.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    The last commit on the master branch was in 2017: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlmc/commits/master https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlmc/commits/master That's a real shame because there are lots of people who would really like to see a good open source video editor. Blender's built-in NLE works but it isn't as well-developed as VLMC could be (it's not the main focus of a 3D modeling program). I think Natron lost its main developer around that time as well. It's as if we almost had a broad revolution in open source video editing, but it petered out before hitting 1.0.
  - kup0 7y ago
    Sad to hear that. I'm super interested in having software like this and would even pay for it. However, I don't believe I am skilled enough to be able to contribute to its development. Maybe someday.
martin1b 7y ago
VLC, it really whips Winamps a$$.
zip1234 7y ago
VLC is an amazing tool. I almost wish it was the embedded video player for Chrome or Firefox. It would be nice to play more formats of video on the web and VLC does an amazing job supporting other formats. Also, there is no way to play RTSP on the web, which VLC does well.
INTPenis 7y ago
I love VLC and use it daily, literally daily. I often donate to open source projects and VLC is one of those. One gripe though is that VLC gives a such a good impression that you get very disappointed when basic things like scanning your media library don't work. It catches you by surprise because the rest of VLC is so polished. And for example the fact that there was no sleep timer until recently. You'd think that an open source project so widely used would find plenty of help to implement such basic features.
- FrojoS 7y ago
  From the interview: "For a patch to get accepted, it needs to be maintainable as well as useful [...] Which means that we put a lot of emphasis on quality. So, with any code we get sent, we need to make sure that we can still maintain it in 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years… And that’s why we have a lot of features in VLC that some consider completely useless and why we don’t have others that some people think are important. It’s not because we’re stupid, it’s just that the code needs to be clean—if it’s not, you don’t get in." (emphasis mine)
mehdix 7y ago
> we don’t have a marketing department or a management team of people who decide on a feature that is then pushed down to the users, as has been happening with RealPlayer and BS.Player. So, when we add a feature it’s because people actually need it and actually want it. There is a clear distinction between software written with profit in mind and free software. Behind the first one often there are people with agendas, strong opinions and marketing departments. They keep breaking things and force me to change my habits to their likings. The second group however, is user-oriented with no marketing department. I used to dislike vlc and its ui. After many years of experiencing software that breaks and pushes to change me I learned to love vlc. Even if it looks different. I don't care about this anymore. Actually I've developed a liking for it, let it break the UI conformaty. It works and is a solid piece of software and this is just brilliant.
- b3kart 7y ago
  I wouldn't agree that the distinction is so clear, unfortunately. There are people with agendas on both sides. For-profit software obviously needs to make money, so whatever people are more likely to pay for is prioritized, even if it's not what a typical user wants the most. Developers of free software are often people with full-time jobs and limited free time, so whatever is more fun to work on and/or matches their skillset is prioritized, which, again, might not be that annoying bug that everybody wants fixed, but which would involve re-writing half the code. I am generalizing, of course: VLC is one of the counter-examples.
  - mehdix 7y ago
    I agree that the distinction is not so clear; contrary to my statement. However, I think the distinction gets clearer over time. Nowadays, I try to prioratize agenda-free software over agenda-driven ones as much as possible.
callumprentice 7y ago
This sounds like a gripe but it's really not - I'm immensely grateful for the ability to be able to play media in the product I work on. Can you elaborate on the best way to ask for help in the VLC support forums? I've tried a couple of times over the years and literally got told to "stop asking for someone to do my work for me" and essentially go away.. I know the developers on the forum must get tired of the "CAN PLS HELP ME MAKE VLC. THANKS" type posts but mine were always specific questions with working sample code which illustrates smy issue and that I'd banged my head on for days without success. I really want to improve the quality of our implementation but have no idea how to without some pointers from experienced devs. Thank you.
- jbk 7y ago
  > Can you elaborate on the best way to ask for help in the VLC support forums? I've tried a couple of times over the years and literally got told to "stop asking for someone to do my work for me" and essentially go away.. It's hard and some devs are not very patient, tbh... > I really want to improve the quality of our implementation but have no idea how to without some pointers from experienced devs. Come on IRC. Really.
  - callumprentice 7y ago
    > Come on IRC. Really. Got it - thank you.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    > Come on IRC. Really. Also applies to many other projects really, it has a big enough of a barrier of entry people's patience isn't nearly as eroded as in say public forums (or SO).
cestith 7y ago
I didn't watch the video but I read the interview. If I could get everyone to take away five things from it they would be these.: Keep everything as simple as possible, keep everything modular and as independent as possible, develop the features your users actually want and need, build on a solid base, and keep the maintainability of the project as a top priority.
shmerl 7y ago
VLC and mpv are the only media players you need. I like using VLC for audio (especially since it can also handle MIDI), and mpv for video.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
SoStoked 7y ago
VLC was my favourite video player for years, interesting to find out the history of its creation.
GeneticGenesis 7y ago
As JB said, this is a pretty poorly cut together video and article. We had JB on the Demuxed Podcast last year, and he told a lot of the early stories around VLC, it's much less edited than the version in this article. Here it is, with a full transcript: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/demuxed/ep-8-videolan-with-jean-baptiste-kempf/ https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/demuxed/ep-8-video...
w8vY7ER 7y ago
merci pour tout jbk!!!
GeekyBear 7y ago
I don't think I've seen anyone else mention one of my favorite features of VLC mobile. The ease and breadth of the ways to get content onto your mobile device is outstanding. You can browse a Plex server, SMB share, cloud service, FTP server, and even point your computer's web browser at the IP address of your mobile device and drag and drop files onto the device, along with other options. This has proven to be incredibly handy. Kudos

455 points by elorant 7y ago

I don't understand the "When a mistake becomes a genius move" part... cool that is was a mistake, but I feel like there's missing something, how was this mistake made? What was the mistake?

Bootvis 7y ago
I'm guessing here that the perceived mistake was that it was better to have a plugin based architecture where you can use all those codecs written by others.
foobarbecue 7y ago
Yeah, seems like he forgot to finish writing that. I guess he statically linked the libraries when updating windows deps because he didn't know how to do it dynamically and that meant they were stuck shipping them all together? Is that even how that works (I don't really know C et al well).
thefz 7y ago
I think he refers to the fact that by porting VLC to Windows they had to embed all the dependencies (codecs) into the final binary, which is coincidentally why VLC has gained so much popularity.
quentinp 7y ago
jbk explained why this initially was a mistake on r/linux, see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d8mhqe/the_one_who_kept_vlc_free/f1c0to5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d8mhqe/the_one_who_k...: > It was the fact that it came from the Linux world. So, when porting to Windows/macOS, the codec packages were part of the binary. It was supposed to temporary. > This interview has cut that part.
jbk 7y ago
OK, there are a few things that were done in VLC for reasons that could be puzzling or had unintended excellent consequences. Those are not really mistakes, per se. I can speak about 3 of them: 1) the one mentioned in the interview, where, when VLC was ported to Windows and Mac OS X, instead of using the system codecs, they used the linux-way and bundled the dependencies. It was supposed to be temporary, and we would use the system codecs. This means that we control better our decoders and demuxers than other traditional players, and we did not require codec-pack. That became very popular for VLC. 2) The cone was a temporary icon (and a student joke), and it is sooooo weird for a player, that this became a huge brand because it is so recognizable. 3) The code was split in a lot of modules, to help speed up the compilation time, of the project. That made the code way easier to extend or port to other platforms. Indeed, for example, a lot of modules don't need a lot of maintenance, because they just work. And you can add features or new OS, without understanding the core. There are 2 other technical reasons that helped VLC getting popular, but those were planned. The interview is too short to explain all this.
- fsckin 7y ago
  2) The cone was a temporary icon Turn it sideways (5 degrees per major release) and keep the colors. Eventually it will be a Play Button.
- alecmg 7y ago
  Do you know how Media Player Classic solved the same problem? I definitely remember the struggle with codec packs, then a breth of fresh air when ffmpeg codecs would solve most formats, and then just like that forgetting all codec issues by using MPC.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Media Player Classic usually came in the same installer as a bundle of codecs (like K-Lite), so you likely installed the two at once, but the model is still different from VLC, in that the codecs get independently installed into the system media framework, not embedded in the player.
  - 7y ago
sharpshadow 7y ago
One genius move back then was that you could increment the volume over 100%

agumonkey 7y ago

similarly Blender author made a voluntary move to keep blender an open product pretty great outcome :)

bryanlarsen 7y ago
Not just the Blender author, it was the Blender users who saved it by raising $100,000 in seven weeks to buy the rights to open it.
Pigo 7y ago
>Sure, more money would be fun, but most of the people I know who have more money are annoying. Like a boss.

pizza234 7y ago

> There are about 500 modules in VLC, which means you can come and work on a very small part and improve it without breaking everything else. This is presented as a positive. Here's the negative: poor maintenance. Virtually nobody knows, for example, how the official SMB plugin works, and there's no documentation. Speaking about "best developers" (a section of the article). Since version 3, video playback suffered from one or more bugs on any of the 4+ machines I've tried it on. I'm talking about video playback, which is a core feature; I had to switch to MPlayer. It seems to me that VLC is the software users love to love. I'm puzzled by the reasons of this; my guess is that products with a zillion of features have a certain charm.

jbk 7y ago
> Virtually nobody knows, for example, how the official SMB plugin works, and there's no documentation. Totally BS. We have 4 SMB modules, which ones are you talking about? (Windows, samba, libdsm (v1) and libsmb2). We spent a lot of time lately to fix that and improve it. Sure, with the move to SMBv2/3 we had some issues, but that is normal because it required a new architecture, and they are almost all fixed now. The documentation of those modules is at the same place as usual. > Since version 3, video playback suffered from one or more bugs on any of the 4+ machines I've tried it on. Since version 3, we activated hardware decoding by default, and that means it is very dependent on your linux distribution and your drivers. I think most of those issues are fixed now though.

foobarbecue 7y ago

How does changing wives affect your code??

lolc 7y ago
I don't speak from experience but changing spouse may come with a change in priorities.
jbk 7y ago
Not your code, but your time to work on VLC.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Insanity 7y ago
Different family situations can surely impact how much time you have to do OSS. One partner might always be working on weekends whilst another is always free during the weekend. Also if you get a divorce, you might not really be up to working on OSS for some time, which is probably part of changing wives. :P
foobarbecue 7y ago
Wow, why all the downvotes? The original article said "People change jobs, change wives, have kids, accidents, and so on. So everything in VLC needs to be done so that we can continue without you." I really don't get how "changing wives" fits here so was asking a legitamate question. And I got some legitamate answers too -- e.g. you might have had a wife that supported your volunteer coding financially or otherwise.

bstar77 7y ago

As much as I love VLC, them blowing off the lack of UI polish is why I have a love/hate relationship with it. For instance, VLC still forces you to kill the process when it can't find all of the files in a playlist (if you deleted them from your desktop). When you restart the app, if you hit play you will have the same problem. This happens to me all the time. It's a shame because it would not take much to address all of the nitpick issues I have with it, but there seems to be no interest.

jbk 7y ago
> As much as I love VLC, them blowing off the lack of UI polish is why I have a love/hate relationship with it. Good, you will be happy to know that we're redoing the UI for 4.0, to fix UX issues. And the issue you mentioned is fixed in last version and better fixed in 4.0. > but there seems to be no interest. That is totally not true. We listen a lot to user feedback, but we are understaffed compared to the project size. It is getting better, and the biggest issues (like the one you mentioned) are all getting fixed.
- valtism 7y ago
  When you say you are going to fix UX issues, do you mean you're going to address concerns, or do you mean you're really doing an overhaul. I personally use IINA, because of its closeness to QuickTime UI, but I would imagine cutting / hiding so much usability would be difficult for VLC. Can you tell me a little about your approach to this problem? I am super interested to hear what your thoughts on it.
  - jbk 7y ago
    > When you say you are going to fix UX issues, do you mean you're going to address concerns, or do you mean you're really doing an overhaul. Both :)
- dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
  Thanks a lot for VLC.
- 7y ago

jbk 7y ago

OK, so, this is me talking. This is an old interview that resurfaces lately (no idea why), and it was done by a HR company, and they did a lot of cuts. So, it is far from being technically accurate, and some parts are quite weird. Clearly not for the HN crowd, tbh. I dislike those kind of interviews, because they focus on one person (people-isation trend that we see also in startups) while VLC was done by a collective. It is sure that I'm the person that spent the most time on VLC and other VideoLAN projects than anyone else, but the work is a collective one. Yes, it is true that I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name, or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer. (inb4 mpv, mpc-hc, potplayer is better...)

nothrabannosir 7y ago
> Yes, it is true that I refused a ton of money to either sell the trademark and domain-name, Thank you. > ... or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer. Thank you a lot.
- heyoni 7y ago
  I know right? So many good projects have failed to maintain their integrity and changed for the worst. It’s hard to trust software these days but there are exceptions and VLC is one of them.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    It didn't help that at some point on of the main distribution points for FOSS shipped archives stuffed with malware that the authors had no idea about.
    - phkahler 7y ago
      Yeah, I used to place some trust in programs under certain licenses, or downloaded from that place. Now the license is a hard requirement and so is not being from that place.
    - 7y ago

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

I’ve mentioned this in other threads on music streaming, but VLC is the center of my music world. The feature that lets you spawn a web server from the mobile app to easily transfer files from a laptop is incredible, so easy that literally my grandma used it to put some old recordings on her phone (and knows VLC is the “recordings app”). I want to pay music artists better for their work than what I can with streaming apps, and I also want my entire library available offline on all devices. VLC makes it not just possible, but easy and fun.

jbk 7y ago
> I’ve mentioned this in other threads on music streaming, but VLC is the center of my music world. I got good news for you: next release has better audio quality (less resampling) and gapless playback. Plus more metadata support.
- Tarsul 7y ago
  ok, I finally registered here to say this: thank you and the VLC team! Also... the only feature that I always missed when playing music with VLC instead of winamp: Enqueue. Meaning: adding a music file that gets put in as the next song and not at the end (or played directly)... is such a thing planned at all? I can't be only one (actually, I haven't found a player that does this since winamp :( )
  - _Tev 7y ago
    On Android, PowerAmp has the functionality, and imo a tad more polished (enqueue is saved as a temporary playlist). On desktop WinAmp is still the only one :(
  - jbk 7y ago
    This is trivial to add. Can you open a ticket?
    - Tarsul 7y ago
      Yes, I have opened a ticket here: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/22914#ticket https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/22914#ticket However, I think my first description here in the comments was not concrete enough. I don't think the (awesome) function from winamp is as trivial to add as it might have appeared :) Thank you again, anyway!

jrochkind1 7y ago

How do the developers that work on VLC get paid? Unrelated, I found this statement (probably a mis-quote by the journalist) amusing: > Because it was done as a student project, it is a very modular program and it is very easy to add a new feature. So many people have found it challenging to make complex software modular and easy to add new features -- turns out, all we need to do is get students to create the projects, and then they'll be so! :)

jbk 7y ago
> How do the developers that work on VLC get paid? Most of the time, they don't. But lately, I created a company doing consulting and integration of libVLC inside mobile apps, and it is now employing most core developers of VLC.
Avamander 7y ago
> So many people have found it challenging to make complex software modular and easy to add new features -- turns out, all we need to do is get students to create the projects, and then they'll be so! :) Get a student who could be a really good software archidect create the foundation basically. I think it's a small amount of people who could do such things.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  In my experience, skill at doing that usually comes from... experience. (and ideally experience in similar domains to what you are designing, not just software in general). Certainly there are "students" with software engineering/architecture experience and/or natural amazing talent, but it's def not the first place I'd look!

TecoAndJix 7y ago

When i was much younger, my friends and I use to joke that you could take a handful of mud, put it in the CD tray, and VLC would open and play the file. Thank you so much VLC team for all you have contributed (and continue to contribute)!

Pigo 7y ago
Anybody who has every known the pain of running RealPlayer, knows what a Godsend VLC was. A free player that just works and is simple to use, it put those companies that didn't truly offer anything on ice.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  I don't think a lot of younger folks appreciate the pain we had to go through back in the day to just play a video file on a Windows 95 PC. There were a handful of media players out there and each would only play 1-2 formats... poorly. Want to play AVIs? Windows Media Player. Want to play QuickTime files? Gotta go get QuickTime. Want to play Real format? Download RealPlayer. So if you downloaded a random video from the web and want to play it, you need to figure out what player you need to get in order to play it. Back then, a lot of stuff from the web was garbage, corrupted data, named incorrectly, .mpg files that were actually AVI format, etc. So once you found the right player, you had to worry about whether it would play properly with your PC's video card. There were flaky video cards and not all manufacturers had drivers that worked. Then, if the downloaded file was corrupted in any way, chances are the official player would throw its hands up and refuse to play it. Then, once you actually found the right player and verified that it could play the file back, you were still stuck with that player's horrible UI and feature set. There were brave souls who would download these "codec packs" from super-shady web sites, to act as plug-ins to Windows Media Player, since Microsoft couldn't manage to ship working video playback out of the box for anything but AVI. God knows what else those codec pack installers put on your system. And reliably playing video directly in your browser? LOL, that would be for another 10 years or so with YouTube. VLC was a huge breath of fresh air! Maybe it's not so vital now, since proper video playback is "table stakes" on any platform. You can play any video now with one line of Python, right? But we did sorely need it decades ago.

chirau 7y ago

I just came to say that the VLC app for iOS is absolutely trash

moviuro 7y ago
https://github.com/videolan/vlc-ios/pulls https://github.com/videolan/vlc-ios/pulls : Here you go, be useful.

Excel_Wizard 7y ago

I have a question that is more likely to be answered here and now than at any other opportunity I've had before- For a long while now, VLMC has been a work-in-progress. It is a video editor being made by the same organization as VLC. I've been eagerly anticipating having this as a free/open source video editing tool that I can trust will be available in the long term. I haven't seen any evidence that it isn't vaporware in a long time. So to those in the know- when can we expect to see VLMC finished? https://www.videolan.org/vlmc/ https://www.videolan.org/vlmc/

jbk 7y ago
> So to those in the know- when can we expect to see VLMC finished? No clue. Noone seems to care enough.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  The last commit on the master branch was in 2017: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlmc/commits/master https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlmc/commits/master That's a real shame because there are lots of people who would really like to see a good open source video editor. Blender's built-in NLE works but it isn't as well-developed as VLMC could be (it's not the main focus of a 3D modeling program). I think Natron lost its main developer around that time as well. It's as if we almost had a broad revolution in open source video editing, but it petered out before hitting 1.0.
- kup0 7y ago
  Sad to hear that. I'm super interested in having software like this and would even pay for it. However, I don't believe I am skilled enough to be able to contribute to its development. Maybe someday.

martin1b 7y ago

VLC, it really whips Winamps a$$.

zip1234 7y ago

VLC is an amazing tool. I almost wish it was the embedded video player for Chrome or Firefox. It would be nice to play more formats of video on the web and VLC does an amazing job supporting other formats. Also, there is no way to play RTSP on the web, which VLC does well.

INTPenis 7y ago

I love VLC and use it daily, literally daily. I often donate to open source projects and VLC is one of those. One gripe though is that VLC gives a such a good impression that you get very disappointed when basic things like scanning your media library don't work. It catches you by surprise because the rest of VLC is so polished. And for example the fact that there was no sleep timer until recently. You'd think that an open source project so widely used would find plenty of help to implement such basic features.

FrojoS 7y ago
From the interview: "For a patch to get accepted, it needs to be maintainable as well as useful [...] Which means that we put a lot of emphasis on quality. So, with any code we get sent, we need to make sure that we can still maintain it in 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years… And that’s why we have a lot of features in VLC that some consider completely useless and why we don’t have others that some people think are important. It’s not because we’re stupid, it’s just that the code needs to be clean—if it’s not, you don’t get in." (emphasis mine)

mehdix 7y ago

> we don’t have a marketing department or a management team of people who decide on a feature that is then pushed down to the users, as has been happening with RealPlayer and BS.Player. So, when we add a feature it’s because people actually need it and actually want it. There is a clear distinction between software written with profit in mind and free software. Behind the first one often there are people with agendas, strong opinions and marketing departments. They keep breaking things and force me to change my habits to their likings. The second group however, is user-oriented with no marketing department. I used to dislike vlc and its ui. After many years of experiencing software that breaks and pushes to change me I learned to love vlc. Even if it looks different. I don't care about this anymore. Actually I've developed a liking for it, let it break the UI conformaty. It works and is a solid piece of software and this is just brilliant.

b3kart 7y ago
I wouldn't agree that the distinction is so clear, unfortunately. There are people with agendas on both sides. For-profit software obviously needs to make money, so whatever people are more likely to pay for is prioritized, even if it's not what a typical user wants the most. Developers of free software are often people with full-time jobs and limited free time, so whatever is more fun to work on and/or matches their skillset is prioritized, which, again, might not be that annoying bug that everybody wants fixed, but which would involve re-writing half the code. I am generalizing, of course: VLC is one of the counter-examples.
- mehdix 7y ago
  I agree that the distinction is not so clear; contrary to my statement. However, I think the distinction gets clearer over time. Nowadays, I try to prioratize agenda-free software over agenda-driven ones as much as possible.

callumprentice 7y ago

This sounds like a gripe but it's really not - I'm immensely grateful for the ability to be able to play media in the product I work on. Can you elaborate on the best way to ask for help in the VLC support forums? I've tried a couple of times over the years and literally got told to "stop asking for someone to do my work for me" and essentially go away.. I know the developers on the forum must get tired of the "CAN PLS HELP ME MAKE VLC. THANKS" type posts but mine were always specific questions with working sample code which illustrates smy issue and that I'd banged my head on for days without success. I really want to improve the quality of our implementation but have no idea how to without some pointers from experienced devs. Thank you.

jbk 7y ago
> Can you elaborate on the best way to ask for help in the VLC support forums? I've tried a couple of times over the years and literally got told to "stop asking for someone to do my work for me" and essentially go away.. It's hard and some devs are not very patient, tbh... > I really want to improve the quality of our implementation but have no idea how to without some pointers from experienced devs. Come on IRC. Really.
- callumprentice 7y ago
  > Come on IRC. Really. Got it - thank you.
- Avamander 7y ago
  > Come on IRC. Really. Also applies to many other projects really, it has a big enough of a barrier of entry people's patience isn't nearly as eroded as in say public forums (or SO).

cestith 7y ago

I didn't watch the video but I read the interview. If I could get everyone to take away five things from it they would be these.: Keep everything as simple as possible, keep everything modular and as independent as possible, develop the features your users actually want and need, build on a solid base, and keep the maintainability of the project as a top priority.

shmerl 7y ago

VLC and mpv are the only media players you need. I like using VLC for audio (especially since it can also handle MIDI), and mpv for video.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

SoStoked 7y ago

VLC was my favourite video player for years, interesting to find out the history of its creation.

GeneticGenesis 7y ago

As JB said, this is a pretty poorly cut together video and article. We had JB on the Demuxed Podcast last year, and he told a lot of the early stories around VLC, it's much less edited than the version in this article. Here it is, with a full transcript: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/demuxed/ep-8-videolan-with-jean-baptiste-kempf/ https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/demuxed/ep-8-video...

w8vY7ER 7y ago

merci pour tout jbk!!!

GeekyBear 7y ago

I don't think I've seen anyone else mention one of my favorite features of VLC mobile. The ease and breadth of the ways to get content onto your mobile device is outstanding. You can browse a Plex server, SMB share, cloud service, FTP server, and even point your computer's web browser at the IP address of your mobile device and drag and drop files onto the device, along with other options. This has proven to be incredibly handy. Kudos