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VideoLAN is 20 years old today
- jbk 6y agoAs usual, please don't hesitate to ask questions about VLC, VideoLAN or related projects (x264, dav1d, libbluray...) Disclaimer: VideoLAN president
- londons_explore 6y agoHow do you fund your work? Have you had to take a pay cut to work on VLC compared to working on similar commercial tech?
- jbk 6y ago> How do you fund your work? Have you had to take a pay cut to work on VLC compared to working on similar commercial tech? VideoLAN does not make any money outside of donations. I have a startup, called Videolabs since 2013.
- phreeza 6y agoWhy the traffic cone?
- colejohnson66 6y agoWhat's the history behind using a traffic cone as a logo?
- dmd 6y agoWhy not ask something that isn't in the Wikipedia article?
- muizelaar 6y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20201125184135/http://nanocrew.net/2005/06/23/vlc-cone/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201125184135/http://nanocrew.n... for those who don't want to dig through wikipedia.
- colejohnson66 6y agoAll I get is that it's an "in joke" of sorts that has just never changed. What I'm asking is: is there anything more than that? Such as: why hasn't it changed (not that it should)?
- jbk 6y agoThis story involves drinking students and internal jokes :)
- rhplus 6y agoIt was created by a group of students at an urban university in a country where the legal age to drink alcohol is 18. Such conditions often lead to collections of traffic cones.
- stormdennis 6y agoSo if it had been made 10 years earlier it might have featured a traffic cone AND a shopping trolley!
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoVLC is the best program I have ever used. Dumb joke: When it turns 21, what would be the drink that VLC would like?
- gspr 6y ago> Dumb joke: When it turns 21, what would be the drink that VLC would like? VLC is French, so it's been drinking great wine since it was 18 ;-)
- kgwxd 6y agoThe legal drinking age in France is 18 :)
- nolok 6y agoIt's the buying/selling age. There is technically no legal drinking age in France, but rules about minors (parent responsability under rule of "common sense", parent must be present if under 16, illegal to have the minor drunk no matter what). Eg your parents giving you a small glass of champagne at new year when you're 12 is legal.
- nolok 6y agoThere is no minimum legal drinking age in France*, the limit is only for buying/selling. * illegal to get a minor drunk no matter the age, parents must be present if the minor is under 16, minor is under parent supervision and responsibility in any case (source : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%82ge_l%C3%A9gal_pour_la_consommation_d%27alcool#Europe https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%82ge_l%C3%A9gal_pour_la_co... )
- amir734jj 6y agoHow was VideoLAN started? I remember "Media Player Classic" and "K-Lite Codec Pack" were popular back then and when I installed VideoLAN and it blew my mind. Extremely fast, no buffering and very lightweight. I am 26 but I have been using VideoLAN as long as I can remember. The best media player.
- jbk 6y agoThe video at the end of the press release explains the story. But in tl;dr: form: Ecole Centrale Paris campus network was managed by students. In 1995, they wanted a faster network, to play video games, and upgrade from their Token Ring network. The Univ did not want to pay so they went to see partners, and one said "put the satellite feed on your network to justify the need for a better network. We'll pay for it, instead of having 2000 dishes and decoders.". This PoC "Network 2000" was a success. Some students restarted the project in 1998 and called it VideoLAN. In 2001, VideoLAN and all the software projects (Server, Client, network, libraries) became GPL. VideoLan Client became VLC. Community added Windows, macOS support. In 2008, I created the VideoLAN non-profit to escape the university and make VLC grow.
- a-dub 6y agowas "network 2000" multicast? how similar/different was it to xing streamworks (commercial multicast mpeg suite from that time)?
- jbk 6y agoIt was an ATM backbone, but the routers did not support mcast. So they cheated to do multicast on a non-multicast network.
- Debug_Overload 6y agoThank you guys for the great work! VLC is just great.
- rootsudo 6y ago2008 makes sense, about the time where k-lite codec pack and media player classic started to be eclipsed! Wow. Thank you for the best video player out there, for all those exciting, strange and exciting codecs!
- gspr 6y agoThank you, the organization and of course the maintainers of all this wonderful software that you maintain! I recently tracked down and reported my first bug in one of the projects and the maintainers made the experience an absolute joy! To the question: I keep hearing from my younger peers that they don't see any value in out-of-browser software. To me, that's their loss. But if this attitude is prevalent, do you feel you are having a harder time attracting talent than say 10-20 years ago? Merci encore une fois !
- jbk 6y ago> But if this attitude is prevalent, do you feel you are having a harder time attracting talent than say 10-20 years ago? A lot lot lot harder than in the past. You have no idea...
- gspr 6y agoAre you worried about the VideoLAN projects going forward? Should other foundational free software projects be worried too?
- jbk 6y agoA bit, to be honest. Which is why we're doing some professional work to fund it.
- FabHK 6y agowow, I had no idea indeed. Interesting (and dispiriting) to know. (It is frustrating already that when you say that you program, a certain kind of youngster asks "frontend or backend?", and when you say neither, they say knowingly, "oh, fullstack!" (>_<) )
- paulz_ 6y agoHey jbk just wanted to take this chance to say thanks! VLC has been year over year some of the most consitently good software I've ever used. Thank you for all the hard work I'm sure goes into making a killer product.
- kome 6y agoI love VLC! Thank you for your work.
- einpoklum 6y agoThe VLC player is incredibly popular. And a bunch of libraries that are part of the project are also pretty well-known (less so by end users I suppose). But - I have rarely, if ever, seen uses of: * VideoLAN Server * VideoLAN Bridge * VideoLAN Channel Switcher The press release doesn't focus on them much, either. I don't see them on the project page. Can you describe what happened with them? Also - how you've chosen projects you've started more recently (like multicat or the VLMC editor)?
- jbk 6y ago> Can you describe what happened with them? They are dead. VLS features are now done with DVBlast. The other are useless with modern networks.
- dantheman 6y agoCongrats!
- zests 6y agoWhat happened internally when you discovered that you were given a false severe grade CVE? I remember seeing many articles suggesting users uninstall VLC. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-13615 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-13615
- jbk 6y ago> What happened internally when you discovered that you were given a false severe grade CVE? Nothing, but we knew it was going to be a shitstorm. Clickbait articles are very annoying. As for the CVE system, it's utterly broken and idiotic.
- saagarjha 6y agoHey now, CVEs are fine; it's CVSS that is totally broken.
- glenstein 6y agoWoah, I didn't realize it was false! I remember hearing about that at the time. I had installed VLC at work (generic office, non-tech industry that just uses windows office software) and was worried I might get in trouble, so I uninstalled it.
- dedosk 6y agoWould you port VLC UI from Qt to something like Electron or some other web-based solution? I hope not, but checking in terms of UI toolkit trends and solutions...
- jbk 6y ago> Would you port VLC UI from Qt to something like Electron or some other web-based solution? No. We're moving some parts to QML, but that's C++ (and the part that are JS are moving to C++ in Qt6)
- jbaber 6y agoSimplement: merci!
- gostsamo 6y agoCan you add to VLC a support for reading subtitles with the os screen reader? Currently only PodPlayer supports that after KMP turned into an adware. Also, if you can offer native accessibility support would be much better for screen reader users. Currently, I need an extension for NVDA to use the VLC player.
- jbk 6y ago> Can you add to VLC a support for reading subtitles with the os screen reader? it's already doable. But it does disable the display of subtitles.
- Bayart 6y ago>Currently only PodPlayer supports that after KMP turned into an adware Potplayer became adware too...
- devindotcom 6y agoCurious whether there are/were plans for a VLC-lite that eschews the many more advanced features (transcoding, streaming, etc) and focuses purely on playback with as little overhead as possible? Maybe I missed this discussion already but as much as I love VLC sometimes it feels like I'm using a semi truck to drive to the store and back.
- jbk 6y agoTechnically, most of those features are only in modules, and you can remove most of those already and have a functioning VLC. We don't remove them, because besides disk space, they don't take any CPU or RAM of the user.
- soheil 6y agoI wish the upload to iPhone UI in the browser looked better, the page that loads when navigating to http://iphone.local http://iphone.local It's hard to know what has already been uploaded to avoid duplicate uploads. It works great on my local wifi though. Additionaly is there any plan to incorporate youtube-dl in VLC for iPhone? It would be super beneficial to be able to download an entire YT playlist for offline consumption with VLC instead of first downloading it on a computer and then transferring the files to VLC on a mobile device.
- jimduk 6y agoWas working with the x264 crowd fun or exasperating or ...? Video-encoding is such a polymath topic (compression, perception, optimisation) and that code was so smart. I clearly remember mb-tree coming out and x264 quality/bitrate performance changing from good to supergood, and reading Dark Shikari's check in note about taking the implicit dependency graph and using it to propagate the relative quality of the blocks and it was a 'wow' moment. Also the Loren Merritt quote page still holds up well http://www.x264.nl/developers/Dark_Shikari/loren.html http://www.x264.nl/developers/Dark_Shikari/loren.html . Thank you
- jbk 6y ago> Was working with the x264 crowd fun or exasperating or ...? Pretty fun, tbh.
- ksec 6y agoI really wish Dark Shikari and Loren Merritt had continue to work on x265 or some other video encoder. 80%+ of all Video on the Internet are still on H.264 / AVC. And vast majority of them are encoded through x264. Their contribution to Video Encoding can not be understated.
- plorkyeran 6y agoThe issues related to commercial licensing of x264 probably ensured that Dark Shikari would never want to work on video encoding things again even before she burned out and quit software development entirely a few years later.
- mpfundstein 6y agowhat kind of person is Dark Shikari actually? Didnt know she is female. Where is she from? Is she employed somewhere or a freelancer???? I just wonder because she is such a legend but internet knows NOTHING. Bit like Satoshi...
- ksec 6y ago
- akvadrako 6y agoWhy doesn't VLC have good support for casting? I mean LAN is in the name - I shouldn't have to use a half-baked Chromecast solution that's proprietary, can't be a server and can't display most subtitles.
- jbk 6y agoBecause Chromecast is not done for push, but for pull. And because noone cares enough to fix it, I would guess...
- jimmaswell 6y ago> Chromecast is not done for push, but for pull. What does this mean?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Moru 6y agoPush = you at the computer pushing something to the TV. Pull = you at the surfpad, pulling from the computer.
- akvadrako 6y agoCasting is all about push
- rakoo 6y agoNo, your chromecast downloads and runs a webapp, and you give instructions about what to play from your computer/phone. That's hlw you can play a webradio and turn off your phone for example
- akvadrako 6y agoThat's an implementation detail and doesn't say anything about casting in general.
- barkingcat 6y agoWant to thank you and your team for such an great piece of software!
- Damogran6 6y agoThanks for continuing to produce a clean, pain-free, DRM headache free, lightweight, awesome product.
- jdofaz 6y agoAny word on AC-4 support? It was the first thing I threw at VLC that it couldn't play. :D
- jbk 6y agoUnder development
- ACS_Solver 6y agoI just want to say thank you. VLC remains one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. It just works, and while I mostly use it as a simple player, any time I needed some more advanced features, they were also there. Most unusually, VLC doesn't get worse with time like so much modern software does. No bloat, no ads, no removal of settings, no inexplicable UI redesigns for the sake of redesigning. Truly the gold standard of software.
- rakoo 6y agoFirst of all, thank you for VLC, for choosing the GPL, and for being one of the too few examples of French excellence in tech ! I can only sympathise with stories in Grandes Ecoles involving "found" cones :) What's coming for the next 20 years? Are there any challenges that the VideoLAN project has unique expertise on that it can bring out ?
- aantix 6y agoWhat are the best settings/codecs for upscaling video to 4K in real-time? Or is there a post-processing solution to upscale video for VLC? I've seen some impressive neural net solutions for upscaing, but they haven't been open source.
- astrange 6y agoI'm not sure open source really applies to an ML model, I suppose you can obfusticate it to "close it". Regardless, prior art here is open source (http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Nnedi3 http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Nnedi3).
- jbk 6y agoIn VLC 4.0, we'll add RAVU, NNEDI3 and a few other to upscale.
- jorvi 6y agoAre there any plans for an UI refresh? I've seen people on macOS switch to IINA in droves because the interface looks very slick and modern (yet functional!). I understand VLC is not in the business in chasing the latest UI fad, but the first thing people who don't know VLC notice about it is how archaic it looks.
- jbk 6y ago> Are there any plans for an UI refresh? yes, for 4.0
- jimmaswell 6y agoWill the old interface remain as an option? I'll be pretty disappointed if I wake up one day and the classic VLC interface is gone.
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 6y agoAre there plans to sandbox / harden VLC against security vulnerabilities? While my jolly roger days are long gone, and virtually all media I play are from trusted sources, VLC probably ranks top 5 by attack surface among the software I run regularly.
- jbk 6y agoYes, there is a big project on that those days :)
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 6y agoThank you. In the link in your reply to a sibling thread, you asked for donations, and I'm happy to oblige. I know you're based in France, but is there a U.S. non-profit entity I could donate to (e.g. SPI)? The reason being that $WORK will match my donation, but sadly VideoLAN is not on the approved list.
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoThe problem could also be solved by putting vlc itself in a sandbox. There is no reason a media player should have direct access to all of your files anyway. I wonder if the flatpak for vlc is set up with strong sandbox rules.
- jbk 6y ago> The problem could also be solved by putting vlc itself in a sandbox It cannot, no. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14409234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14409234
- DonHopkins 6y ago>Probably do a multi-process media player, like Chrome is doing, with parsers and demuxers in a different process, and different ones for decoders and renderers. Knowing that you probably need to IPC several Gb/s between them. Chrome and other browsers and apps, and drivers like virtual webcams, and libraries like Syphon, can all pass "zero-copy" image buffers around between different processes by sharing buffers in GPU memory (or main memory too of course) and sending IPC messages pointing to the shared buffers. That's how the browser's web renderer processes efficiently share the rendered images with the web browser user interface process, for example. And how virtual webcam drivers can work so efficiently, too. Check out iOS/macOS's "IOSurface": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/iosurface https://developer.apple.com/documentation/iosurface >IOSurface Share hardware-accelerated buffer data (framebuffers and textures) across multiple processes. Manage image memory more efficiently. >Overview: The IOSurface framework provides a framebuffer object suitable for sharing across process boundaries. It is commonly used to allow applications to move complex image decompression and draw logic into a separate process to enhance security. And Android's "SurfaceTexture" and GL_TEXTURE_EXTERNAL_OES: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/SurfaceTexture https://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Sur... >The image stream may come from either camera preview or video decode. A Surface created from a SurfaceTexture can be used as an output destination for the android.hardware.camera2, MediaCodec, MediaPlayer, and Allocation APIs. When updateTexImage() is called, the contents of the texture object specified when the SurfaceTexture was created are updated to contain the most recent image from the image stream. This may cause some frames of the stream to be skipped. https://source.android.com/devices/graphics/arch-st https://source.android.com/devices/graphics/arch-st >The main benefit of external textures is their ability to render directly from BufferQueue data. SurfaceTexture instances set the consumer usage flags to GRALLOC_USAGE_HW_TEXTURE when it creates BufferQueue instances for external textures to ensure that the data in the buffer is recognizable by GLES. And Syphon, which has a rich ecosystem of apps and tools and libraries: http://syphon.v002.info http://syphon.v002.info >Syphon is an open source Mac OS X technology that allows applications to share frames - full frame rate video or stills - with one another in realtime. Now you can leverage the expressive power of a plethora of tools to mix, mash, edit, sample, texture-map, synthesize, and present your imagery using the best tool for each part of the job. Syphon gives you flexibility to break out of single-app solutions and mix creative applications to suit your needs. Of course there's a VLC Syphon server: https://github.com/rsodre/VLCSyphon https://github.com/rsodre/VLCSyphon
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoThis might just be my own environment, but it seems like VLC's ability to stream from Youtube breaks very frequently. Is that just a side-effect of Google constantly updating their YT infrastructure, or do you believe they are intentionally introducing changes to sabotage the ability for third-party programs such as VLC to render their streams?
- therealmarv 6y agoWhen will VideoLAN focus on color accuracy (colors are slightly off by default)? I suspect most users don't notice but e.g. Quicktime on supported formats adjusts colors according to monitor color profile and video color profile and it's visible for trained eyes. I can adjust manually my VLC too in colors but it's not exact science and just by comparing and personal feeling. I wished I could optimise videos as good as my TV is doing it in VLC (but this is also beyond colors). Thanks VLC!
- jbk 6y ago> When will VideoLAN focus on color accuracy Next major release of VLC.
- kuschku 6y agoI get constant crashes with HDR10 video, is improving the support for HDR10 video also on the roadmap?
- cvuls 6y agoyour problem is likely this https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Video:Color_washed_out/ https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Video:Color_washed_out/
- therealmarv 6y agoNo it's not only this. I have to change Hue, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Gamma slightly. Quicktime on Mac does a better job in this. VLC is not color accurate by default or not optimized for subjective pleasing color results (unlike most TVs nowadays) but the manual sliders can compensate it. However it's annoying if you change monitors. Then the settings are off again.
- seanalltogether 6y agoDo you view videolan as a platform that should support an endless array of features and plugins and codecs, or do you view it more like a product that needs to keep cutting the fat as time moves on?
- jbk 6y ago"Plays it all." but we're working so that new features don't slow down the player, at runtime.
- mFixman 6y agoSomehow, VLC is both one of the programs with the most useful features and the least bloat I've ever used. What does your project management do right to find the right features without adding bloat? This is the kind of thing giant software companies struggle with, and they have the advantage of feature-tracking scripts on their programs.
- jbk 6y ago> What does your project management do right to find the right features without adding bloat? 3 answers: - limited resources - modules: adding features is often just a new module, which does not slow VLC. - only devs :)
- LoathsLights 6y agoI always loved using VLC, but I watch a lot of tv shows and as far as I know there's never been a good way to remember playlist position (except from some plugin I never got to work). Has this ever been a feature you have considered adding?
- jbk 6y ago> Has this ever been a feature you have considered adding? Next major release
- robertoandred 6y agoWill there be a way to turn off all of the extra library functionality? I just want a video player. Like QuickTime Player but with more format support.
- jbk 6y ago> Will there be a way to turn off all of the extra library functionality? yes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- franzb 6y agoI like VLC but why is it so difficult to set the volume at exactly 100%? Or did I overlook an obvious way?
- 5555624 6y agoThe easiest way, I know of, is to to just under 100% using the sliding scale in the lower left corner and then go to the Audio menu and increase the volume. A click on Increase Volume goes up to the nearest number divisible by 5 (i.e. at 97%, clicking Increase Volume goes to 100%; at 92%, you need to do it twice).
- Moru 6y agoOr just use the mousewheel, also does 5% increments
- roelschroeven 6y agoThe easiest way that I found is using the up and down arrow keys: the set the volume to multiples of 5%.
- znkynz 6y agox265 playback on Windows seems challenging; nearly impossible to seek in files using slider bar?
- jorl17 6y agoDo you "like" the IINA project, assuming you're familar with it, and is there anything you can "take" from it? What are your thoughts on it? I used to always install VLC in all my machines. One day, I found a file that had wonky audio -- it randomly sped up and slowed down, but in a somewhat bearable way (it was a 2h-movie,) like some weird flutter was going on. I didn't make much of it at the time. Later, I got another file that would randomly lose audio. As in, sometimes, the audio would cut for a while and then come back. Except I used to replay this file often and noticed it happen in different places every run -- this got me thinking it could have been a software issue. At the time (this was roughly 4 years ago, I believe), I happened to see IINA mentioned somewhere, and I therefore gave it a go. It seemed to consume more CPU, but it didn't have the wonky audio in neither of these files. I became a fan and, while I keep VNC installed "just in case", I get this feeling that IINA has higher compatibility and a better interface. For example, IINA has what seems like a better algorithm for finding subtitles from a path, and it's just more well integrated with macOS. I wish I could go back to VLC, but I keep feeling like it's going to fail me or that the UI isn't as polished/well-integrated into macOS. I hate that I feel this way because I honestly feel like I'm "betraying" this wonderful piece of software that is VLC. I guess there isn't really another question. I'd like to say thanks, and here's to hoping that in the near future I'll go back to VLC. You have done a remarkable job and I think you should be extremely proud of yourself! VLC rocks! :)
- handedness 6y agoIINA is an excellent piece of software. I would love to see a linux build. VLC is still valuable for more technical edge cases, but I've had significant stability issues with VLC for many years and on all platforms. IINA has never crashed on me. It also addresses so many of my minor annoyances with VLC.
- saagarjha 6y agoIf it makes you feel any better, IINA ships with x264, dav1d, and libbluray ;) Speaking as someone who works on IINA, the team behind VLC is excellent and I'm very thankful for the work they do.
- unixhero 6y agoJust here to say: After all these years, thanks for not falling into malware and adware temptations. Should I say mad props also to a fantastoc milestone of 20 years.
- surround 6y agoWhy was the VideoLan Movie Creator (VLMC) abandoned? Will it ever be revived? It would be nice to have an open source video editor.
- cynoclast 6y agowhy does VLC still fail to support click to play/pause?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alinhan 6y agoWhat's the state of VLC's support for HDR on Linux?
- simlevesque 6y agoToutes mes félicitations, merci d'avoir créé VLC et d'avoir utilisé la license GPL !
- fabiensanglard 6y agoChapeau bas!
- einpoklum 6y agoIt is indeed not trivial at all that a large official organization decided to contribute a significant program/project under the GPL rather than a permissive license. Thanks goes to the Ecole Central Paris for that part.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nateberkopec 6y agoSeeing a bunch of people walking around with traffic cones on their heads at FOSDEM a while back really made me appreciate what a strong and vibrant contributor community VLC has. Thank you to everyone who contributes!
- dvt 6y agoCongrats to the VideoLAN team! I'm 34, and I've been using VLC as long as I can remember :)
- easytiger 6y agoI've been on Linux since circa 2000. I was using mplayer2 to play most media. VLC was a big advance as it seemed to work better with videos with encoding issues in terms of recovering the stream and whatnot.
- astrange 6y agoPretty much all players are just libavcodec, so the only differences are coincidences or default options, not original research in the player app. This goes double for encoding apps.
- easytiger 6y agoMaybe it just had better exception handling then.
- dopeboy 6y agoI remember the days of trying mplayer2, totem, and countless others. Everything just worked with VLC.
- rspeele 6y agoVLC "just works" and has done so for at least the 11 years or so that I've used it. What an excellent piece of software. Never change, VLC!
- easytiger 6y agoYea, it's solid and the android port is excellent and by far the best video player available there too. Even on android the upnp client is very good. The only issues I've had are when i first installed in one OnePLus7 a lot of my videos seemed to have some kind of timing issue playing (looked like 5 FPS). Suspect it was to do with the 90Hz screen and eventually was fixed. Gestures to change volume and brightness are top QoL features.
- fireattack 6y agoInterestingly, VLC is the only video player I have on my (Windows) computer that does not "just work". The default setting will have issues to convert TV range properly to PC range so the video is "washed out". I see no such issue with any other players like MPC-BE, MPC-CE, or MPV. If I remembered correctly I have to manually change the renderer mode or whatever it's called to make it work. To be fair, I didn't experiment much since I'm content with MPV.
- nxpnsv 6y agoThanks VideoLAN!
- pachico 6y agoYou guys rock and the entire Linux community owes you big time. Once you installed videolan you were ready for all media formats. It was so tiresome to tell the people you convinced to try Linux that no, by default they couldn't play their media, that they needed gstreamer this and that. You made the transition to Linux so much easier to lots of people by offering a simple to use very feature rich application everyone needs and uses. Thank you!
- LinuxBender 6y agoVLC is great. I've been using it since at least 2002 and it works where other players do not, or where other players are missing codecs. I am looking forward to the next 20 years of VLC!
- smudgy 6y agoI remember when it came out as a swiss army tool for videos - loved it since the first version I got (off Slashdot) and I've been using it since. Good job folks at VideoLAN! Thanks for reminding me I'm an old fart!
- noisy_boy 6y agoThe only reason I use smplayer instead of VLC is its ability to search and almost always find and save a subtitle from opensubtitles.org painlessly. VLSub provides the counterpart feature in VLC but the search requires tinkering with the name and saving subtitles doesn't save to the right place/randomly fails.
- jzer0cool 6y agoThe #1 video player that always worked. Can you imagine a time before Youtube and cheap hosting for a college student? Well, that was a time for me involving FTP servers, hosting on some place with great bandwidth, a time of Emule, Limewire, sharebear?, I can't recall it all. There were so many video extensions like .avi, .mpeg, and my favorite was .dvix. When you use some reguar player, it was always say "codec not found". I always knew it would run in VideoLan. VideoLan you are my codec saver and many hours saved and enjoyed! Happy Birthday!
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoThank you for the excellent program! It seems to be the only video processing library that I can use for all Apple systems, and, unfortunately, I need to use it, because RTSP... There's very few dependencies that I will include without too much hesitation, and VLCKit is one. But it is...large...
- tombert 6y agoI don't have any questions directly, just wanna say that I love VLC, it's one of the first programs I install on any computer, and I will continue to use it as my primary media-viewer for the foreseeable future. The number of features that the devs have packed into VLC is staggering; I've been using VLC for almost 15 years now, and I still find new things about it occasionally. Fun fact (though probably not as surprising to an HN crowd as it is to most people I tell this to), VLC can also be used to convert media to different formats, AND works as a quick ad-hoc media server if you want to display something on a TV. This can be really handy if you have a video file in a weird format and want a way to quickly watch it on a device that doesn't support weird formats. I think I'm going to donate. Keep up the good work folks!
- Topgamer7 6y agoI found out it will work with karaoke files!
- jbk 6y agoCDG files? yes :)
- tomjen3 6y agoI only found out fairly recently that it can stream youtube videos (mostly, it does fail sometimes for seemingly no reason), which is great for those of us who end up clicking too frequently (read, all the time) on the related videos tab. It also mean that you don't see the ads, but there are extensions that can do that too.
- malwarebytess 6y agoThere are extensions that add youtube ads to vlc?
- 7786655 6y agoI assume tomjen3 was referring to browser extensions that block ads on the YouTube website.
- tunap 6y agoHip, hip... Hourrah! Hip, hip... Hourrah! Hip, hip... Hourrah! Excellent work to all involved. Thank you.
- kevas 6y agoJust stopping in & saying that I love this software. Thank you!
- asadlionpk 6y agoVLC is one of the first things I install on any new system. It's light, consistent and works! Thank you for not going "2.0" on it.
- starky 6y agoThey did go 2.0 on it when they moved to 1.0. It was practically perfect before then.
- mekkkkkk 6y agoThank you for an amazing piece of software that I use daily! I got a question I've been wondering about. When I first encountered VLC, most other popular media players had very embellished UIs with tons of chrome and bitmaps everywhere. Apart from superior performance and format support, VLC stood out by being unapologetically minimalist and basic in its interface. Was that intentional? And were you ever tempted to go the same route UI-wise as other media players? I'm sure glad you didn't!
- jbk 6y ago> Was that intentional? And were you ever tempted to go the same route UI-wise as other media players? If you suck at UI, hide your UI. :) Else, we're working on updating the UI, but that's very difficult for a small open source team. And that's going to make a lot of people unhappy, so we're working on options to get the old look possible :)
- octocop 6y agoVLC is great! I am just wondering when i can chromecast subtitles on VLC
- Springcleaning 6y agoCongratulations!!! Three feature requests: 1) Make it possible to disable the playlist feature completely. 2) Make it possible to start it a second time with another video concurrently. 3) Make it possible to use a list of regex on subtitles, to filter out SDH and other stuff I don't need.
- vkolencik 6y ago2 is possible (Preferences > Interface > uncheck "Allow only one instance").
- Springcleaning 6y agoMaybe I should have said for MacOS, it does not show that option (also not in the advanced options). The ability to play videos in sync side-by side would be perfect to visually compare encoding quality.
- matriculate 6y agoI’m likely going to get downvoted to oblivion but as good as the video player application is, the development experience when trying to incorporate the SDK into your own software is utterly miserable. I’ve given up trying to use it after searching for a solution and not being able to find one and asking in the support forums. I presented a clear description of the issue and example code and was rudely told to not ask developers to write my app for me. It’s happened a few times in exactly the same way over the years. Each time, I foolishly think it will be improved and spend even longer polishing my question, making sure the same old code builds etc. It’s always the same. Miserable. Charitably, I see so many messages along the lines of “I wantz to build video app- pls helpz” which must get tiring but not as disappointing as asking sensible questions and proving source code.
- jbk 6y ago> the development experience when trying to incorporate the SDK into your own software is utterly miserable. It's not miserable anymore, but yes, it's far from good. If you are not doing something very simple, it can be very hard, and there is no support team to help you. Examples should be better those days, but the road is long to go.
- vanillax 6y agoI recently co-authored an entire re-write of the VLC flutter plugin for android and iOS. This may help. https://github.com/solid-software/flutter_vlc_player https://github.com/solid-software/flutter_vlc_player
- nom 6y agoFirst of all, thank you so much for your amazing software! Second, are my files bitrotting or has the quality of some decoding plugins degraded over time? I mostly observe issues with WMV and MKV files that I don't see in other players.
- jbk 6y agoAbsolutely not normal. Disable hardware decoder ?
- gautamcgoel 6y agoCan someone explain why I can't get VLC from the standard Fedora repository and instead have to enable rpmfusion? I vaguely recall that it had something to do with proprietary codecs, but I never really understood the details.
- jbk 6y agoSoftware patents on multimedia.
- colmvp 6y agoJust to chime in here with the love for VLC, it's very rare for me to continually use the same program for years while it gets updates, doesn't lag my computer, and just works.
- teddyh 6y agoVLC is certainly the program I always recommend to everyone, since it reads all formats and its GUI is perfectly serviceable for most people. But I never use VLC myself to watch video files, simply because VLC is, and have always been, for years, consistently slower when seeking in all the commonly used file formats which I encounter. It’s not exactly slow, it’s just… noticeably not as fast. It is especially bothersome when skipping through a video to skim it, which I often do. I currently use mpv (https://mpv.io/ https://mpv.io/), which is much faster at skipping, even though mpv does not have a GUI to speak of.
- teraflop 6y agoBy default, VLC tries to seek exactly to the timestamp you tell it to, which may requiring reading and decompressing a significant number of I-frames. Various other players, including mpv and MPC-HC, will instead just snap to the nearest keyframe and display that instead. Try turning on "Fast seek" in VLC's Input/Codecs preferences tab. It's still not quite as fast as other players, in my experience, but it's significantly better.
- teddyh 6y ago> Try turning on "Fast seek" in VLC's Input/Codecs preferences tab. That is a bit better, but still not close to what mpv does. That option also causes VLC to sometimes get “stuck” while skipping, i.e. when you skip many times in quick succession, sometimes the playback gets to a certain point, and any skips will then not skip past that point – you will have to wait a few seconds for normal playback to progress a bit, and then you can skip again. This interrupts your flow, makes you wait (and forces you to partially watch a section you expressly wanted to skip), and is, needless to say, very disruptive when skimming a video.
- Nition 6y agoMPV does seem super fast in general. I had a 4K HDR video file recently that the default Windows player couldn't play (black screen with only audio), VLC played but playback was choppy and the colours were washed out, and MPV played perfectly smooth with correct colours.
- luizfzs 6y agoThank you VideoLAN team! This thread is so wholesome!
- blazor 6y agoHappy Birthday! What a superbly useful, solid piece of technology. Don't forget when this came out, the only option to watch video on Windows was to pay money, or try Windows Media Player, which I don't recall ever successfully playing any video I ever threw at it !
- johnchristopher 6y agoVLC is how I listen to music on Linux. For the longest time I have been a foobar/winamp user on Windows. But on Linux, the music player situation is atrocious. I surrendered to VLC et voilà. It bugs me to no end that I use a video player to play music files but that's life. It plays everything, it doesn't need an insane backend scanning framework, it doesn't randomly crashes, its controls have been consistent for years and I can easily select the output device. I hate using it to play music but I love that I can use it to play music. Oh, and I can't wait for someone to release a VLCMedia distro with a keyboard/kiosk mode to get rid of XBMC/Kodi which has an insane amount of incoherent keybindings and defaults. edit: I also use cvlc to create an RTSP stream from pi-0, those streams are read and converted by a pi4 to HLS files in ssh shared folder with a VPS that has an index.html file with a js player. Works flawlessly. Only downside is when wifi gets flaky. How cvlc is the easiest and fastest option to do that on a pi0 is beyond me but thank you.
- isaac21259 6y agoIf your looking for a good music player on Linux I highly recommend Lollypop. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Lollypop# https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Lollypop#
- MayeulC 6y agoAnd Elisa for the KDE alternative: https://apps.kde.org/en/elisa https://apps.kde.org/en/elisa
- johnchristopher 6y agoNo, it doesn't support enough format yet, the UI isn't practical and latest flat version crashes. I would have stick with it if I could have setup a default folder from which to start browsing files (~/médias/music rather than ~).
- johnchristopher 6y agoI am running awesome KDE these days but I'll give it a try on work's computer if it supports debian 9.
- hudo 6y agoMaybe in next 20 they will fix scaling issues when using screens with different DPI settings
- jbk 6y agoThis is a Qt bug, which VLC uses for its UI.
- totaldude87 6y agoThis is so popular for so many years that, I questioned why someone would use a VLC cone for traffic diversions ( when I first saw one)
- myself248 6y agoOh thank goodness I'm not the only one! Normal cones here are just plain orange, monolithic, all one color. I'd never seen the style with the white stripe in person. Until about 2 summers ago, some appeared at a construction site, and my first impulse was "Ooh, VLCs in the wild!"
- tzury 6y agoThe creator of VLC player Olivier Pomel founded a company about a decade later and called it Datadog.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoCool! TIL. I've seen Datadog job postings for positions near Boston. I should apply.
- frannyward 6y agoI use VLC for converting .VOB files to .MP4 that I converted from VHS on my pioneer dual recorder/player.
- makeworld 6y agoffmpeg would be a better tool for that. Handbrake too I think, if you prefer a GUI.
- intsunny 6y agoI remember when us Linux desktop folks would run Windows Media Player 6.4 under Wine because it had the best support for all the codecs out there. (Especially all the DivX movies and TV shows out there.) Also in the early 2000's it was super fashionable for EVERY Linux app to have a needless server/client model. VLC is quite the prime example of this.
- frannyward 6y agoI use it to convert . VOB files to .MP4 format.
- uhtred 6y agoUsing VLC right now to listen to .flac music files!
- discordance 6y agoSend them a few bucks HN. They deserve it! https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money
- comprev 6y agoI've been using it for years and will continue to do so for as long as I can. Plus the Xmas hat and snow on the famous orange traffic cone icon always makes me smile each winter :-) Thank you!
- EvanAnderson 6y agoMy young daughter has grown up with VLC playing our "home movies". We usually end up watching videos from the prior year around Christmastime. The "Christmas cone" (as she calls it) is something she associates with the season. This year she even asked if it was "Christmas cone time" yet. The cone needs to be festooned as a conical "party hat" on February 1. If I had art skills I'd make this happen.
- kypro 6y agoI thought it was way older than that to be honest. I must have been using VLC for around 16 years myself. When I was a teenager my friends and I would film our weekend bike rides around the city – sometimes uploading them to Google Videos back when that was a thing. I remember often struggling to get the video formats to play on Windows Media Player because back then there seemed to be a lot of competing formats and WMP didn't always support them. Just off the top of my head I remember, 3gp, mp4, avi, wmv, divx, mpg & m4v. I was having trouble getting a video to play one night and a friend told me to try VLC and I haven't looked back since. VLC just works. It's also light weight – which was import when comparing to RealPlayer and Quicktime on an early 2000s PC. The UI is also extremely clean and simple when compared to other media players (especially those in the mid-2000s). Now 15 years later I'm still using VLC almost every day. It's probably the second or third thing I'll install on a new system. Quicktime player is pretty decent on Mac, but it doesn't play everything and there are things it doesn't do that I use all the time on VLC like the 100%+ volume. I can't imagine how much time and many headaches VLC has saved me over the years. It's easily one of the best pieces of open-source software ever made.
- yandrypozo 6y ago... and I still use it on my phone and my laptop <3
- INTPenis 6y agoI've had some sort of computer for over 26 years but as far as I can remember VLC is one of those few graphical desktop applications that I've relied on for the longest consecutive time. In so many situations where you want a video player, VLC is always there and it always works. I wish I could donate to more projects but I try to focus on privacy organisations. If VLC started charging for a lifetime license tomorrow I would buy it.
- john37386 6y agoIt's really an awesome software. It just works! I heard back in the days that they got some sponsors to improve security. Since it's running on so many computers, I was wondering if anyone is aware of any security issues. On my side, I didn't heard of any, but I also didn't really look deep into it. Anyone has thought on the security side of VLC?
- jbk 6y agoWe do monitor the security of VLC quite closely, because of that.
- ericra 6y agoI love VLC and have used it as my primary media player on every machine for as long as I can remember. I recently started exploring the command line options and I wrote a short (very basic) article on getting started with the VLC command line in case anyone finds it interesting or useful: https://ericra.com/writing/vlc_commands.html https://ericra.com/writing/vlc_commands.html
- kuon 6y agoI have enormous respect for VLC and what it brought to video in general. But, recently I have been using mpv because I love how snappy it is, especially when seeking with the mouse wheel.
- jacko0 6y agoWhat happened a few years ago to the iOS version, it was suddenly withdrawn from the App Store.
- jbk 6y agoDolby
- filmgirlcw 6y agoVLC is one of my favorite projects of all time. Hard to believe I’ve been using it this long. Happy birthday to the project and congrats to all the contributors!
- yarinr 6y agoI used to be a huge MPC-HC[0] (Media Player Classic) fan. It's funny, but I liked it mostly because of the way subtitles were displayed. MPC-HC always seemed to get the job done perfectly, and when I had to use VLC at the time, I've always run into some problems. I kept using MPC-HC for about two years after the development was halted. When it was time to look for an alternative, I gave VLC another try and was pleasantly surprised. The problems I remembered running into were no more, and the project seemed more mature overall. I'm enjoying it ever since. Thanks to everyone involved with the project! [0]https://mpc-hc.org/ https://mpc-hc.org/
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoI'm personally fond of mpv, mostly because it's "light" - it starts faster than VLC, and it (by default) pops up a single window per file (so I can easily have multiple things open, rather than VLC's default of opening everything in one instance), and I personally favor the minimal UI (okay, complete lack of UI). However. VLC always works. Sometimes mpv randomly stops working on a machine, or gets undermined by codec support (OpenSUSE, I'm looking at you). So when that happens... I just open my media in VLC. Because VLC works everywhere, on every system (oh, that reminds me that it's the best Android media player), on every format.
- aspaceman 6y agompv also is opengl ain't it? I remember it always lit up the fans on my Mac, and I figured that was the reason. Since Mac OGL compatibility can be shaky.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoLooks like OpenGL and Vulkan, yeah
- encom 6y agoMPC-HC is continued here: https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc I'd be very sad if it were to be abandoned.
- kthejoker2 6y agoI find it deeply satisfying to find this article atop HN's feed, followed by "Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus " Good software that solves real user problems effectively and efficiently will live forever. Thank you, VLC team!
- Cro_on 6y agoRecently went back to ios after a few years in the android sphere. Didn't realise how spoilt I had been until I tried to get some video and .mp3 files onto the device! After looking around for a while I found a very simple method using VLC and their local wifi network sharing feature. Big love forevrr vlc, always there in my time of need.
- neetodavid 6y agoSharing Via Wifi has been exactly what I needed twice in the past few months! Having the ios vlc just host a local web page so that any device on the wifi can drag and drop files in a web browser is so cool.
- bsharitt 6y agoI think VLC is probably the piece of software I've used continuously the longest, mostly because I've always taken it with me when ever I switched between Windows, Linux and Mac over the past probably 18 or 19 years I've been using it.
- xpressvideoz 6y agoI didn't know VLC was a French project. It's quite interesting.
- bombcar 6y agoI was going to build a media server box for my TV - built on the descendant of Xbox Media Center - and it’s there and alive, but I never use it. VLC on iPhone and Apple TV can open SMB shares and browsing isn't hard. And VLC can open RTSP streams also. Simply amazing tool.
- bigmattystyles 6y agoI've always worried about how high value a target VLC is. Many are using it to play files that were downloaded from who knows where - it wouldn't take much to find a bug in a decoder or some other component and then exploit it with a payload in a highly sought after movie. It's the main reason I contribute $20 a year to VLC. I know it's open source and there are eyes on but between distribution, etc..., someone paid needs to be involved imho; please consider doing the same.
- jbk 6y agoWe're working on sandboxing VLC, for this very reason :) Stay tuned about that.
- dcw303 6y agoIs there a technical reason why the subtitle delay on the iPad build is limited to +/- 5 seconds? I don't think there is such a limitation on other platforms. Sometimes the sub timings are off by a lot and this can make it impossible to get things to sync up. The reason I ask is this is literally the only feature I've ever noticed as lacking, which is pretty amazing on what is otherwise a fantastic piece of software that I've used reliably for many, many years.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ntr-- 6y agoJust the other day I was trying to view a small USB camera I had plugged into my Kubuntu machine. Cheese couldn't find it... kamoso was crashing... uninstalled them both. Pointed VLC at it as a capture device and it came up instantly! Amazing pieces of software, thank you VideoLAN team.
- CGamesPlay 6y agoI've recently increased my usage of VLC when I discovered that there were no good podcast apps for macOS. Specifically, I listen to serial podcasts in batches, so there's a very clear to-listen list and the episodes can be quite old. For some reason, even the open source RSS readers refuse to accept that someone might want to keep a long backlog of articles (podcasts are RSS feed where the article has an MP3 file, in case you didn't know). VLC natively can display the RSS feeds, but sadly doesn't have a notion of what is "already listened". So I save the episode list to a text file and have a script that pops a line off the top, saves the MP3, and I listen directly to the MP3 in VLC. So, if you know how I can automatically save both the track position and track number in an m3u playlist, I'd love to hear the secret!
- anta40 6y agoMany many years ago (during undergraduate days), we used to download MKV animes at campus lab (yea yea bad practice, I know). Typically, we didn't have admin rights to install the necessary codecs for watching those movies. Guess what? A friend told me to download "VLC portable". Guessed what? It worked automagically. Now I work on various OSes (Windows/Linux/Mac), and VLC is still my default multimedia player.
- tzuyu 6y agoI remember those days. Around 2010, i waited 2 hours to download VLC from my dialup setup. Average download speed was 3.6kbps and download size was 18 mb i guess.
- symlinkk 6y agoI don’t really understand the praise for VLC. I might be wrong here but isn’t it basically a GUI around FFMPEG? While VLC is great at playing anything you throw at it, that’s pretty much all due to the hard work of FFMPEG devs. The parts that VLC adds - the GUI - is really not that well done in my opinion. However it is absolutely critical that we have some sort of open source, cross platform, multimedia player, and for that I applaud it.
- _Gyan_ 6y agoYes, much of the demuxing and decoding relies on libav, but there are other demuxers and decoders in VLC as well. The library for handling DVD/BD playback is also distinct. Managing playback (flow, state, buffering..etc) itself is not a facility of libav so that is managed by the app.
- jbk 6y ago> but isn’t it basically a GUI around FFMPEG No, it isn't. VLC is doing a lot more than just wrapping libavcodec. Look at the source code of VLC. To give you an idea, VLC is around 800 kLoC, the UI taking 60 kLoC, and the core 100 kLoC. There are tons of modules that are not based on FFmpeg. Also, some VLC devs are also FFMpeg devs.
- philonoist 6y agoI just wish VLC for Android has support for being an audiobook player like bookmarking and reading chapters off the m4b format.
- jbk 6y agoDid you try 3.3.4? We improved audiobook support over there.
- john4532452 6y agoVLC is Awesome. Wish the plugin framework has support to capture all the keybindings. For example writing a plugin to delete the currently playing video file using del key is not possible without changing the frontend c++ qt code.
- renewiltord 6y agoIt's funny. For a lot of the time on Ubuntu, I could choose to install a few million gstreamer plugins and fail to watch anything or be up in minutes with VLC. Baller software.
- echelon 6y agoI remember pirating anime back in the 200[2-7] era and having to hunt for codecs to play anything. (Pirating was the only way to get anime back then.) Windows movie player sucked and wouldn't work with hardly any of the series being distributed over KaZaA, eMule, BitTorrent, etc. You'd need DivX, or QuickTime, more frequently some obscure and sketchy codec that came with its own `.exe` installer. When VideoLAN came on the scene, it played everything. It also supported proper subtitles, so anime sub groups stopped baking them directly into videos. (The switch to MKV was huge for fansubs.) VideoLAN was a huge part of my youth. Many kudos!
- robobob 6y agoCongratulations! Around 2004 maybe I guess I switched from mpc+k-lite, VLC is still unbelievably good and never gave me a reason to look for a alternative, that’s half my life. If vlc can’t play it I delete the file. I love to drop torrented movies to my iPad via Browser, or converting and streaming from iPad to tv in real-time. Before Christmas I used it for something very nice and spent 25€ on a donation and you can too.
- bobbydreamer 6y agoOther than the player what I have been a fan off is their robots.txt http://www.videolan.org/robots.txt http://www.videolan.org/robots.txt