8 ms·

VLC for Windows 8 reaches $65,000 funding goal with five days to spare

95 points by Garbage 14y ago

FreeKill 14y ago
Congrats to the folks at VLC, it's great software and the more platforms it runs on the better for everyone...
alpb 14y ago
This is great news for Surface RT users!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - kcbanner 14y ago
    What?
  - fruchtose 14y ago
    "And what will this money be used for? MS licensing fees for using "Metro" (or whatever they call it now)." At the very least, creating a product--especially on a new platform--costs money. People need to be paid. I am surprised someone in this community would hold your attitude, but your post is so trollish that I can't see any value in it.
    - alpb 14y ago
      Do licensing fees cost that much?
ddon 14y ago
Here is a direct link to a VLC Kickstarter page: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for-the-new-windows-8-user-experience-metro http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for-the-n...
jbk 14y ago
As the one running this KickStarter, (and also main VLC dev + VideoLAN president) I have to say that I am happy. Running a fundraiser through KickStarter for an Free and Open Source software that was always 100% developed by volunteers was a risky bet, and we were unsure... The good thing is that our community accepted that quite well and enough users understood the need and funded it. If you wonder why we need money for VLC on WinRT, you can read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4902508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4902508 And now, back to work, we got something to deliver :) PS: before you ask for iOS, you might have a surprise soon.
- mtgx 14y ago
  I hope you'll take the Android version out of beta soon as well. I haven't gotten a chance to test it yet because I have an ARMv6 phone, but to be honest I think you should save yourselves the trouble and completely skip this architecture, and just support ARMv7 and ARMv8 chips with NEON. Pretty sure the manufacturers will stop supporting ARMv6 for low-end devices next year, too, in favor of Cortex A7. Even Google doesn't make Chrome for ARMv6. Also, if you want to have the best media player on Android, MX Player is the one to beat, in both performance and features.
  - zanny 14y ago
    MX is the best for now, but if Android VLC could get desktop parity, with streaming, encoding, etc all in one package, it would kick butt. I have vlc on my Android tablet, but it doesn't utilize hdmi out to tv properly. I think most other media programs will take exclusive control of an hdmi attached screen if they are set into fullscreen, vlc as of the most recent beta I was running didn't.
  - jbk 14y ago
    VLC for ARMv6 exists already :) It is just not on the store :)
- donniezazen 14y ago
  I just find it hard to understand why should so much money, time and energy should be spent on making Metro version of VLC considering it might be only useful on one niche product.
rorrr 14y ago
VLC used to be my favorite video player. Then I discovered Splash Pro Ex. Seriously, if your computer isn't very powerful, you can watch full HD movies without any stuttering, barely any CPU load, and has half of the load on the GPU compared to VLC. Instant skips to any part of a huge file (I just tested on an 18GB mkv, VLC takes like 30 sec to skip to the middle).
- TobbenTM 14y ago
  Link: http://mirillis.com/en/products/splashexport.html http://mirillis.com/en/products/splashexport.html Not free, Windows only.
  - rorrr 14y ago
    Yeah, VLC is collecting money too, that's what this post is about. Regardless, even if VLC is free, I just like Splash better for basic playback. I realize VLC is extremely complex and full of all kinds of features, but I don't use 99% of them. I recently tried streaming using the VLC browser plugin, and it failed spectacularly, it doesn't buffer properly.
    - masklinn 14y ago
      > Yeah, VLC is collecting money too, that's what this post is about. VLC is collecting money to port to a platform with which the current codebase and toolchain are completely incompatible (see jbk's comment above), and that money is solely collected from people who want to support the port (or VLC itself), using VLC or hacking on it costs $0.
  - brass9 14y ago
    A limited capacity lite version is there
- mtgx 14y ago
  I wish I could use VLC more, but I can't and I can't recommend it to friends either to use most of the time. What I recommend them is BSPlayer. The main reason is because BSPlayer is so much better with subtitles. It has 3 subtitle sources to look into, and it can automatically match and download them for your movie. For a foreigner that's extremely helpful and convenient. It basically can be a deal-breaker if other players don't have that. I think VLC has sort of a similar 3rd party add-on for that, but I'm not even sure if it's supported anymore, and I don't think it worked that well anyway. And I also found it pretty hard to set-up. It's not a one-click install. If VLC was as good at subtitles as BSPlayer, I'd use only that and recommend it to all my friends, too. Now you have me intrigued with Splash Pro, though. I'll have to give that a try, especially on older PC's.
bitteralmond 14y ago
I love that this is a thing, and that it's such a success to keep it current. However, I don't approve of Windows 8 itself and that's a bit of a problem in itself. This story still gets an upvote thought.
- jbk 14y ago
  Not approving Windows 8 and not porting a popular open source solution to Windows 8 are two different things.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    We need more pragmatists like you.
    - jbk 14y ago
      Thanks :)
bborud 14y ago
How about we make a Kickstarter project to fund removal of the fussy new UI that VLC got a few versions back, and which now makes VLC slow and annoying to start on my macs.
- jbk 14y ago
  You have simple options to have the old UI back.
- aes256 14y ago
  If you haven't already, trade VLC in for MPlayerX on OS X.
Keyframe 14y ago
This is great news, especially since it will yield more goodies for other folks who are into c99 on windows. I love VLC (sans font searching here and there, heh). It's so much useful that I don't even use QT on PC for playback anymore for DNxHD codec qt files. It supports even MXF files. VLC and ffpmeg (ffmbc not so very much) are one of the best tools, free or not, for what they do, if you're in professional video.
zaidf 14y ago
Pledge £350 or more Text link on the VLC for Windows 8 website for 1 month and your (company's) name in the list of Silver sponsors within the application. Are these going to be no-follows? Otherwise, isn't that to some extent selling a link back?

95 points by Garbage 14y ago

FreeKill 14y ago

Congrats to the folks at VLC, it's great software and the more platforms it runs on the better for everyone...

alpb 14y ago

This is great news for Surface RT users!

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- kcbanner 14y ago
  What?
- fruchtose 14y ago
  "And what will this money be used for? MS licensing fees for using "Metro" (or whatever they call it now)." At the very least, creating a product--especially on a new platform--costs money. People need to be paid. I am surprised someone in this community would hold your attitude, but your post is so trollish that I can't see any value in it.
  - alpb 14y ago
    Do licensing fees cost that much?

ddon 14y ago

Here is a direct link to a VLC Kickstarter page: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for-the-new-windows-8-user-experience-metro http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for-the-n...

jbk 14y ago

As the one running this KickStarter, (and also main VLC dev + VideoLAN president) I have to say that I am happy. Running a fundraiser through KickStarter for an Free and Open Source software that was always 100% developed by volunteers was a risky bet, and we were unsure... The good thing is that our community accepted that quite well and enough users understood the need and funded it. If you wonder why we need money for VLC on WinRT, you can read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4902508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4902508 And now, back to work, we got something to deliver :) PS: before you ask for iOS, you might have a surprise soon.

mtgx 14y ago
I hope you'll take the Android version out of beta soon as well. I haven't gotten a chance to test it yet because I have an ARMv6 phone, but to be honest I think you should save yourselves the trouble and completely skip this architecture, and just support ARMv7 and ARMv8 chips with NEON. Pretty sure the manufacturers will stop supporting ARMv6 for low-end devices next year, too, in favor of Cortex A7. Even Google doesn't make Chrome for ARMv6. Also, if you want to have the best media player on Android, MX Player is the one to beat, in both performance and features.
- zanny 14y ago
  MX is the best for now, but if Android VLC could get desktop parity, with streaming, encoding, etc all in one package, it would kick butt. I have vlc on my Android tablet, but it doesn't utilize hdmi out to tv properly. I think most other media programs will take exclusive control of an hdmi attached screen if they are set into fullscreen, vlc as of the most recent beta I was running didn't.
- jbk 14y ago
  VLC for ARMv6 exists already :) It is just not on the store :)
donniezazen 14y ago
I just find it hard to understand why should so much money, time and energy should be spent on making Metro version of VLC considering it might be only useful on one niche product.

rorrr 14y ago

VLC used to be my favorite video player. Then I discovered Splash Pro Ex. Seriously, if your computer isn't very powerful, you can watch full HD movies without any stuttering, barely any CPU load, and has half of the load on the GPU compared to VLC. Instant skips to any part of a huge file (I just tested on an 18GB mkv, VLC takes like 30 sec to skip to the middle).

TobbenTM 14y ago
Link: http://mirillis.com/en/products/splashexport.html http://mirillis.com/en/products/splashexport.html Not free, Windows only.
- rorrr 14y ago
  Yeah, VLC is collecting money too, that's what this post is about. Regardless, even if VLC is free, I just like Splash better for basic playback. I realize VLC is extremely complex and full of all kinds of features, but I don't use 99% of them. I recently tried streaming using the VLC browser plugin, and it failed spectacularly, it doesn't buffer properly.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    > Yeah, VLC is collecting money too, that's what this post is about. VLC is collecting money to port to a platform with which the current codebase and toolchain are completely incompatible (see jbk's comment above), and that money is solely collected from people who want to support the port (or VLC itself), using VLC or hacking on it costs $0.
- brass9 14y ago
  A limited capacity lite version is there
mtgx 14y ago
I wish I could use VLC more, but I can't and I can't recommend it to friends either to use most of the time. What I recommend them is BSPlayer. The main reason is because BSPlayer is so much better with subtitles. It has 3 subtitle sources to look into, and it can automatically match and download them for your movie. For a foreigner that's extremely helpful and convenient. It basically can be a deal-breaker if other players don't have that. I think VLC has sort of a similar 3rd party add-on for that, but I'm not even sure if it's supported anymore, and I don't think it worked that well anyway. And I also found it pretty hard to set-up. It's not a one-click install. If VLC was as good at subtitles as BSPlayer, I'd use only that and recommend it to all my friends, too. Now you have me intrigued with Splash Pro, though. I'll have to give that a try, especially on older PC's.

bitteralmond 14y ago

I love that this is a thing, and that it's such a success to keep it current. However, I don't approve of Windows 8 itself and that's a bit of a problem in itself. This story still gets an upvote thought.

jbk 14y ago
Not approving Windows 8 and not porting a popular open source solution to Windows 8 are two different things.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  We need more pragmatists like you.
  - jbk 14y ago
    Thanks :)

bborud 14y ago

How about we make a Kickstarter project to fund removal of the fussy new UI that VLC got a few versions back, and which now makes VLC slow and annoying to start on my macs.

jbk 14y ago
You have simple options to have the old UI back.
aes256 14y ago
If you haven't already, trade VLC in for MPlayerX on OS X.

Keyframe 14y ago

This is great news, especially since it will yield more goodies for other folks who are into c99 on windows. I love VLC (sans font searching here and there, heh). It's so much useful that I don't even use QT on PC for playback anymore for DNxHD codec qt files. It supports even MXF files. VLC and ffpmeg (ffmbc not so very much) are one of the best tools, free or not, for what they do, if you're in professional video.

zaidf 14y ago

Pledge £350 or more Text link on the VLC for Windows 8 website for 1 month and your (company's) name in the list of Silver sponsors within the application. Are these going to be no-follows? Otherwise, isn't that to some extent selling a link back?