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So, this is our new major release, and I'm going to share some stuff that should fit better the audience here on HN, and that are not part of the main announcem
by jbk 13y ago
So, this is our new major release, and I'm going to share some stuff that should fit better the audience here on HN, and that are not part of the main announcement :)
First, this is a release that fixes some important architecture mistakes we've done in 2.0.x branch of VLC. I'm notably speaking of the lag in reactivity, notably on volume change (that was shared on the mpv thread) and seeking, but also some grave video settings propagation. I wish we could have fixed and shipped that earlier, but we couldn't (long release cycle).
Then, this is the first official release of libVLC that is LGPL for most of what you need as a developer, including the right modules. SDKs for Win32/64, MacOSX, iOS and Android are getting ready.
If you are a web developer, our VLC plugin now supports Windowless, to fill the gap between Flash and HTML5 (it should work on IE6,7,8 without too much work).
If you are on Mac OS, the interface is finally polished after the major changes of 2.0.0 :)
Finally, we decided, as a community that we will accelerate the major release cycle of VLC. The fact that we needed 1,5 year to get the fix to some critical audio core and video settings issues out is way too much. We will move towards a 6-months schedule with LTS.
Sure, there are other very good players on each platform, but we are doing our best so that you can play everything everywhere for free, using open source technologies :)
- devindotcom 13y agoThanks for the breakdown. VLC is my primary but maybe now I'll even be able to uninstall mplayer and the others!
- jongalloway2 13y agoCongrats on the release! Can you give any high level updates on the VLC for Window 8 effort? I've been following the Kickstarter updates and know it's been more difficult than expected, just wondering if there's any new news.
- jbk 13y agoYes, we're almost near porting the core: http://people.videolan.org/~funman/win/wack.xml http://people.videolan.org/~funman/win/wack.xml
- jongalloway2 13y agoAwesome! Great to hear, and thanks for the quick response.
- davidu 13y agoAmazing piece of software. Somehow still can't figure out how to do the one additional thing I want (above and beyond what I have already sorted out how to do), which is quit the player and re-open it later at the TS of where I left off with my video. :-)
- jbk 13y agoUse the srspos extension :)
- wahnfrieden 13y agohttp://addons.videolan.org/content/show.php/Remember+position?content=157838 http://addons.videolan.org/content/show.php/Remember+positio...
- codfrantic 13y agoIt already remembers on Android :-D
- grinnick 13y agoI like the (very subtle) OSX interface polish I can see. Also, perhaps it's just me but it seems to open faster than 2.0.8 did. Thanks for all your hard work anyway. VLC has been my default media player for years now. I can't think of another piece of software that I've used so regularly for such a long time.
- jbk 13y agoIt is faster than 2.0.8 to open on OSX, yes. And yes, a bit of polish has been done on the OSX interface, but there is a bit more yet to do :)
- devx 13y agoIt seems to open faster on Windows, too.
- jbk 13y agoThat is true too :) But the increase should be smaller than on OSX.
- Camillo 13y agoI haven't noticed any differences in the interface, but the application is 50% smaller now. I like that.
- jbk 13y ago
- mayhew 13y agoThanks for all of your hard work. VLC is a great example of open source software that "just works" for normal users.
- jbk 13y agoThanks :)
- wslh 13y agoCongratulations! How VLC is currently backed financially? how much extra money do you need for the project?
- jbk 13y agoWe receive only donation through paypal, that pay for the server, and going to conferences... The rest is volunteer work :) If you have a million or two to spare, we could do something though :) To be honest, we need code more than money.
- bloopletech 13y agoAs someone who currently uses a different player (mplayer2) which shares an upstream (ffmpeg) with VLC, how much of the codec/format improvements are due to/push to the upstream projects? I really hope all these great improvements are shared between the media player projects as much as possible.
- aktau 13y agoNot quite sure myself, but I've been tracking the development of mpv, a fork of both mplayer2 and mplayer, and its development is going fast, very fast. For example, intel VA-API support was ported and integrated into master in about a week. With support for VA-API VPP (video post-processing), so deinterlacing comes free too (just like for VDPAU). That means that on my weak intel boxes, decoding 1080p content takes about 3-5% CPU and 25MB. Which means I can play 16-32 simultaneous videos in a grid at the same time. You should've seen the look on my clients' face when they saw me pull that one off, where the former developer couldn't even do one HD clip without lagging horribly. It is, in a word, awesome. Just like this new VLC, which I use on my mac. Also awesome. I actually looked at the new VLC plugin code to make my own browser plugin for mplayer/mpv. Though in the end I didn't decide to support a windowless interface like VLC (because I couldn't really, mplayer-likes don't support that). That's fine though, windowed mode was far easier to code.
- luckydude 13y agoNo code, have some money. PM me if that would help.
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 13y agoI have stared at you're work for over 150 days straight. Around 8 TB~ of content, estimating about: 666 KB/s. It's probably higher then that. I just wanted to thank you.
- jbk 13y agoCool content, or?
- gph 13y agoPorn. ;)
- 13y ago
- pinaceae 13y agoVLC is one the most impressive pieces of multi-platform open source software out there. you guys and girls are doing a heck of a job. congrats on all the work.
- erikt 13y agoWhy is this update not showing up in my Mac? I'm on 2.0.8 and when I checked for update it says that 2.0.8 is the latest version. Edit: Nevermind, looks like this has been answered. VLC waits a week before releasing the update to the public.
- nja 13y agoSo are all the 2.X releases going to be named after Discworld characters? Twoflower and now Rincewind...
- jbk 13y agoAnd The luggage for 1.x. Yes.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoI have a rather odd question for you. I've been trying to use VLC for forensic work, specifically for viewing videos frame-by-frame. There's a way to step forward one frame at a time, but there's no way to step backwards. So it's really difficult to switch between two frames back and forth to look for differences. I've resigned myself to capturing screenshots and pasting them into an image editor then using undo/redo to switch between frames. Do you have any suggestions for how to do it better? I know this feature probably wouldn't be useful to anyone but me, so I'm not really putting in a feature request. Just hoping to discover that someone else has already figured out a way of stepping backwards frame-by-frame, to complement the existing "step forwards" functionality.
- etcet 13y agoavidemux can do this. Most video formats are not designed or optimized for going backwards so it's much slower.
- barrkel 13y agoBut fast forward is usually almost instantaneous, to the point it's often faster to seek backwards, then play back at normal speed, than to wait for a previous frame to be calculated. There's no reason why the software can't cache frames (it's only 25fps normally) or fast forward from the last I-frame. 25 frames of 1080p HD video is 200MB, as uncompressed 32bpp bitmaps. I have 24GB of memory in my PC; that's the worst case, and it's not bad. A bunch of prior frames can be cached, and the next bunch recalculated if it looks like the user is going to continue stepping backwards.
- FizDev 13y agoAlthough I haven't tried it, there seems to be an extension for that : http://addons.videolan.org/content/show.php/Previous+frame?content=156396 http://addons.videolan.org/content/show.php/Previous+frame?c...
- iamthebest 13y agoLast time I checked, Apple's QuickTime Player was able to do this. There's even an option to show frame numbers in place of units of time in the UI.
- iamthebest 13y agoI just updated from 2.0.8 and already notice a lot of improvements in 2.1.0. Pause/play and start/stop used to result in some unpleasant audible artifacts. Sounds much cleaner now. Same goes for changing playback speed. I still think there's some weirdness going on with using F11 vs double-clicking to switch to full screen view for video playback. Overall great job with this release. BTW, I'm also loving the fact that I can use VLC on Android. I compiled it from source back when there were no binaries, currently am using the nightlies, and am looking forward to being able to get the stable releases in the app store eventually.
- mikevm 13y agoVLC is a great piece of software, but it's always missing some last pieces of polish that stop it from replacing my default video player (I only keep VLC in those rare cases when I have some unplayable video). Two issues that are very annoying to me: 1. The lack of "Remember last played position" option is very frustrating. This option is now part of many popular media players. 2. The "Disable screensaver" option doesn't work properly. When you pause a video, VLC will stop the computer from going into sleep mode. This is pretty awful! VLC should only disable the screensaver while the video is being played. And one last thing that would be nice: the ability to move the main VLC window by clicking and dragging on the video area, and not just by the titlebar.
- fjarlq 13y agoAt least those requests are being tracked: 1. https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/5315 https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/5315 2. https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/3724 https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/3724
- jbk 13y ago1. you have an extension called srspos for that. 2. yes, pause is bad in VLC, because it still displays...
- gtufano 13y agoDo you have some pointer handy for further information about the SDKs? I've not been able to find anything on the site (or on the wiki)
- joseflavio 13y agoI use VLC in win7 (x64) and in ubuntu (x64). I usually watch my videos from a slow memory card or pendrive, because of this I try always to increase the file caching the in input codecs, first, I don't understand why it is limited to 6999ms, is there a reason (my machines have between 8gb to 32gb of ram, so would be nice to prefetch everything...)? and second, the volume is still with some lag... i guess because you pre-amplify it.. the lag is a real pity because makes it feels a way worse player... still it is my favorite player! so thanks!
- Florin_Andrei 13y agoWhen are you guys going to release an official Android app?
- iamthebest 13y agoI've been grabbing the nightly builds and installing them on my phone for a while now. http://nightlies.videolan.org/ http://nightlies.videolan.org/