VLC desperately needs a Mac OS developer to help out | Hacker News Reader

VLC desperately needs a Mac OS developer to help out

forum.videolan.org

166 pointsanigbrowl43 comments

This is really tragic. I rely on VLC for all my video viewing needs. It loads video much faster than QuickTime w/ Perian and is much more responsive, not to mention the vast array of file formats it supports. I also like being able to tweak the buffer sizes to optimize playback from my NAS. I'm a little shocked there aren't any Cocoa devs wanting to work on this. Do I need to try and learn Objective-C now? I fear I would only damage the code base.

I'm feeling the same way. Maybe it's time to learn Obj-C. Might give it a try.

MPlayer. I had some videos that wouldn't play with VLC that would play with MPlayer. (They were encoded with Nero Recode.)

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

mplayer is great and I use it as my primary video player, but I can understand why one would prefer VLC -- it's much more friendly, even if you use the GUI for both.

Also, mplayer and VLC are helpmeets in my system; sometimes VLC can play something that mplayer will choke on, and vice versa. VLC is a valuable resource indeed.

One thing that VLC Mac developers really want is testers! There is too few testers. This a job that can be done by any guy who want to try a new software. That's not an easy job but that's a valuable one!

Perian and QT have definitely not replaced VLC at all. I'll give you one example: VLC's filters kicks the functionality that QT can give square in the nuts. I often apply VLC's Audio tempo scalar synched with rate filter for listening to sped up lectures. That feature alone makes VLC necessary for me, not to mention all the other stuff it does.

VLC is also used by other programs (such as Handbrake) to perform decryption of protected DVDs.

Technically it's not. Programs use the libdvdcss functionality built into VLC, but there are other alternatives (such as Fairmount) that also use libdvdcss. VLC is just more likely to be installed. Indeed, if you're running 64-bit Handbrake then the lack of a (stable) 64-bit version of VLC makes Fairmount a better option.

"""Finally, we have a few issues, since Apple doesn't want us on the Mac platform and is blocking us a lot, and refuses to explain why."""

I don't understand this. The Mac is pretty much an open platform. Putting video on the screen is not something Apple can block.

Does anyone know what they are specifically talking about?

This sentence means that some people in the Apple compagnie doesn't really like VLC. So they remove VLC from the offcial Apple download page without any explanation. We don't understand why as some other people in Apple do really like VLC...

The answer is simple really. They want to:

A) push their now-free QuickTime X player, along with the H.264 codec.

B) push consumers towards consuming more video through iTunes instead of other, um, ad-hoc channels.

I love VLC, but I can see how Apple has a competitive interest in not actively promoting VLC.

Yes. VLC allows you to easily circumvent some of the copy protection schemes on commercial DVDs. Apple doesn't like it because the MPAA doesn't like it.

Do enough people care to fund it? I personally do use VLC, but if it became unmaintained I'd just switch to another player.

I'm (theoretically) willing to maintain it if I can make enough in donations to pay the bills. (Contracting fills that role right now.)

That's probably the spirit that got VLC where it is now. Not having the time or the skill to contribute is one thing, being willing to contribute but only if there's money involved is another.

I have more productive things to do with my non-work time than spending it hacking even more. Diving headfirst into arbitrary codebases is just my day job. And really, it's not like one could make much money by maintaining a VLC port. It'd still be something they did out of love, reduction of evilness of job, or a combination of the two. ('Un'fortunately, my current job is already very non-evil.)

To VLC Team: If you're only making 10k EUR maybe you're not getting the maximum donations possible? I think your audience is big enough that there is more than 10k EUR per annum of gratitude to be harvested. (Pulled out of local donkey.)

If people would prefer to use something else than pay for VLC, then VLC is literally not worth it.

It's quite possible that's the case; I think most people on Mac would rather use Quicktime (w/ Flip4Mac [1], which is Microsoft-supported) for free than pay for VLC. But if there were a trivially easy way to pay a dollar, I think a lot of folks would. Ultimately, open source projects that aren't fun to work on will live or die by the micropayments problem.

1 or whatever; I'd never heard of Perian before this thread, and I just switched back to Linux from OS X.

"It's quite possible that's the case; I think most people on Mac would rather use Quicktime (w/ Flip4Mac [1], which is Microsoft-supported) for free than pay for VLC."

I'm probably an atypical Mac user. I sometimes use my Mac to watch movies, but generally don't care for the OSX UI and don't care if something doesn't have a true OSX feel (n fact, non-OSX may suit me better). (I have a Mini for development purposes but do most things on Kubuntu.)

I like using VLC because, aside from its feature set, I use it on Vista and Kubuntu as well and know what it can do and how to do it. (Usually; for whatever reason, the default keyboard shorts are oddly different on different platforms. I don't think it's because of collisions with preexisting shortcuts, and I usually just reassign them to suit myself.)

This thread has informed me about some other OSX options I'll try out, but so far VLC is about the most full-featured player I've seen. Couldn't live without the equalizer, gamma/brightness control, audio sync adjustment, and such.

There are other differences, too. The playlist showed up by default on the OS X version of VLC, and I haven't found a way to make that happen on the Ubuntu version. Also, the OS X version has a very nice "jump 10 seconds" feature which the Ubuntu version seems to lack entirely (or I couldn't find it). It's weird that the OS X version of VLC actually seemed to have more features and a markedly better interace than the linux version, to the point that although I used VLC almost exclusively on OS X, now that I use linux I usually use Totem.

Not sure about the playlist thing, but on linux there are keyboard shortcuts for jumps of varying lengths (some combo of left or right arrow and ctrl|alt|shift variations).

It would be really sad if VLC on Os X goes , that's one of the main apps i use.

QT + Perian and MPlayer are nowhere near to VLC in terms of functionality. I can get any ol format and get VLC to play it , as an example .iso files.

Interesting that it took 10 days for this news to get out. Kind of makes me feel like Mac OS X isn't exactly a high priority for the people behind VLC?

I do hope that they find a dev though.

The people behind VLC are whoever shows up, so I'd say VLC isn't a high priority for OS X open source volunteers.

Isn't there a nonprofit behind VLC? I was mostly wondering what what their focus is on. Is their focus primarily licensing issues?

http://www.videolan.org/contribute.html

They have a nonprofit, but it looks like they don't use it to pay developers. I didn't see any financials, so I don't know whether they just don't have enough money to pay developers or they have consciously decided not to (see http://wiki.mako.cc/Crowding_out ).

That's a shame because VLC is by far the best media tool I've ever used on OS X in terms of playback compatibility.

I think that largely used to be true ... but nowadays with tools like Perian and Mplayer OSX Extended it's definitely no longer the case. With Snow Leopard, VLC is actually the weakest of the media players in terms of stability and performance, in my opinion.

Comment grandparent explains why.

Not the original commenter, but here is my take on it on Snow Leopard: I use QuickTime X a lot for its h.264 hardware acceleration. As of now, that's the only option you have if you want to play 1080p on Mac. Coupled with Perian, I think it solves the majority of playback issues with a rather simple user interface. Then I use MPlayer OS X Extended for its better support for MKV, subs, DTS, AC3, etc. And it has a very simple interface like the original QuickTime player (< X). So really, there's much less need for VLC on that platform...

"Taking into account the learning curve to VLC development, I think it is fair to say that the situation is now critical."... Yikes.

I'm a big fan of VLC, and hope to see someone jump on board with them. VLC has an amazing suite of tools under its hood, although most casual users simple reference them it as a Media "Player". If I knew a hint of Mac OS development, I'd be jumping on board.

The OP:

VLC is looking for MacOS X developers Postby ajmas on Fri May 29, 2009 5:55 am

by Rémi Denis-Courmont on Sun Dec 06, 2009 11:00 pm

There are now effectively zero active developers for MacOS.

This is absolutely false. The only thing true is the fact that there isn't so many mac developers for VLC. They need helps because they want to bring a really nice player.

They should start a kickstarter project to pay someone to work on it..

I wonder if this is because Perian has eliminated much of the need for VLC.

Perian is nice, but VLC is great to have as a fallback: it works on everything up to and including scratched DVD's, and it's easy enough to use being a standalone app.

Yes, VLC's reading of DVDs is much more permissive. I've never figured out what the deal is with Apple's DVD reading software.

Perian is hampered in many places by the limitations of QuickTime itself. Apple hasn't yet provided any API for QTX, but they've promised us that it fixes many of our problems. We've communicated with the QuickTime team, and they're aware of our frustrations and seem at least somewhat inclined to work with us once QTX has a reasonable API.

Quicktime can't crank the volume up like VLC does. It sounds like a small thing, but when you're on a laptop with little speakers it makes a big difference.

Yeah it can. There are two ways, in the sound section of the video properties ("boost") or by holding shift and pressing the up-arrow key. Normally the QuickTime volume control widget stops you at 0db (any more than that and you would be clipping the signal) but if you hold shift and keep pressing up (up and down control the volume widget) it will go beyond 0db, even though it doesn't visually indicate it.

Sadly, they disabled this in QuickTime X. Some of my friends use older versions of QuickTime to get around this problem.

Ah lame, I haven't updated to Snow Leopard yet so I didn't know.

Geez, os x is completely riddled with tricks you 'have to know', usually achieved by some obscure key combination. Which UI book did they get this out of ? ...

The don't-clutter-my-screen-with-nine-hundred-thousand-buttons-and-menus book?

Joking aside, most OS X keyboard shortcuts actually follow a very rational scheme (which is mentioned in the Apple HIG, IIRC). If Cmd+X performs an action X, both Cmd+Shift+X and Cmd+Opt+X will perform similar versions of X, so you don't have trouble remembering "special" shortcuts.

Example: Cmd+Q quits an application, Cmd+Shift+Q logs you out and Cmd+Opt+Shift+Q logs you out without confirmation.

Another example: Cmd+Opt+Esc brings up the Force Quit dialog. Cmd+Shift+Opt+Esc force quits the current application without confirmation.

I don't think this is an OS X specific thing. I suspect Windows, KDE and GNOME all follow a similar HIG.

(No, none of those shortcuts are good for your RSI.)

I'd say it has some to do with that but also players like MPlayer which are provide much greater playback performance for the most part.

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