VLC 3.0 release
videolan.org
videolan.org
1. It's existed for long enough that we know it won't just go away and break our hearts. (I used VLC to play videos on BeOS back in college in the late 90s.)
2. No matter how many iterations it goes through, it's still intelligible to would-be time travelers from the past. I.e. didn't get caught up in the "must change the UX around for change's sake" epidemic that still seems rampant.
3. It's always had acceptable performance, perhaps owing to being born in a time of no goddamned Electron apps.
4. It's dependable across platforms, even platforms that I'm unfamiliar with or don't like. Need to play a video on Windows? I don't even know what crapware to download, because I download VLC, because I know VLC runs on Windows and will greet me as a familiar friend in this strange and foreign land.
My hat is off to you, VLC!
[0]: https://np.reddit.com/r/france/comments/736ghk/ama_je_suis_l...
> Much more is know about economic decision making than moral decision making. Very little is known about sacred values. [In political negotiations] the standard view is to leave the hard questions of recognition and who you are for last, and you try to build things slowly through economic small steps, and person-to-person discussions. [I find that] when sacred values are in conflict, that is a formula for another hundred years of war.
> Now what do I mean by sacred values? Well, they are values that are very strongly tied to the emotions, to your sense of who you are within your community, and you are usually not even aware of them. It is a little bit like food: people usually are not aware of food until they are starving, [but then it becomes the one value people have]
> The same [is true for] sacred values: sacred values are the frame within which all social and economic transactions are possible, and again you usually are not even aware of them, until another society or group challenges them. Then they become dominant.
> In our [secular Western] society we do not have standard principles of sacred values any more, except for our children and perhaps our nation, everything is supposedly fungible. Of course, if I asked you if you would accept a million dollars to sell off your child, you would say I am crazy. If I insisted on it you would think I am a sociopath. But that is exactly the way people feel when one offers them a material incentive to exchange their sacred values.
The change is that VLC now supports H.265 hardware decoding on mac.
Great that VLC iterates so quickly!
I believe this was originally done because Lion would black out all other monitors when fullscreening something.
Doesn't seem to work on last year ones with only dedicated GPU-hardware acceleration.
I agree with the grandparent post - it's simple, consistent and dependable :). Also, customizable!
2.) Desktop - mouse slider affecting volume results in a lot of accidental volume changes, especially when using a Trackpad.
3.) iOS - When going back from playback to a list of media on your local server, the list refreshes to the top every time. Very annoying.
4.) iOS - connecting to a Local Server is awkward for pre-saved ones. You have to touch the saved setting and then it just pre-fills the login info without notice instead of connecting immediately. First few times it felt like it was doing nothing, until I realized what it actually did.
5.) iOS - Adjusting brightness/volume during playback by swiping is not precise and too sensitive. Very difficult to get the setting to desired level if it's not extreme and lifting your finger usually results in another change afterward.
That was true on previous versions. In 3.0, you can just use Up/Down on the keyboard.
2) disable this in preferences.
Many of the auxiliary menus are inconsistently partitioned. For example, if you're looking for a color setting in Tools->Effects & Filters, it's unclear whether it'll be under Color or Essentials.
These are minor things, but that's what good UX is all about. Tragically, new style guides and frameworks often pitch themselves by explaining solid UX principles then claiming the way to achieve these is a total rewrite using their system.
I'll change that problem to "the playback speed menu items don't show their shortcuts" then.
Fixed in 3.0
That being said, VLC has still been amazing for all my video needs
Well amen to that. If it works, why change it?
More than ever it's a shining example of high quality software driven by a desire to simply make things work.
It stands in stark contrast at a time when the tech industry seems hyper focused on business models that lock users into crippled platforms and extremely invasive tracking.
You and I would be great friends.
My main reason for using it over VLC is that it's comically easy to download (just press "D") and sync subtitles (pause in the beginning of a sentence -> CTRL+6 -> select sentence -> F5). Last time I checked this was a lot harder in VLC. It required a trial-and-error method to try and get the correct delay.
[1] https://mpc-hc.org/2017/07/16/1.7.13-released-and-farewell/
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=175209 - https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/
As for the sync subtitles, it's already possible in VLC.
VLC was first released in 2001, as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player
Because, indeed, VLC was out on BeOS before Linux and Windows.
"Well, it's important to remind people that we don't make money out of VLC and that there is no business model around it, we're not Mozilla or Facebook. VideoLAN only receives donations and that's not enough to hire someone. VLC developers are either volunteers (the majority since VLC started) or have their consulting business around open source multimedia."
Good point: there is plenty of software where people have no issues with buying a new licence every couple of years,
Compare that to (in my case) sixteen years of happy VLC usage across many different computers and phones, and it's obvious that I have some donations to catch up on!
I naively thought free projects were as resistant as VLC when it comes to manipulation for the sake of money, but big and even often cheered ones gave in.
A bad business model can be worse than having none.
It seems that it's up to the content owners as to how much they would want to enable.
https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/235694348-How-to-bu...
"When you buy a VOD, you will be able to stream its videos for as long as they remain on Vimeo. If the seller allows, you will also be able to download the videos to your computer and devices, DRM-free."
https://www.gnupg.org/donate/index.html (though they are at ~€5k/month now?)
http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2018.html http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html
I tried to get OpenBSD added to our companies system awhile back but the group that manages that process said they did not get a response from the OpenBSD group when they reached out to them to get a bit of information.
I can (and do) donate outside of my companies process, but they are missing out on additional money.
Edit: $14
Edit: $117
Edit: got hacked
Better show an Ethereum address or so, it's just a few minutes work and might render a much larger donation due to the expected increase in price over time.
And while they don't have an Ethereum address, they do have bitcoin and monero, two of the biggest players in this space. It would be nice to see more options just so that one could use whatever cryptocurrency is going to have lower transaction fees at the time.
there's already monero and bitcoin donation addresses there, but paypal is something most people already know about and can deal with (from multiple currencies around the globe).
I love the projects I've donated to, but not enough to trust them all not to fuck up storing my banking info. This way, I have all my donations easily available via one interface that I don't use for much else.
* VLC 3.0 "Vetinari" is a new major update of VLC.
* VLC 3.0 activates hardware decoding by default, to get 4K and 8K playback!
* It supports 10bits and HDR
* VLC supports 360 video and 3D audio, up to Ambisoncics 3rd order
* Allows passthrough for HD audio codecs
* Can stream to Chromecast devices, even in formats not supported natively
* Can play Blu-Ray Java menus: BD-J
* VLC supports browsing of local network drives and NASLooking forward to trying this on my Amazon Fire instead of having to sideload Kodi to watch videos on my fileserver.
-vcodec prores_ks -pix_fmt yuva444p10le -profile:v 4444
At the end of the App ProRes White Paper released earlier this morn there's an explicit warning about using ffmpeg:
In some instances, unauthorized codec implementations have been used in third-party software and hardware products. Using any unauthorized implementation (like the FFmpeg and derivative implementations) may lead to decoding errors, performance degradation, incompatibility, and instability.
This means Perian and other software that might use ffmpeg in some form. Clearly it's not working with the current OS and causing problems with AV Foundation, which QuickTime and FCP rely on.
TL;DR : everything is fine but don't use it for broadcast.
So excited to stream media to my TV via a non-crapware application.
Story time: this past summer I wanted to travel from Canada to Florida (3 days 2 nights) with just me and two young kids. To save on airfair I decided to drive. I bought myself the dlink DIR-505, one of those vehicle power bars, packed my laptop running plex, plugged in my portable drive that houses all my media, and I had a mobile hotspot the kids connected to from each of their devices to watch movies using plex, it was intuitive enough for them to use. With each having headphones, I even streamed my music to the car's bluetooth using plex. We went for 12hrs on our longest day, it was a huge relief from the boredom at times.
I've never had a problem with subtitles though, can you explain what you mean?
Has always worked perfectly, even with 4k high-bitrate video. Supports subtitles and can even fetch them for you.
PS: and it has Opensubtitles support. I do sometimes have to resort to using VLC to grab subtitles (for a diff language) but even VLC sometimes does not work. Then I gotta resort to, well, a web browser to grab the sub.
[1]https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/288806/plex-losing-subtitl...
With this I guess it should be possible to daisychain from twitch to chromecast via vlc if they start another game of brinkmanship over access to video.
[0] - https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1691460-chro...
1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/videostream-for-go...
I don't think it sucks per se - VLC was always publicly planning to add Chromecast support (it's been out on a couple platforms for a while, just not the ones I care about)
VLC does seem great for a one-off use case though.
Also:
~ > curl -sI https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.0.html | grep clacks
x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
Hugs and kisses
-- Havelock
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken." - http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com
So no technical purpose, just a fun way of keeping Terry's name alive :)
In the books, the clacks is a semaphore tower used to communicate, and it's sort of a telegraph/internet system, to compare it to the real world.
One day, people from the VIA association (VIA is a students’ network association with many clubs … amongst those is VideoLAN.) came back drunk with a cone. They then began a cone collection (which is now quite impressive I must say). Some time later, the VideoLAN project began and they decided to use the cone as their logo.
Edit: see comments below. They had a build problem and 64bit windows is a few hours behind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16340935
Help -> "Check for Updates" tells me I'm on the latest version even though I've only got 2.2.6 on Win10 (- and I still can't find the x64 build on their page!)
In the way a smartphone has replaced dozens of other pieces of electronics in most people's lives, VLC kind of replaces many other pieces of software. Sustaining a project like this to 3.0 is a huge accomplishment.
Almost?
VLC is one of the most common Windows software and it still took until 2018 for it to work correctly.
I personally love the rather small text and thus the giant amount of screen estate on my 27 inch 4K screen on Windows. But other people might have different preferences or visual acuity.
im really talking about dpi scaling though. there are still a fair amount of apps I use frequently that don't do a good job. the recent qbittorrent update looks horrible for me. some electron apps have awkward proportions but are still usable.
100% on 28" looks tiny.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/is-mac-retina-scaling-f...
Laptops aside I've read that using a large enough display, at least 32", helps work around the Windows scaling issues. I haven't tried this yet.
How has VLC been able to play mp3s, DVDs, and other media formats natively when other players were forced to pay licensing fees, hence the need to buy media players 10 years ago?
Problem solved!
VLC is clear example of lack of patents fostering innovation.
LAME hasn't included an mp3 encoder for these same reasons, even though its FOSS software.
I always assumed the reason no one bothered VideoLAN was a combination of the fact that 1.) VLC truly has remained a non-profit project, unlike many other FOSS software that makes money via some kind of business model (ads, premium support, etc.) and (less likely) 2.) everyone loves VLC so much that even the people possibly affected by the licensing don't care because they use it themselves.
Copyright holders have formed a few broad, cross-industry associations in order to protect their rights as widely as possible. These organizations represent the combined interests of many powerful people and so are able to exert significant political influence.
There are no equivalent organizations for patents, and the numerous industry bodies that manage licensing are often very small, narrow in scope, and lack the funding to lobby effectively.
There can be damages even for no-cost software because it isn't measured by the profits or earnings from the software but by the market loss on other software profits.
I stopped using VLC because of the whole Rebuilding font cache issue every time I opened it. It soured me a little more every time until I finally just stopped using it. I wonder if that issue is fixed.
May be time to revisit VLC 3!
I really like VLC as an organization and its open source nature. But, until now I have found it to be lacking in some areas as compared to POT player.
As for why change, personally Kakao doesn't seem trustworthy.
Tried finding tone mapping options. Apparently, those are only available for the OpenGL for Windows output. Changed to that (automatic is D3D11). Great, nice colors. Full-screened. Then back to windowed. Crash. Happens on many (but not all) 4K HDR MKV files here.
So yeah, not really working at all that well. Back to Potplayer for now (I had been using VLC for years, but for 4K videos it just wouldn't work all that well).
Nice on the Chromecast features though! :-)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vlc/+bug/790216
(CLI --http-reconnect /or/ Advanced (All) Preferences > Input/Codecs > HTTP(S) > Auto re-connect)
when you check for updates.
But everything is now SN3D/ACN
I only wish they had the post processing chops of madVR...
Does that mean this version includes libbluray? Right now, if I want to play a BD I need to use an older version of VLC that was compiled with libbluray.
No DRM-decryption, though.
By that, do you mean libaacs?
No protocol specified
Error: unable to open display :0
VLC media player 3.0.0 Vetinari (revision 3.0.0-0-gef4c265)
No protocol specified
xcb_connection_has_error() returned true
No protocol specified
[00000000009d0570] main interface error: no suitable interface module
[00000000008f93b0] main libvlc error: interface "globalhotkeys,none" initialization failed
[00000000008f93b0] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
It's probably because of the profile not supported by the Chromecast.
And, of course, ChromeCast.
From my own experience, a few months ago, on Linux mpv was still the better choice (more performant, better image quality, some more polished/reliable features like subtitles) as long as you don't mind the minimal UI (or use a front-end).
Or if you like that:)
When I select Playback > Renderer, it's connected to Chromecast alright, but when I press play, nothing happens.
Edit: Ok, it happens to some videos (they are h.264 videos), other videos seem to work fine, but for some reason, changing volume doesn't seem to have any effect on it. Is it by design?
just downloaded it on windows.
UI now renders good on 2k screen.
The HDD issue (buffering) should be fixed, and so is the equalizer.
On the other hand, the UI has been improved a bit which is good.
Google vlc python api.
You can tell from their website that design isn't their cup of tea.
I care 1000x more about basic solid function, like chromecast and subtitles and dvd menus. Casting to roku maybe. I'm donating now, what they've done needs to continue.
Thanks VLC team for all the dedication and good work. You're the best.
EDIT: This only works if you change the preference to set playback orientation to "landscape", not if you lock orientation.
This is because, before, VLC did not activate hardware decoding by default.