The team that powers VLC | Hacker News Reader

The team that powers VLC

increment.com

304 pointschoppaface49 comments

(disclaimer: president of VideoLAN here and old VLC dev)

What's interesting in this article (quite accurate, for once) is the focus on the size of the team, which is quite small; and on the development process. And how the team are now friends more than co-developers...

In fact, VLC is ported - and maintained - in a very large number of platforms (probably more than Firefox, Chrome, Office or Libreoffice) with Android (+TV), ChromeOS, iOS/iPadOS, AppleTV, WinRT&Xbox, Windows (XP+), macOS (10.7+), Linux, Unixes, BSD, OS/2. While the core team has always been around 5 persons, and always less than 10. And most developers have been working on their free time...

The VideoLAN non-profit needs also to maintain quite a bit of infra (updater, crash reporter, bugtracker, forum, wiki, ml, gitlab, git) for a lot of projects (not only VLC, but things like x264 and dav1d) and do support, appstores, PR, translations and partnerships (the only way to get support from MS, Google or Apple).

Sure, VLC is probably not always the best for your usecase, and there are probably better solutions for each platform, but we are consistent, completely open source and open process, therefore people can trust the project and the brand: VLC will be around in 5 years, and we will do our best to port on all platforms, in an open way. A lot of players come and go, but the project is structured so it can last.

Since HN is a technical crowd, we're currently working on 2 fun projects: VLC.js and integrating sandboxing inside VLC :)

> Sure, VLC is probably not always the best for your usecase

VLC is both consistent and almost always the best media player for the platform. I especially love your Android UI/UX.

It has been my go-to player for ~14 years now, installed it on my high school desktop windows, my university linux and now work MBP and personal Android never disappointed me. Thanks for keeping up the quality work, I give you as example of good quality open-source project when the topic comes up.

Do you have any "need" for a fullstack/infra kind of person? Or any place we can see what know-how needs you have at the moment?

Would love to get involved with my limited capacity.

Also thanks for staying open source and privacy conscious.

> Do you have any "need" for a fullstack/infra kind of person?

Yes, we do. Both web (JS for VLC and for our website), backend (Go) and infra are needed.

And currently, people who are able to write Ruby to improve gitlab upstream.

> people who are able to write Ruby to improve gitlab upstream.

This I am able to do. How can I help?

I've contributed in very small ways previously (getting libdav1d into Handbrake[1], designing the dav1d logo[2]). Would love to be able to offer my time in a domain I'm skilled in.

[1]: https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/pull/1864

[2]: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/merge_requests/681

Their vlc UI on Android is an issue for me because it overlaps the ANDROID ui buttons (home back etc )

This is a bug in your Android ROM, not in VLC. We try to work-around those bugs, but we need to do that, one by one. It is tricky.

What ROM do you have?

I'm using a stock rom Android 9 . My phone is a one plus 6 . Maybe it's an issue with notch compatibility .

My OnePlus 6T is fine as far as I can tell.

It is Android 10 but was fine in 9 also.

Thank you for staying a nonprofit; I'm sure you have received many offers in the past.

I'm glad to have been a user of VLC since I first got a computer. I happily install / recommend it to family and friends. It does what it needs to do very well, and without bloat.

Here's a discussion of one such offer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048

We still get shady offers every week

I remember, years ago, when VLC was fairly unknown and my dad asked if I knew what VLC was... he was convinced it was adware as he had never seen it before and when you clicked on it, nothing really happened.

I looked it up after he uninstalled the nothing-burger of an application. Found your website and decided to download it. I remember malware would masquerade as real software a lot back then and it wasn’t that far out.

Installed it and ever since has been my favorite for watching anything, and helped streaming files and the like.

VLC is awesome and I haven’t stopped using it since.

I give you folks a lot of credit for building a professional ecosystem on top of a brilliant but constantly moving target (FFMPEG). Well done.

We also support FFmpeg, in the way we can (infra and sponsoring of new features).

VLC is the only thing I can use on my AppleTV to access my local Plex server when my Internet connection is down. It's almost the only time I use VLC but so worth it when I need it. Thank you and the team for all your work over the years.

Wait, you can access Plex from VLC?

Yes, https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc-ios/tree/master/Share...

Whoa! The plot thickens.

Thanks for the insight!

via DLNA, I assume.

Curious are there open discussions or articles about VLC.js? Is it possible this may include decoders in some form? I sort of hope VLC.js isnt just Emscripten. Would be nicer if the open web benefits. I have been using the audio and video HTML tags lately and am disappointed by how limited they are and how cubbersome styling them is. You literally hide the out of the box components instead of being able to style those directly.

That's full VLC in wasm.

Thank you for all the time and energy you put into this amazing project!

Besides using VLC to watch my video collection, and listen to albums, I use this program daily to organize and stream a plethora of internet radio stations. It's almost always running. It's an incredibly useful creation, and very much appreciated. Merci beaucoup!

Hey - around ~3 years ago or so I was dabbling with writing a libVLC module to handle custom encryption and jumped on the IRC channel to get help. Was a great experience all around!

Curious about VLC.js - is there a recommended way to get updates on that project?

I'm particularly interested in if/how you plan to integrate encryption via the browser's built-in EME stuff.

(also, fwiw, I think libVLC is not famous enough, considering how popular VLC is!)

Thanks for all the work you guys are doing in keeping it open source and human-friendly! I recently moved from Mac to Linux and VLC was one of those friendly apps that I had to install there too so thanks for making sure it's available on all platforms too. Runs so fast and always just works!

What kind of sandboxing, and what are the most relevant source files to look at? I don't know much about sandboxing but I've been interested in learning more for a while. It would be cool to see how a Real Project(tm) approaches it.

Sept 2017 Talk about sandboxing

https://vimeo.com/269079774

> What kind of sandboxing

Sandboxing between the different stages of VLC, because each require different control needs.

Yeah, huge thanks so much for a really phenomenal tool! In my group of (admittedly fairly technical) friends, "download thyself a traffic cone" is a fairly common thing to hear when encountering an AV issue :)

What’s the est development burden to add support for Split Screen in Mac OS? I noticed VLC doesn’t support this yet and wasn’t sure if it’s going to be a huge thing to add or not.

The official API mandates using AVPlayer to use it. You can hack it, but it's not supported, so we're not sure if we should do it or not.

Probably not the best for my usecase? What sublime properties of optimal media players have I been missing out on by using exclusively VLC for more than a decade?

Could you expand a bit on the two projects, or send me a link to a place where I can learn more?

VLC.js is porting the full VLC in wasm, to be able to play everything inside a webpage.

Sandboxing is a way of securing VLC, so that when it crashes, the machine is not compromised. It's a bit more complex than simple sandboxing, since simple sandboxing is not useful (we have access to everything).

Thanks for what you do and how you do it. I love, use and recommend VLC constantly.

your software arbitrarily restricts root usage. no other software does.

There are probably more people accidentally running vlc with root privileges than people who run a gui login as root.

It should be hard to do poorly thought out things.

You have a wrapper if you know what you are doing, that is shipped besides the binary.

Here are some reasons I donate money to videolan.org (the non-profit behind VLC player). VLC is versatile and available on multiple platforms for free. It’s probably the easiest to recommend to anyone who wants to play many formats (including those that are not or won’t be supported natively by some proprietary platforms). VLC may probably not be the most performant of players (depending on the platform and one’s needs), but it’s feature rich to cover most needs.

Software like this needs to exist and continue to exist even in the era of YouTube and streaming services (which, honestly, are becoming more user hostile with time even when you’re paying them with your information and habits or directly with money).

I've got immense respect for VLC. Not only because it shows how a relatively small core team can shoulder a large software project but also because they've never compromised on doing any shady business to make a quick buck.

A fun trivia about an early VLC developer, Sam Hocevar [0]: Afaik, they were the first-ever to blog about the idea of blocking ads with DNS blackholes back in 2002 [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Hocevar

[1] http://sam.zoy.org/writings/internet/doubleclick.html

i wish new grads don't get attracted to the free lunches of faang and have more of the pirate like ethos of the old hacker days. vlc reminds me of that so much.

Nothing wrong with getting play real $ from FAANG and still enjoy learning diff deep tech stack and contributing to VLC in one's spare time.

FYI: I don't think Apple or Amazon offer free lunches, and Netflix served inedible Jillbee sandwiches when I was there.

Different economies, no?

VLC has served me well for many years on many platforms. I can’t thank its devs enough.

For Mac though I’ve moved to IINA: https://github.com/iina/iina

It’s much more “idiomatic” on macOS.

Thanks for sharing this. I like VLC a lot, but the UX/UI always leaves a lot to be desired on macOS. So, I'll try IINA out and hopefully it works as well as VLC, with the added benefit of a beautiful UX/UI.

I have a ton of goodwill and appreciation for the VLC team.

That said, my experience with the VLC app has never been very positive. It seems to be universally loved by everybody, yet every time I've used it in the past 10 years I've some issues with it, including but not limited to:

- Stuttering 720p video on Windows 10, 10 core CPU, GTX 1080

- Opening network streams is a bit of a hit and miss

- I could never make sense of the default "playlist" view when you start the app

- Settings menu is a nightmare of options and UI layout

I've always used SMPlayer on Windows and Linux and IINA/mpv on macOS instead and always had a better experience.

Am I the only one that really doesn't grok VLC at all?

Mpv previously did a lot better job using video acceleration particularly nvidia at least on Linux.

I believe this has been improved a while back but I now use Mpv for all my laptop/desktop needs.

Network steams provided as in a url for a video often is no such thing.

You might notice that Mpv uses YouTube-dl which has a variety of recipes that are updated to actually figure out how to get at a video.

That this works a lot is pretty good work.

The web is a mess and developer are presumably disincentivized to ensure that people can watch contents outside the officially sanctioned ad ladden experience.

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