VLC and Qt – A History [video] | Hacker News Reader

VLC and Qt – A History [video]

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81 pointspieterr68 comments

From the last slides, they are turning VLC into another iTunes.

Too bad. I liked having a player that emphasized playing "files" instead of loading everything into some opaque "media library" first.

Let's see how long it takes before the monetization of the new "iTunes VLC" kicks in.

What's opaque or bad about a media library? They only exist because the filesystem is inadequate for cataloging and interfacing with the complex metadata associated with media files.

It's opaque because it isn't clear where the files are located on the fs; and you get confusion or strange behavior: if I delete the media library file, will the fs version also be deleted? What about the other way around? And how does that work for renaming or moving? Etc. etc.

I think a tool should embrace the filesystem as much as possible. If metadata doesn't fit in the fs view, then perhaps store them in hidden files next to the actual files. Needless to say, if these files are not there, the system should deal with that gracefully.

>If metadata doesn't fit in the fs view, then perhaps store them in hidden files next to the actual files

Sure, or in tags within the files like almost every music player, but that doesn't preclude there being a media library which is more like an interface to/cache of that metadata.

There's nothing wrong with a media library if your goal is to catalog a library of media.

If your goal is simply to play a video file, it's sheer overhead.

I don't want every text file I download to be categorized and moved into a semi-permanent collection. Nor do I want the same as a default for image files, music, video, or anything else. Some things are ephemeral.

Okay but there is no reason that adding this library would mean anything has to happen to VLC's ability to play a file without doing anything to it or organising it first. Many music players offer both a library and will play individual files thrown at them without any importing ceremony. eg, Winamp.

> I don't want every text file I download to be categorized and moved into a semi-permanent collection.

It already is and it is called desktop search.

I still have my files from 20 years ago.

I don't have my "media libraries" from 20 years ago.

As soon as a tool tries to move my files into an internal representatation I cannot control, I delete the tool.

I have my media library from 20 years ago: it is embedded in my music files using standardised tagging formats. Any in-software 'media-library' I have used in that time has simply been a cache of and search interface for this metadata. Similarly some video files support tags and there are some standards for external metadata storage that can live next to the files I believe.

I highly doubt the music file metadata shown in the video only exists in an opaque internal representation within VLC.

I've been using iTunes since 1.0, which was 19 years ago, so practically I actually do still have my media library from 20 years ago.

VLC has already been a media catalog app for quite some time - on mobile, but also on the Windows app available on the Microsoft Store: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/vlc/9nblggh4vvnh . This version looks quite a lot like those slides.

Yes, my first thought when watching the video was "oh, they're porting the Android UI to desktop" (and not in a bad way).

Isn't that player just your file manager? e.g. on Windows I just (at worst) group them by type and there's my tunes - I then click them as I have vlc as my default media player

Have you considered mpv? It's a highly extensible no-nonsense media player. I still recommend VLC to my family because they prefer VLC's GUI focus, but for me, mpv is the best.

1. One great thing about open source is that nobody is forcing you to upgrade. You can stick with VLC 3.x forever, and as mentioned in the video, it will be a long-term support release.

2. Jean-Baptiste Kempf was offered tens of millions of euros to put ads in VLC, but turned down the offer (link in French)[1]

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/france/comments/736ghk/ama_je_suis_...

Except that codecs and hardware won't stop evolving.

And let's not forget that codecs have a long and terrible history of security issues. There's a reason that they're a poster child for fuzzing.

Nothing about open source allows you to use an old and unsupported piece of software

It literally does. As the source is available, you can always compile whatever version you happen to have the sources for. Nobody is forcing anyone to upgrade, there's just no guarantees either.

I think a lot of folks have been traumatized by their experiences with iTunes, and its default settings.

I don't know if this is still the case, but at one time installing iTunes on Windows meant that some or all of the user's default app associations for media files were hijacked. Then, because of the default iTunes settings, launching a media file for playback would always initiate a process of importing that file into the iTunes library. Whether or not the user cared about creating or maintaining such a library.

Whenever installing iTunes, for myself or others, I am careful to fine-tune the system's file associations, and even more importantly, I make sure the iTunes prefs are in line with what the user would expect/prefer. Especially the settings for 'copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library,' and 'Keep iTunes Media folder organized.'

With those two settings unchecked, the contents of the iTunes library are not duplicated or socked away in an obscure location; they're exactly where the user wants them to be. And the files don't get renamed. That's the way the media library feature behaves in the current version of VLC—and there's no reason to assume that VLC will change this behaviour, to be more like the iTunes default, just because it may change its GUI front-end.

This "socking away or duplication" of the contents of the iTunes library (same for iPhoto or its successors) was the dealbreaker for me on OS X. It indicated that they were brazenly ignoring the wishes of power users who knew what they were doing, and thus signalled the direction of how the OS would develop.

Good for you for attempting to stop other users getting confused by it -- I have spent several afternoons restoring people's setups for people who are completely unable to organise their files, and explaining this behaviour to them was the dullest part of it.

> Let's see how long it takes before the monetization of the new "iTunes VLC" kicks in.

Boy does that sound entitled. What's wrong with monetizing a software that devs put so much effort in and that has been supported by donations and purposefully has no ads?

I recommend having a look at mpv. It plays files, supports all the container formats and codecs you are likely to come across both for audio and video.

I sometimes reach for VLC still, but mpv is and has been my go to player for most casual video playback for years now.

The UI pretty much consists of video playback plus an auto-hiding timeline overlay. On the timeline overlay you can also select which subtitle to show as well as turn subtitles on/off.

You can install it on macOS with

  brew cask install mpv

assuming you have Homebrew installed

Clementine has a full-featured media library... that I never used though I use Clementine daily. I put files in playlists and play them as is.

Maybe the same thing will be possible with VLC?

It doesn't look like they will enforce it. They say they plan to support the direct explorer to playback. I hope because if they start adding the files I play to some sort of library, whether by duplicating the binaries or not, this is the end of me using VLC.

What I like a lot less is controls overlaid on the video. It's a matter of taste but for me I absolutely hate that. Don't mess with the image. If I want the controls to disappear I am happy to go full screen. Skype is doing the same and it is annoying as fuck.

The first and last time I installed iTunes was probably 15 years ago. It started importing my files. "Fine", I thought, "it's creating some internal database of my files. Oh neat it's downloading meta-data." Then I realized, to my horror, it was also renaming/retagging files and directories in it's own format. All of my music was in a consistently named and categorized file structure of my own devising, having been mostly ripped from CDs I owned and then tagged and filed by hand. Down the details of track filenames and ID3 titles having consistent casing. All of that was trashed by iTunes. The hate I feel, to this day, for that software has no equal in decades of computer experience.

Apparently Naver has been providing funding and office space for VLC development. (I was told so by a friend working for Navers Europe division a couple of years back)

I wonder if there has been any pressure or influence from them to steer the project in that direction.

Told by a friend which heard this from his cousin which heard this from another friend which heard this in a grocery ?

Naver manages part of a floor in Paris start-ups incubator "Station F" where they do share some space for a project founded by one of the companies doing VLC support.

They worked (maybe still? didn't keep in touch) for Naver with managing the startups and projects at Station F actually. Maybe you know them even, it seemed like Naver themselves only had a handful of people there at the time at least.

I only visited their offices a couple of times, but it appeared like they were having close interactions with the projects they took under their wings.

Naver does not manage, "pressure or influence" any of those projects with the except of their own. Again, they manage startups co-working spaces.

You seem to have good insights. Are you involved with VLC and/or Naver in Paris or do you have any idea how this decision came to be?

(My OC was really meant as just a question and not an implication)

I'm one of the main devs

We use this https://code.videolan.org/videolan/medialibrary/ as medialibrary. This doesn't touch your files at all.

Slides are available here:

https://www.qtdesktopdays.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/QtD...

https://github.com/iina/iina is much nicer alternative for macOS

"IINA is the modern video player for macOS."

I can scarcely imagine a descriptor more empty of meaning than "modern", in this context.

It's mostly just clean UI that I like. And that it's in Swift, makes it easier to contribute than C.

Am I blinkered in that I expect people contributing to a media player to know C, or do you mean in terms of working with the walls of apple's garden (haven't touched an apple product for five years now so I've never used swift)

In addition it seems to be just an UI over mpv, which is written in C.

What “UI” does a video player even need? Is the pause button prettier or something?

VLC is C++

Did you watch the presentation? He stressed that VLC is only C at its core. Of course whenever they interface with Qt they call into C++, maybe also in some other plugins.

Qt is only used for linux and windows. AFAIK UI for Mac will be written with Cocoa or something like that

I'd pay for a Windows version of IINA. Or at least any video player with focus on effective UX, not on a checklist of features and options.

VLC doesn't spark joy for me.

I second IINA. I love its design and UX. Feels like a great native mac app.

Nevertheless, it's good to keep VLC handy too. Sometimes things work better in VLC, and sometimes on IINA -- in terms of being supported or not, bugs in playback or just plain CPU usage.

I love writing software for Linux, but tbh I'm glad I never got into writing GUI apps. Between Qt, GTK, X.org, Wayland, Mir, whacky hidpi support, etc, it sounds like an absolute nightmare.

Long time ago I wrote some cross platform Qt4 apps , the apps worked (I used things like calling APIs, uploads/downloads, screenshots,embedding webkit, system tray support) no nightmare, no hunting for random libraries. Maybe some entitled users would complain that it does not look native enough on their system but the app was not forced on them and at least GNOME based distro could have put a bit more effort into making Qt look more native.

You don't really have to choose between things like Qt and X.org, Wayland, hidpi, etc. Using a library such as Qt means you only have to care about your application, and leave the rest for the toolkit developers, who will code the actual backends for X.org, Wayland, Mir... whatever. Of course nothing is perfect and issues may arise but I don't think it's as bad as you depicted it.

Qt has never worked correctly with HiDPI and Qt5 is a nightmare to integrate a player window (need to implement yourself on every platform). No magic.

VLC does care about because the movie is rendered by the compositor not by QT for performance reasons. It is explained in the presentation.

I would say that Qt makes GUI on Linux about as easy as Delphi was on Windows in its day. It's somewhat of a bubble - if you use Qt, the incentive is to do everything in "the Qt way". But it also nicely abstracts you away from all those underlying differences.

Slide #40

But, we are not Gnome:

  * No usage regressions

  * No feature removal

-> Too true, too true... Even if they have valid reasons for removing some features it puts me always off.

That doesn't mean good. I think it is still possible to rate your own songs on iOS but there are so many hoops to jump that this is effectively a deprecated feature. He explicitly said it doesn't mean you will be able to reach these features easily.

> No usage regression.

I'm calling Bullshit on that. They said the exact same thing for the v2 -> v3 transition of VLC.

And then completely broke playback of my music collection, because the containing folders had square brackets in their name. eg "[2015]" or "[FLAC]"

VLC 2 worked fine with those folders. VLC 3 refuses to recognise music files in those folders. Because square bracket characters "aren't valid URL characters".

We're talking about folder names, not friggin URLs.

https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/19594

That was a regression right there, but they just ignored the problem and refused to fix it.

Grrrr.

Interesting on how he is honest about the current state of Qt and QML support on platforms like Android, and how they are moving into platform specific APIs for future versions.

Probably not the kind of content that KDAD was expecting.

KDAB is a Qt consulting company. I doubt they're too concerned. They're selling their expertise, and they get a lot of credibility by speaking truth.

On the other hand, their blogs about doing Android development, and the experience that I share with VLC developers by trying to do the same, aren't aligned.

At the end of the day it is easier to just use your own JNI wrappers alongside a native UI than trying to make Qt work on Android.

The reason he mentions why VLC doesn't use Qt on Android.

This looks beautiful and useful. I'm a sucker for sleek UI and I'm in favor of keeping up with design concepts.

I get that not everyone will embrace this, but since VLC was launched 25 (or was it 15?) years ago to create a barebones video player that basically plays whatever you tell it to, it'll just lead to people creating new projects in modern languages that'll do the same. Imagine how many new developers could jump on this if there was a new OSS media player written in Rust or Go. And even if it doesn't happen, you can still fork VLC and keep the old UI alive.

If you are looking for a solution to managing files and are an emacs user try emacs bongo mode. There is a great introduction video https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2020-08-06-emacs-bongo-extra...

Please tell me that the menu bar will still pop in when pressing Alt ?

vlc is heading towards itunes style business model, which means subscriptions are to be introduced into videolan, they are probably planning on adding content service, already sounds like a bloatware, monetization of videolan by the developers will be the end of vlc.

alternatives mplayer,mpv

Do you have any pointers to the claims you are putting forward ? Absolutely nothing in the history of the project, in the speeches of the founder and main maintainer and the webpage agree with anything you say.

It looks a bit like iTunes so he must be right!

Oh wait, VideoLAN is a non-profit? A core developer only mentions that they adapt to what people want, explicitly mentioning streaming and Netflix, not some soon to be announced competitor? A Qt Desktop conference is also hardly the platform to announce a shift of "business model".

But the OP has quite the imagination. :)

The guy does say in the video that they are trying to appeal to users who are used to streaming services and help with content discovery. He didn't really say how but it is logical to assume that it points to integration of 3rd party streaming services.

Or, they could go the PopcornTime way, integrating with torrent engines and other alternative distribution methods.

(It won't happen, because of the persecution of developers of torrent-aware software by content-owning companies, but it would work.)

There already was a discussion of adding bittorrent to VLC somehow, but IIRC they didn't want to include it in the core distribution of VLC for fear of copyright owners

Yes, VLC will probably be able to read from new sources because the web as a distribution platform is dead, every content publisher has their own way of working that doesn't interoperate with others. That doesn't mean VLC will start creating a business model around that.

Total bullshit. How do a non-profit org would make business style subscriptions ? There was already offers -from companies- trying to -buy- vlc in some way, that was always rejected, and by a far amount that your hypotetical subs would generate

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