Show HN: Building a VLC-like Media Player in JS (Using Ffmpeg as WebAssembly) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Building a VLC-like Media Player in JS (Using Ffmpeg as WebAssembly)

bestmediaplayer.org

23 pointsdominictyler12 comments

This could use feature detection or a try/catch or around creating a SharedArrayBuffer, as browsers that don't support it will be stuck on loading with no error message. This is seen in Firefox because even though FF supports SAB, this website doesn't send the required headers to tell FF to enable Spectre mitigations: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Somehow this project sounds like some SEO bait, especially with all the redundant copy-paste instructions on the page that are just SEO keywords. Who is behind this project? All commits are just anonymous as "bestmediaplayer". If it's supposed to be some VLC like project it doesn't really look like it.

- bestmediaplayer.org

- https://fileconverter.digital

- https://github.com/bestmediaplayer/mediaplayer

Edit: Things like: https://twitter.com/FreeConvertFile/status/13294654923320442... don't really inspire a lot of confidence in the project and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25146306 combined with the privacy policy of the site sounds more like an ad-based SEO site.

Like I thought of doing this project 1 month ago. I looked at the attempt out there to compile VLC to JS. I spent a few days and actually got it working, but it resulted in this monster 150 MB file. That's just not feasible.

I was looking at different approaches to a in-browser Media Player for a while. It was only about a week ago that I found SourceBuffer.appendBuffer, in conjuction with FFMPEG -f segment that I thought there was something possible.

Then I finally cracked -segment_format_options which was the missing piece. I spent a whole day on that googling around, opening Upwork contracts trying to solve that problem. Could've been 1.5-2 days, I don't remember.

Point is, it wasn't just a 1-2 hackathon. There were serious technical problems that I solved.

And Showdead shows previous submission as "Show HN" by a banned account... https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bestmediaplayer.org

Wait. This isn't just a throwaway project "just to get SEO"

This is a project I was genuinely proud of and I honestly thought it could overtake VLC one day. Like when I wrapped it up for release, I seriously thought I might have just changed the world with this.

As for social proof: "Wow, that is really really impressive" ~https://github.com/ColinEberhardt/wasmweekly/issues/54

Like I was test-firing each file at the end of the project, then when it came to the SWF file, that actually test-fired successfully and ran. It blew my mind, I didn't expect that to happen.

This has nothing to do with VLC, just a clickbait.

I specifically worded the title "a VLC Media Player" to mean: "I'm trying to build the equivalent of VLC Media Player for the web", because right now there is none. This is the closest, best attempt out there.

I’d be careful making claims about this ending up with more features than VLC. There’s the “coding lots of features is hard” part for sure, but also I’m not sure all of VLC’s stream creation/consumption stuff can be done in the browser since you won’t have direct access to the network stack. And there might be other things I don’t know about that can’t be done in the browser.

I'd suggest either dropping the "VLC" or write "VLC-style" or "VLC-like" to make it clear.

ok. done.

Why this is flagged? Looks like a very cool and useful project.

edit: nevermind read the comments

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