VLC for Windows 8 reaches $65,000 funding goal with five days to spare | Hacker News Reader

VLC for Windows 8 reaches $65,000 funding goal with five days to spare

thenextweb.com

95 pointsGarbage44 comments

As the one running this KickStarter, (and also main VLC dev + VideoLAN president) I have to say that I am happy.

Running a fundraiser through KickStarter for an Free and Open Source software that was always 100% developed by volunteers was a risky bet, and we were unsure... The good thing is that our community accepted that quite well and enough users understood the need and funded it.

If you wonder why we need money for VLC on WinRT, you can read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4902508

And now, back to work, we got something to deliver :)

PS: before you ask for iOS, you might have a surprise soon.

I hope you'll take the Android version out of beta soon as well. I haven't gotten a chance to test it yet because I have an ARMv6 phone, but to be honest I think you should save yourselves the trouble and completely skip this architecture, and just support ARMv7 and ARMv8 chips with NEON. Pretty sure the manufacturers will stop supporting ARMv6 for low-end devices next year, too, in favor of Cortex A7. Even Google doesn't make Chrome for ARMv6.

Also, if you want to have the best media player on Android, MX Player is the one to beat, in both performance and features.

MX is the best for now, but if Android VLC could get desktop parity, with streaming, encoding, etc all in one package, it would kick butt.

I have vlc on my Android tablet, but it doesn't utilize hdmi out to tv properly. I think most other media programs will take exclusive control of an hdmi attached screen if they are set into fullscreen, vlc as of the most recent beta I was running didn't.

VLC for ARMv6 exists already :) It is just not on the store :)

I just find it hard to understand why should so much money, time and energy should be spent on making Metro version of VLC considering it might be only useful on one niche product.

Er, yes. Windows 8 and Windows RT are very niche products, aren't they, with install bases in the millions...

Yeah, it will start approach desktop linux share now...

</trolling>

Seriously, I'm one of those who bought Windows 8 upgrade. Does not mean I'm using it, after two hours of cursing, Windows 7 was back.

I also bought Windows 8. After a few hours getting used to it, I'm happy with it.

You must be some kind of computing god! No mere moral could ever understand Windows 8!

</sarcasm> (not directed at you)

The desktop environment is the same though.

It's even better... Windows Explorer has a saner user interface, for example.

(Say what you want about Ribbon in Office, it's worked well for the built-in Windows apps)

I see this argument over and over, and I can't imagine why someone would go back to Win 7, even if all you use is the desktop.

If you read it, and apply a bit of thinking, you should see that it isn't just about "having a metro version of VLC". It's a huge codebase update, and as they also mention, this work will be applicable to other open-source applications looking to run on Metro and/or ARM.

I find it a little contradictory to call an application open-source and then its developer spend huge resources beautifying an-already-awesome-software for a proprietary operating system.

Ah yes, because what distinguishes open-source from not-open-source is how much effort is spent on the interface. Every true open-source aficionado understands that interface is the least important part of software (this is why Linux will win the desktop)

>before you ask for iOS, you might have a surprise soon.

Xamarin...?

Great job. As I've told most of my family and friends to stay off the desktop, except for Office, having a metro VLC will be a great addition.

Yes, this is exactly why we are doing it :)

>PS: before you ask for iOS, you might have a surprise soon.

Have you guys figured out a dual license scheme for the core?

That's great news!

Here is a direct link to a VLC Kickstarter page: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for-the-n...

Congrats to the folks at VLC, it's great software and the more platforms it runs on the better for everyone...

This is great news for Surface RT users!

This is great news, especially since it will yield more goodies for other folks who are into c99 on windows. I love VLC (sans font searching here and there, heh). It's so much useful that I don't even use QT on PC for playback anymore for DNxHD codec qt files. It supports even MXF files. VLC and ffpmeg (ffmbc not so very much) are one of the best tools, free or not, for what they do, if you're in professional video.

I love that this is a thing, and that it's such a success to keep it current. However, I don't approve of Windows 8 itself and that's a bit of a problem in itself. This story still gets an upvote thought.

Not approving Windows 8 and not porting a popular open source solution to Windows 8 are two different things.

We need more pragmatists like you.

Thanks :)

Pledge £350 or more Text link on the VLC for Windows 8 website for 1 month and your (company's) name in the list of Silver sponsors within the application.

Are these going to be no-follows? Otherwise, isn't that to some extent selling a link back?

VLC used to be my favorite video player. Then I discovered Splash Pro Ex.

Seriously, if your computer isn't very powerful, you can watch full HD movies without any stuttering, barely any CPU load, and has half of the load on the GPU compared to VLC. Instant skips to any part of a huge file (I just tested on an 18GB mkv, VLC takes like 30 sec to skip to the middle).

Link: http://mirillis.com/en/products/splashexport.html

Not free, Windows only.

Yeah, VLC is collecting money too, that's what this post is about.

Regardless, even if VLC is free, I just like Splash better for basic playback. I realize VLC is extremely complex and full of all kinds of features, but I don't use 99% of them. I recently tried streaming using the VLC browser plugin, and it failed spectacularly, it doesn't buffer properly.

> Yeah, VLC is collecting money too, that's what this post is about.

VLC is collecting money to port to a platform with which the current codebase and toolchain are completely incompatible (see jbk's comment above), and that money is solely collected from people who want to support the port (or VLC itself), using VLC or hacking on it costs $0.

A limited capacity lite version is there

I wish I could use VLC more, but I can't and I can't recommend it to friends either to use most of the time. What I recommend them is BSPlayer. The main reason is because BSPlayer is so much better with subtitles. It has 3 subtitle sources to look into, and it can automatically match and download them for your movie. For a foreigner that's extremely helpful and convenient. It basically can be a deal-breaker if other players don't have that.

I think VLC has sort of a similar 3rd party add-on for that, but I'm not even sure if it's supported anymore, and I don't think it worked that well anyway. And I also found it pretty hard to set-up. It's not a one-click install.

If VLC was as good at subtitles as BSPlayer, I'd use only that and recommend it to all my friends, too. Now you have me intrigued with Splash Pro, though. I'll have to give that a try, especially on older PC's.

VLC next version will have this add-on integrated.

Good to hear. I hope you can seek subtitles in more than just one source, though. It might help if you created your own database for subtitles and then promote it a little on your site. VLC is very popular, probably more popular than BSPlayer (I don't have any numbers), but if BSplayer can make their own subtitle database, you probably can, too.

Also, I think VLC doesn't support localizations that well. Some letters in other languages look very weird, while the same subtitles work well in BSPlayer. Just something to look into.

The localization should be fixed, to be honest, since a few version.

The word "Pro" in its name tells enough.

How about we make a Kickstarter project to fund removal of the fussy new UI that VLC got a few versions back, and which now makes VLC slow and annoying to start on my macs.

You have simple options to have the old UI back.

If you haven't already, trade VLC in for MPlayerX on OS X.

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