We had to redesign a new kind of module called a renderer that has some weird capabilities and of course the Chromecast being kind of undocumented didn't help.
Because we merged the architecture for mobile and desktop, because we changed the decoding API to get GPU 0-copy and CPU 0-copy, because we needed a lot of changes for 4K and HDR.
I've found videostream[1] to be amazing. Kind of sucks for the small team making it that VLC has this built in now, but I guess their startup was always on shaky grounds.
I've had issues with Videostream, but it worked ok.
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)
Yup, I've been using videostream for years now. Seems like Chromecast support in VLC was always just around the corner, glad to see it's finally out there.
This is also useful in case the amazon/google spat flares up again.
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.
You don't have to dig around for the underlying video stream, you can actually just paste a twitch stream link straight into the vlc network stream dialog, I'm not sure what magic it does but that's worked even well before this new version.
In case you're confused, eterm was just proposing this as an option. At this time the Twitch app does support casting from the desktop, Android, and iOS [0]. This roundabout solution would only be needed if Amazon decided to remove that functionality.
If you need this on a regular basis, check out Emby or Plex. They do transcoding on the fly for your entire media collection and fetch metadata online automatically for a really nice browsing experience. I certainly wouldn't describe either as crapware.
VLC does seem great for a one-off use case though.
No offense, "my video collection" is vague. What are you trying to watch? With which applications? Like, do file file_name_of_file_which_doesnt_work and post it here, or on their forums. For MPEG2 and VC-1 you need a license key for hardware acceleration. [1] They already give you a H264 license with the device but I think the default ffmpeg doesn't have support for OpenMAX by default. So you gotta compile ffmpeg with that. Instructions are on the forums.
I have been jumping between Videostream, Plex and VLC nightly in the last few months. They seem to play all kind of video files but subtitles remain to be a hard problem. VLC simply doesn't support it (or I didn't figure out how to enable subtitles). Videostream is buggy. Plex works with a specific version only (had to downgrade to get back subtitles)... The search continues I guess.
How is Videostream buggy for you? I've been trying Videostream, VLC nightlies, and Emby. The latter two were buggy for me, but Videostream (although it is just Chrome embedded rly whatever that's called) works. So I just went for a one-time Premium tax and now I can stream. Including with a remote from my Android phone.
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.
I was running 1.9.6, after an auto update to 1.10.something subtitles stopped working on Chromecast. I looked around and found a thread[1] with many people reporting the issue with many versions of Plex. One guy said he reverted to have it working again so I tried that and... it worked! I haven't updated Plex since then. Good to know that you have subtitles working with the latest version, maybe I will update when I get home, fingers crossed!
I like plex, despite its mysterious failures during streaming (dropped wifi, stuttering on old-generation chromecast). The UI is clear, easy for me to organize, and sub-organize things for my kids to use.
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?
In my experience, yes. I tried an Dell XPS 15 for a few weeks and the 4K pain points were evident with apps like Audacity, Photoshop, and VLC. I ended up learning more about Apple's high-DPI approach:
> there are still a lot of pain points if you have a 4K display. otherwise it's mostly fine.
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.
text size is easy enough to change; i do love how it renders on a 4K display though.
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.
One could argue that having to scale up to 150% is a pain point. If I'm switching to a 4K display I would want to use the maximum resolution at 100% scaling.
How is it a pain point? It's literally a preference designed to work with HiDPI displays. And it was set to 150% automatically (because EDID contains info about the monitor's physical size).
Are you seeing any performance difference in 32 vs 64? I'd imagine the vast majority of newer Windows PC that ship can do 64, but is there a great reason to run 64-bit VLC?
What format does ambisonic audio get stored in? I remember over a decade ago they had a method for storing the various harmonics in Vorbis streams in an Ogg container, but I don't remember that going anywhere.
"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."
What is annoying is many groups like this make it hard for us that have employers that will match donations for non-profits to donate.
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.
Out of curiosity, have you considered monetization strategies like an open pay-per-video store? VLC is awesome, and I kind of wish it got the monetary compensation it deserves hah. I've heard that indie movie distribution is a dreadful space.
Certainly no expert in the field here, but maybe a store/market built around vimeo's "on demand" stuff? A partnership with vimeo whereby VLC would get a % of sales when purchased via VLC might help both parties (more exposure to vimeo via VLC, revenue for VLC, etc).
"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."
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.
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!
* Recurring SEPA transfer? (Europe-only AFAICT)
* Use their Paypal link, see if you can enable recurring payment there? (I'm not familiar with this though)
Thanks for the link. It had honestly not occurred to me to donate before. VLC has been around for so long, and has always worked well, been unobtrusive, and made so few unnecessary changes, that I have taken it for granted. I wish I could say the same for other open source software, then I might donate to them too.
Why donations via Paypal? Paypal sucks and steals! They make up their own (totally unreasonable) rates for exchanging Euro's to USD..
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.
maybe because a lot of the potential people you might want to donate actually use paypal?
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've downloaded a couple of hundreds of euros last year to various open source and Internet advocacy projects, and I've always used PayPal to do so.
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.
Paypal is "easy" to setup and maintain for many donation type cases like this, and provides an incredibly low barrier for entry to accept donations, this low barrier of entry can easily make up (to the developers) for the skimming done by paypal with fees and bad currency conversions. Also keep in mind that people in europe are likely not converting to USD when donating, the VLC non-profit is europe based so there's likely not a conversion there happening. It's going to happen USD to Euro though. And if that's still a concern, you can also do a direct bank transfer in europe pretty easily as they provide that information, making it without fees for a lot of EU citizens.
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.
I just looked it up and I still don't quite understand what clacks are supposed to be, other than an inside joke for Terry Pratchett fans. Do people actually use clacks for side channel data or is it just a way to keep Terry's name out there?
Specifically, the reference is to so-called GNU messages in the clacks system, where GNU is a prefix code meaning “send the message on, do not log, and turn the message around at the end of the line and send it back again”. These messages were used as memorials for deceased clacks workers - the message would never be delivered, and would stay in the system for as long as the clacks stay running. Hence, the worker’s name will be spoken for - hopefully -eternity.
Here, I would take the opportunity to publicly congratulate to Jean-Baptiste and his team for the great job they are doing, and thank them for the joy they are bringing to many people.
Wow... how didn't I notice that. It really does work now. From UI's perspective it would be even better if one could still skip forward/back, change volume and brightness while still having screen rotation locked, but hey - we can't have it all :).
Thanks VLC team for all the dedication and good work. You're the best.
I think you can still do all that stuff by dragging your finger on the screen with rotation locked? Left/right sides are volume/brightness, bottom is seek.
EDIT: This only works if you change the preference to set playback orientation to "landscape", not if you lock orientation.
On Windows Phone, the option does not disable auto-rotation (thus, forcing portrait mode). Instead, it locks the screen to the current rotation state, so you can stay in landscape mode even if you rotate your device. Found this to be much better.
Congrats on the release. VLC, or "the cone", as some non-technical people call it is a household name. We have not been able to use it as a verb yet but when you can answer so many questions with "just use VLC" you know you have an amazing product. Thank you for the hard work and keeping VLC relevant.
I love the Santa hat on the icon, too. More projects should be playful with their logos. I hope VLC constructs additional pylons for many years to come.
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.
I wish the macOS version were as mature as the Windows one. Many shortcuts are missing, video is stuttering if played from external HDD, audio equalizer settings can't be saved and their values are not shown on the equalizer, etc.
Just tried the v3.0 on Mac and still the video is stuttering. I believe the quality even got worse with the same settings compared to the previous version.
On the other hand, the UI has been improved a bit which is good.
>BD-Java menus and overlay in Blu-Ray
>BluRay text subtitles (HDMV) deocoder
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.
I use in on windows because it has great windows support (official installer, all the things), but on unix, mpv is the way to go (especially if you prefer GTK apps, there's gnome-mpv).
Out of interest, what are the other options (specifically in my case, for MacOS). For me, VLC has been the most stable and least wonky option for years now, but I'm not sure I'm aware of everything that is out there.
I like having the same player across systems and haven't ever had problem with HD in it; basically, no incentive to leave VLC. I've probably used it for about 10 years now, and it's always done the job. Why wouldn't it be worth using?
Nice! I tried a 1080p mkv video on 2.2.8 before upgrading and it used around 8-9% CPU. After upgrading, played the same clip and it was under 1%. Nice performance increase there!
I tested this with an mpv developer. This depends on a lot of factors, as you might be used to with mpv, but mpv was overall just as power efficient, if not better. This was done months ago with a nightly build of mpv and a nightly build of vlc, I'd be happy to do more extensive testing later if there is interest, but I decided on a particular power friendly configuration for mpv for laptop usage in the end.
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).
* 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 NAS
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.
I have studied this last year. Yes there are some decoding bugs sometimes. I have seen them in After Effects in some special case that you can avoid, and in some Blackmagic hardware. No issue in in most softwares (Quicktime, FCP, Adobe softwares, DaVinci etc.). Note : we are not sure the bugs comes from ffmpeg. We fixed a bug last year in the alpha encoding of ProRes 4444, since then we didn't find anything wrong besides that you should use -q 1 (Quality 1, with 4 you can have a little blur in subtle background patterns).
TL;DR : everything is fine but don't use it for broadcast.
This is great! I was trying to play some somewhat obscure media files the other day with foobar and it wasn't doing a great job of it. Then I remembered that VLC must play it and not only did it, it played them almost flawlessly.
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.
Congratulations on the release. VLC has been my player of choice for quite some time now. I've been using the 3.x nightlies for some time now to get hardware decoding of 4k. Is there any way to see whilst a video is playing:
a) Is the video being hardware accelerated?
b) Is HDR being displayed? Most TV's pop up a little HDR icon in the top right if it is.
I can't seem to find the 64bit build of the 3.0.0 release on the web nor on the FTP. Is there not one? Further, are there any advantages of using the 64bit versions over the 32bit? Any disadvantages? [edit - just saw this in the changelog: * 64bit version of VLC for Windows is recommended. And there is another post in this thread about it which I did not see, apologies, it looks like they will be arriving in a little while.]
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!)
I am having trouble on MacOS. I have version 10.11.6
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?
300 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadAnd, of course, ChromeCast.
So excited to stream media to my TV via a non-crapware application.
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)
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...
https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt
VLC does seem great for a one-off use case though.
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/
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.
Has always worked perfectly, even with 4k high-bitrate video. Supports subtitles and can even fetch them for you.
[1]https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/288806/plex-losing-subtitl...
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?
http://bradshacks.com/vlc-3-hidpi/
VLC is one of the most common Windows software and it still took until 2018 for it to work correctly.
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.
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.
But everything is now SN3D/ACN
"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."
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048
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."
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Also:
I don't use VLC, but I gained some more respect for them today regardless."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.
Hugs and kisses
-- Havelock
when you check for updates.
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.
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.
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.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vlc/+bug/790216
(CLI --http-reconnect /or/ Advanced (All) Preferences > Input/Codecs > HTTP(S) > Auto re-connect)
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?
This is because, before, VLC did not activate hardware decoding by default.
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:)
-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.
Looking forward to trying this on my Amazon Fire instead of having to sideload Kodi to watch videos on my fileserver.
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?
just downloaded it on windows.
UI now renders good on 2k screen.
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!)
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?