I'm a big fan of VLC, it's been my default video app since I can remember. Can't wait to see it again on iOS.
The "big" feature I would like to see is some kind of "super-easy" drag and drop feature where I could easily send video files to my iPad/iPhone without doing the whole Browser->IP:Port->Choose file, etc. A "video file right click -> VLC -> Send file to iPad (upload in background)" would put a smile on my face.
The Dropbox integration may very well make it that easy, simply drop into your Dropbox folder and hey presto. Although waiting for it to sync to AWS might be painful, I wonder if the iOS and Android clients do local syncing like the desktop clients do when on the same network?
I wish we could do that, but it is really annoying to do, since it almost needs a special desktop app to do so. And the iDevice must be in the listening mode...
Drag'n drop in the browser is the best we have so far. Maybe a later version with Bonjour will come... Patches welcome :)
Bonjour is easy to implement. But why a special desktop app? Isn't there VLC for desktop already?
I haven't used the original VLC for iOS. Do you run an HTTP server on the device for file uploading? You could go one step further and add WebDAV on top of HTTP. That would allow mounting the app as an external disk. It can also be integrated with desktop VLC for automatic discovery and file sharing.
MPlayer works in the Linux world, but the app itself has no stable releases outside of that so it doesn't have traction beyond Linux. Unless you count things like SMPlayer (Windows-specific front-end and MPlayer backend) and the like. MPC-HC is pretty popular in the Windows world. But neither of them come close to approaching VLC's userbase. We make SMPlayer, MPC-HC and VLC all available in portable form at PortableApps.com alongside each other and VLC's downloads blow the other two away.
Quite right, my mistake. The point still stands, though, as Windows (the dominant OS by a huge margin) has no stable releases of the base MPlayer app, so there's no one version people can grab. Whereas VLC runs quite well on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Yep, that's the same reason I recommend VLC. It's definitely improved since the days of 2005 or so when I used it to stream dvds over a lan to a machine that didn't have a DVD drive. I wonder if anyone has screenshots of it over the years...
The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior. (Especially subbing groups)
There are many rendering filters and pipelines available for DirectShow (and therefore MPC-HC) that VLC does not have. For example MadVR[1] improves upscaling and display rendering quality dramatically and xy-VSFilter can render subtitles many times faster than libass which is used in VLC.
These are just two examples that I came up with off the top of my head, but there are countless more. The advantage of VLC is that it's simple and just works out of the box for 95% of stuff, but MPC/Directshow gives you far more flexibility as you can construct a very custom filter chain (eg. using different decoders and renderers).
Kinda surprised that the grandparent (asked an honest question) is getting downvoted while this post (made a baseless claim) isn't.
>The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior.
VLC is built largely around the cross-platform ffmpeg libraries and does not seem to have the ability to use native Windows DirectShow filters, in the interest of being portable and removing a source of configuration errors. Like it or not, a number of high quality open-source "audio/videophile" (for lack of a better term) media player plugins exist solely as Windows DirectShow filters. The most important that springs to mind is MadVR, a video renderer with support for high-quality GPU-accelerated upscaling filters, and the ability to set separate upscaling filters for the chroma and luma channels. That's more than enough for me, but there's also ReClock (similar to the RetroArch emulator, perfectly syncs the video to the display and slightly shifts the pitch of the audio to compensate), various vendor-specific hardware-accelerated video decoders, xy-VSFilter, the LAV filter suite (which support, amongst other things, bitstreaming, the ability to pass compressed audio streams through to a digital receiver), and others I'm probably forgetting.
These plugins can be used in any media playing software for Windows that supports DirectShow filters, such as the official Windows Media Player. MPC just happens to be a really lightweight, stable, and customizable DirectShow-based media player.
VLC is good software and probably the best solution for people who just want to watch some videos without configuring anything. I haven't looked at a stock MPC install in a while, but it's possible that stock VLC works better than that. However, for those that actually want to put some effort into tweaking their AV-setup, and want to make use of Windows-specific software, MPC is a great media player, one of the few programs (including Foobar) that I sorely miss on Linux. The people that look down on VLC users are silly, but it's not like the only reason to use MPC is elitism.
There was a time(early 2000's) when lots of fansub groups were experimenting with brand new codecs and package techniques(like mkv).
MPC's easily extensible plugin system was a great thing then, because fansub groups could create their own package and easily distribute it with the codecs they were using.
VLC wasn't nearly as optimized as today, so it tended to run like crap on a lot of systems. I remember MPC loading up almost instantly on my college machine, while VLC would take a while to load and run.
Today, this is less of an issue. Pretty much everyone's settled a few standard codecs, and VLC's performance is quite good.
Codec support isn't that much of a problem nowadays, true. The plugin system is still useful for the reasons I mentioned: Adjustments and custom plugins that for the most part only dedicated AV-nerds care about.
However, consider that an H264 successor will arrive at some point, the anime scene will probably adopt it well in advance of everyone else (like it did with Hi10p), and flexible codec support doesn't seem so pointless after all.
I don't want to go off-topic, but since VLC developers are reading this thread, here's where MPlayer (I use MPlayerX) is still better than VLC:
- MPlayer starts much faster.
- MPlayer loads videos much faster.
- MPlayer has very convenient shortcuts for skipping forward or backward by 10 seconds (just press the right or left arrow), which are a godsend when you're watching something in a foreign language and you need to hear a sentence again. VLC's shortcuts (command-option-arrow) are far less convenient, harder to remember, and VLC reacts to them much more slowly, which makes it incredibly inconvenient.
There has been some improvement over the last few years: seeking hardly used to work at all in VLC, while now it works, albeit slowly. However, it's not enough to beat MPlayer.
There may be other reasons to prefer MPlayer, but they become more subjective. The ones I mentioned above are areas where VLC is objectively inferior. It would be great if it could be further improved.
I used to be an avid mplayer user too, starting since circa 2003 on Linux. However nowadays, on my Mac, I found more and more video files that mplayer crashes on. That made me switch to VLC. I still miss mplayer's super-fast seeking and loading times though. And once in a while VLC freezes during startup for no good reason.
I've been using both for weird format files and codecs (anything more or less standard is streamed to the tv directly) and felt that VLC tends to try as much as possible to read everything, while MPlayerX is more tolerant towards garbage in the stream and won't bother recovering mildly invalid data.
Part of the lag in VLC when starting a stream might come from a more heavy handed init process.
This can be a curse or a blessing, I'm happy both approaches are available.
VLC has gotten heavy and some defaults have me thinking the user is not in mind. Holding CTRL / ALT with arrow keys to skip? This is awkward with one hand. The arrows default to "Navigate" for DVD menus. DVD's! Rebuilding font cache? Yes, yes these are all customizable...
Assuming it's like the last version on iOS (which I was lucky enough to download before it got yanked) you can just plug in your device and throw whatever videos you want into VLC's documents folder. Transfers really quickly over USB.
Yep. I paid for the membership, so Plex will also re-encode my stuff and sync it to the iPhone (or any other device). This prevents having to mess around with Handbrake for hours trying to get the iPhone to eat the video.
I don't see get how the LGPL solves the problem the GPL had with Apple's policy. Particularly, 6.a of the LGPL cannot be met simultaneously with Apple's code signing mechanism; so that the user can modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified Library.
Pretty sure the [L]GPLv2 is okay with this. For instance, say you have a Motorola Milestone. Motorola provides the changes they made to Linux, as they are required to, but you can't actually build a new kernel and put it on the phone; the Milestone's bootloader protection was never broken.
The original GPL licensed version had full source code and build scripts provided. How is this different?
The LGPLv2 still contains a clause which prevents you from adding additional restrictions, which Apple do in their policy. (10: ... You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. )
I believe, even if you compile from source, you still have additional restrictions placed on you, as Apple's policy for example, restricts you from putting the app on any more than 5 devices.
There is no limit on number of devices for iOS apps (provided they are devics you own or control for your own use). The 5 device limit is for DRM protected iTunes media.
But as Bradley says if this was the reason for the license change why did they not switch to eg BSD? Something that would solve the problem definitively.
His opinion is just that, an opinion, whether or not they are correct.
The fact of the matter is that no one else except the VLC team can initiate legal proceedings and Bradley Kuhn has no right to do so, unless he makes a contribution.
Instead of downloading media to your iPhone you can use Tonido iOS (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tonido-file-access-music-vid...) app to play/stream pretty much all the video formats directly from your PC, Mac or Linux (or) you can use the app to download the media and play with VLC.
Actually many users do want immediate gratification. Don't want to wait for the media get transferred to the device and play. Also there is an issue of storing large file in your mobile device and delete it afterwards.
I am a Tonido user. I am not affiliated with them anyway
This new version support file transfer over wifi/3G.
You can both download from an external HTTP server and use the build in it HTTP Server to upload file to your iOS device.
There is a nice drag and drop browser support to send files.
OPlayer has smoother playback for me. I just tried VLC and the first video I tried it said the hardware was to slow to play it. I'm using a 4G iPod Touch. So I converted some some videos with Handbreak using the iPod Touch preset. I tried about ten converted videos and none of them played smoothly. OPlayer handles all of them.
Like all the other iOS apps, it had to remove ac3 support.
Oplayer has been my favorite, since it's slowly implementing all the esoteric features I use vlc for, including subtitle font size adjustment, etc (though it's not all the way there.).
I was trying to install VLC on my android nexus 4 the other day and apparently it's not in the Play store? I ended up installing "Joe VLC" instead. I wonder if there will be an official android release?
Are there any plans to make the Play Store beta available to North American users?
From what I recall, the issue was not having NA devices to test against. It seems like the gaps in chipsets and devices have narrowed (e.g. Qualcomm chipsets used more widely as LTE spreads, US Note 2 using Exynos 4 like the international versions, etc.) so I was wondering if anything had changed on that front.
Haha, I didn't know VLC alpha wasn't available outside of Europe(France?) on Play Store ! I'm happy to know it can work both ways =)
Seriously though, I understand the constraints, especially since VLC is trying to use hardware acceleration when available, then not testing on real devices can really affect quality (crashing alpha? 1-star on play store!)
As I understand, VLC is unable to leverage the hardware codecs of the iPhone, because it doesn't use the official media frameworks, so it has to run stuff less efficiently in software.
Have they made the Android app excellent yet? Last I checked it was still nowhere as good as MX Player performance wise. I'm just saying they might want to fix that before venturing into other platforms, especially platforms that have been very hostile towards them in the past.
VLC is free (both as in beer and in speech) and will always be :)
However, you can donate to our non-profit organization, which e.g. paid the iPad I used for development, as well as a whole lot of other things around VLC and further VideoLAN projects.
"VideoLAN revealed some very exciting news today: VLC for iOS will be back in Apple’s App Store by tomorrow (July 19). The company tells TNW the app will be available for free worldwide"
The original iOS port was made by Applidium; is this still Applidium, or a separate VideoLan initiative?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadThe "big" feature I would like to see is some kind of "super-easy" drag and drop feature where I could easily send video files to my iPad/iPhone without doing the whole Browser->IP:Port->Choose file, etc. A "video file right click -> VLC -> Send file to iPad (upload in background)" would put a smile on my face.
Drag'n drop in the browser is the best we have so far. Maybe a later version with Bonjour will come... Patches welcome :)
I haven't used the original VLC for iOS. Do you run an HTTP server on the device for file uploading? You could go one step further and add WebDAV on top of HTTP. That would allow mounting the app as an external disk. It can also be integrated with desktop VLC for automatic discovery and file sharing.
Can't wait to start contributing!
Indeed, but the first thing I did was crashing, and was not the biggest priority. I hope that we can bring it later on.
> But why a special desktop app? Isn't there VLC for desktop already?
We could do that, although I'm not a fan of such coupling, but maybe it's easier than I expected.
> I haven't used the original VLC for iOS. Do you run an HTTP server on the device for file uploading?
We do for this version :)
> Can't wait to start contributing!
Seriously? Can't wait for patches :)
Curious as to what you think about MPlayer, MPC-HC, or mpv, which have mostly taken the crown in nerd circles as being the de facto video players.
There are others too, though I'm not sure what the differences are.
I use FooBar2K for audio and VLC for video.
* Extremely fast startup and snappy interface
* Supports a wide variety of formats
* Uses existing ID3 tags & Vorbis comments and doesn't try creating its own
* Mature plugin interface
* Reasonably simple
Downsides are that you have to be willing to spend a little extra time organizing your music and it's weak with playlists and device synchronization.
These are just two examples that I came up with off the top of my head, but there are countless more. The advantage of VLC is that it's simple and just works out of the box for 95% of stuff, but MPC/Directshow gives you far more flexibility as you can construct a very custom filter chain (eg. using different decoders and renderers).
[1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228 [2] https://code.google.com/p/xy-vsfilter/
>The only "nerd circle" I know that is fixated on MPC are otakus, for no meaningful reasons except to make themselves feel superior.
VLC is built largely around the cross-platform ffmpeg libraries and does not seem to have the ability to use native Windows DirectShow filters, in the interest of being portable and removing a source of configuration errors. Like it or not, a number of high quality open-source "audio/videophile" (for lack of a better term) media player plugins exist solely as Windows DirectShow filters. The most important that springs to mind is MadVR, a video renderer with support for high-quality GPU-accelerated upscaling filters, and the ability to set separate upscaling filters for the chroma and luma channels. That's more than enough for me, but there's also ReClock (similar to the RetroArch emulator, perfectly syncs the video to the display and slightly shifts the pitch of the audio to compensate), various vendor-specific hardware-accelerated video decoders, xy-VSFilter, the LAV filter suite (which support, amongst other things, bitstreaming, the ability to pass compressed audio streams through to a digital receiver), and others I'm probably forgetting.
These plugins can be used in any media playing software for Windows that supports DirectShow filters, such as the official Windows Media Player. MPC just happens to be a really lightweight, stable, and customizable DirectShow-based media player.
VLC is good software and probably the best solution for people who just want to watch some videos without configuring anything. I haven't looked at a stock MPC install in a while, but it's possible that stock VLC works better than that. However, for those that actually want to put some effort into tweaking their AV-setup, and want to make use of Windows-specific software, MPC is a great media player, one of the few programs (including Foobar) that I sorely miss on Linux. The people that look down on VLC users are silly, but it's not like the only reason to use MPC is elitism.
MPC's easily extensible plugin system was a great thing then, because fansub groups could create their own package and easily distribute it with the codecs they were using.
VLC wasn't nearly as optimized as today, so it tended to run like crap on a lot of systems. I remember MPC loading up almost instantly on my college machine, while VLC would take a while to load and run.
Today, this is less of an issue. Pretty much everyone's settled a few standard codecs, and VLC's performance is quite good.
However, consider that an H264 successor will arrive at some point, the anime scene will probably adopt it well in advance of everyone else (like it did with Hi10p), and flexible codec support doesn't seem so pointless after all.
- MPlayer starts much faster.
- MPlayer loads videos much faster.
- MPlayer has very convenient shortcuts for skipping forward or backward by 10 seconds (just press the right or left arrow), which are a godsend when you're watching something in a foreign language and you need to hear a sentence again. VLC's shortcuts (command-option-arrow) are far less convenient, harder to remember, and VLC reacts to them much more slowly, which makes it incredibly inconvenient.
There has been some improvement over the last few years: seeking hardly used to work at all in VLC, while now it works, albeit slowly. However, it's not enough to beat MPlayer.
There may be other reasons to prefer MPlayer, but they become more subjective. The ones I mentioned above are areas where VLC is objectively inferior. It would be great if it could be further improved.
Part of the lag in VLC when starting a stream might come from a more heavy handed init process.
This can be a curse or a blessing, I'm happy both approaches are available.
a to change aspect ratio on poorly encoding. c to change crop. e to advance one frame. s to change subtitle stream, l for audio stream.
VLC has gotten heavy and some defaults have me thinking the user is not in mind. Holding CTRL / ALT with arrow keys to skip? This is awkward with one hand. The arrows default to "Navigate" for DVD menus. DVD's! Rebuilding font cache? Yes, yes these are all customizable...
> native Dropbox integration
> background audio playback
This is awesome.
Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/cRwg8Rr.jpg
Not quite as slick as the context menu you're suggesting though.
I've added it...
http://www.digidna.net/diskaid
And to that effect I use Airplayit for streaming+copying from pc/mac to ios. It's fairly simple and reliable.
Note that the relicensing was not done for the iOS port.
And the app above the VLC engine is dual licensed GPLv2/MPLv2
The LGPLv2 still contains a clause which prevents you from adding additional restrictions, which Apple do in their policy. (10: ... You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. )
I believe, even if you compile from source, you still have additional restrictions placed on you, as Apple's policy for example, restricts you from putting the app on any more than 5 devices.
(and I can only assume you are involved with Tonido, given that half your HN posts are promoting using it)
I am a Tonido user. I am not affiliated with them anyway
Oplayer has been my favorite, since it's slowly implementing all the esoteric features I use vlc for, including subtitle font size adjustment, etc (though it's not all the way there.).
However, you can try yourself here: http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/armv7-android/VLC-debug-...
From what I recall, the issue was not having NA devices to test against. It seems like the gaps in chipsets and devices have narrowed (e.g. Qualcomm chipsets used more widely as LTE spreads, US Note 2 using Exynos 4 like the international versions, etc.) so I was wondering if anything had changed on that front.
Seriously though, I understand the constraints, especially since VLC is trying to use hardware acceleration when available, then not testing on real devices can really affect quality (crashing alpha? 1-star on play store!)
However, you can donate to our non-profit organization, which e.g. paid the iPad I used for development, as well as a whole lot of other things around VLC and further VideoLAN projects.
Unless you were being facetious.
http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html
The original iOS port was made by Applidium; is this still Applidium, or a separate VideoLan initiative?
So, it's a VideoLAN initiative.