VLC Hits the Device Market

JoeBorn writes "VideoLAN has long been known as a mature open source project for video playback and transcoding on the PC. Now, Neuros and Texas Instruments have sponsored a port of VLC to their next generation open set-top box. The idea is to allow developers to easily create interesting plug-ins for recording and transcoding applications for the set-top box which will automate functions previously requiring a PC, like formating recordings for a portable player or streaming to another device on the LAN or the Internet, etc."

Re:subtitles

[pawzle]

Absolutely ! Subtitle support in VLC is abysmal. New lines created before old ones are removed overwrite the old ones instead of neatly "stacking" vertically. It frequently spews time control information whenever it encounters something it can't understand, and the fonts that it uses to render are at times, bloody awful !

Re:subtitles

[Anonymous Coward]

Support of subtitles has greatly improved in development version of VLC: 0.9.0.

Many new subtitles type have been added as you can see here [jbkempf.com].
Moreover, SSA in mkv has been completely rewritten in latest Google Summer of Code: project page [videolan.org].

Mod parent up

[sentientbrendan]

VLC is excellent overall, but their subtitle support is horrendously broken. Subtitles show up in ugly fonts, and are sometimes unreadable. Worst of all, half the time the subtitles from the last segment of dialog will stay on the screen and *overlap* with the next segment of dialog, making everything totally unreadable. Subtitles will also disappear if you pause, and then restart the video. The bugs go on and on...

Re:VLC = mature?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on the Mac, and I find MPlayerOSX to be more stable than VLC, and that's saying something. VLC does get markedly better with each "letter" release, however, and nothing can compare to it's ability to Just Open Stuff.

It's important to delete your old preferences from time to time, as if you overtweak the advanced settings you can really bung things up.

I haven't met any software video player that can cope with a poorly torrented video or badly scratched DVD without ARFing (that's Abort, Retry, Fail? to you kids), but my knowledge of CD drives tells me that's more to do with the hardware controller getting flustered. One thing analog tapes still win on, if the tape is in one piece you can read it. No checksum bullshit.

Re:subtitles

[owlnation]

Yes I agree. I use VLC all the time. I love what it can do on the whole, but the UI is from 1995. My biggest gripe is the volume control -- it's really hard to fine tune it. The UI has a LOT of room for improvement, and I've never found a skin for it that actually works properly.

That said, I guess the important thing to remember about VLC is that it's yet to to reach v1.0. It's thus, not really fair to expect it to be perfect yet.

VLC ASCII art codec

[ortholattice]

A neat thing about VLC (for nerds anyway), that may not be well-known, is that you can ssh into your Linux box and watch movies as ASCII art on the terminal window. See http://www.linuxactionshow.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=1466 [linuxactionshow.com] . (I see you can do it in Mplayer too according to that page.)

Re:Yeah, VLC + softsubs == SUCK :(

[MetalPhalanx]

Ctrl, Alt, and Shift along with the arrow keys allow you to skip through the file in increments of IIRC, 5 seconds, 15 seconds, and 1 minute increments.

Also, maybe I'm just lucky but I've never had problems with VLC and subs.

Re:subtitles

[Tyrdium]

About half a year ago, I discovered SMPlayer [sourceforge.net] while looking for an alternative to VLC. Formatted subtitles render properly and look great. Unformatted subtitles also render quite nicely if you select "Use SSA/ASS library for subtitle rendering" under preferences. Works on Linux as well as Windows, which is nice. I highly recommend giving it a try.

Re:subtitles

[pherthyl]

>> My biggest gripe is the volume control -- it's really hard to fine tune it.

This is fixed in the current SVN (which will become 0.9)

>> The UI has a LOT of room for improvement, and I've never found a skin for it that actually works properly.

Yep. Luckily VLC decided to drop wxWidgets entirely (which they say was causing a lot of issues) and rewrite the UI in Qt4 for the upcoming version. It's not perfect, but it's already a big step up.

Re:Mod parent up

[catmistake]

I wonder how much of the subtitling issues are VLC's fault, and how much it is bad or poorly coded or corrupt subtitle files. In my experience its not always screwed up... sometimes it works fine with some files, sometimes its a little wacky with others. Ironically, while aware of the problem, VLC is the only app I've been able to find that allows me to transcode from one video format to another with subtitling included in the transcode, letting me choose subtitle location and point size (cli of course).

Re:Good for devs?

[JoeBorn]

Neuros and TI are putting a lot of money to fund this and other open source development. see http://bounties.neurostechnology.com/ [neurostechnology.com]

VLC is lacking (at least) one important feature

[NitroWolf]

I've really tried to liked VLC. Everyone talks about how great it is... but it's interface is pretty poor. The deal breaker for me, however, is the fact that it does not (and will not EVER, according to the developers I've seen talk about it) play files directly from RAR's.

Their "excuse" for the lack of an extremely important feature (to me and many others, anyway) is that they don't want to support piracy. Well, just like the FOSS community always harps that BitTorrent is used for legitimate traffic, well so are video's distributed in RAR's. Yes, the majority of video's in multi-part RAR's are illegal video... but then again, so is most of the BitTorrent traffic.

To leave this feature out of VLC is ridiculous. Before anyone tells me to add it myself: I have offered to submit a patch and it's refused based on the grounds above.

VLC is pretty useless to me, since I have no desire to unrar all of my video. Not only does it waste time, it also wastes space.

Fortunately, XBMC is pretty stable under Linux now, at least for watching/streaming video... as such, it's the best media center/video player out on the market right now. It does everything VLC does, except it does it properly and works. In fact, XBMC does just about everything "right" when it comes to video watching. MythTV, VLC, etc... can learn a lot from the XBMC project.

Re:Mod parent up

[KURAAKU Deibiddo]

While SRT [wikipedia.org] subtitles are simple, SSA [wikipedia.org]/ASS [wikipedia.org] subtitles can be anything but simple. VLC does quite well with SRT subtitles as long as they do not overlap (i.e. one subtitle line is already displayed when another is to be displayed). However, it ignores the vast majority of the SSA/ASS spec apart from timing (and to some extent, color).

For example, this is a SRT subtitle line:

10
00:02:17,679 --> 00:02:19,237
I'm really sorry.

From this you can determine the line number, the start --> end times, and the dialogue. It's plain text, although every now and then you might see the use of HTML italics (<i>italic text</i>). You can set what font these type of subtitles are displayed in, within VLC's preferences.

However, SSA/ASS subtitles are considerably more complex, and are widely used, especially for anime fansubs. An example ASS line looks like this:

[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:23:47.10,0:23:51.59,Ed - R,,0000,0000,0000,,{\be1\fad(200,200)\org(0,0)\c&H7B70ED&\2c&HB4AFE2&}{\k20}{\k30}na{\k35}mi{\k29}da {\k62}ga {\k64}ko{\k62}bo{\k26}re{\k30}so{\k40}u{\k37}na

The "Format:" line specifies what the information displayed in the "Dialogue:" line is. Comments can be included on "Comment:" lines. The text portion of this particular line is karaoke, and includes parameters [sourceforge.net] to specify blurred edges, fade in/out, the origin point, color and alpha transparency (primary and secondary), and karaoke timing for each syllable. This is not simple, and VLC (up to the current release version) ignores basically all of it other than the timing and (to some extent) the colors. The font declarations are ignored by VLC, it would use whatever subtitle font you specified (or the default one). VLC is also often mocked because it will display the contents of {} if they are not valid SSA/ASS parameters. A number of groups tend to include notes inside braces, usually for editing purposes, because most players (other than VLC) do not display them.

Unlike SRT, the lines in SSA/ASS are not numbered, and do not need to be in the order in which they are displayed.

Here is the style information the line above uses:

[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Ed - R,Cascade Script LT Std,45,&H00856232,&H00AB956E,&H00000000,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,2,0,7,40,20,20,1

Note that the first two characters of each color are for transparency.

Also, the assertion that subtitles are typically an ASCII file is generally untrue; while both of these types of subtitles can be a text file, they're more commonly found muxed into a container that supports multiple tracks, usually either as a .mkv [wikipedia.org] or (less commonly, these days) an .ogm [wikipedia.org] file. (Anime .mkv files are most likely to be x264 video.)

With regards to soft-subs, though, MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu] is vastly superior to VLC, in that it handles subtitles properly, and you can set it to auto-play specific subtitles and audio (for multiple audio/subtitle track files) by adding the following lines to your ~/.mplayer/config:

ass=yes
embeddedfonts=yes
c

Freebox

[Yvanhoe]

The French ADSL operator Free has been doing this for years. The set-top box is called a Freebox, VLC is used to receive several channels and I heard that the latest version can use it as a VCR. Of course they made their own GUI and didn't release the sources (as I am aware of)

Re:VLC is lacking (at least) one important feature

[Dwedit]

Do you really think that applying some lossless compression algorithm to a heavily compressed video file will save space? Un-rar your damn stuff. It doesn't get any smaller from being inside a .rar file.

Re:GPL issue

[JoeBorn]

The GPL is being satisfied, but what's significant about this announcement is that Neuros and M2X are going a step beyond to make sure that code is being contributed back upstream, which very few device manufacturers do. Typically, modifications are made available (through some means as parent sites) but no effort is made to bring those patches back to the central repo, so many of the patches are effectively lost.