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."

subtitles

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

Have they made it accurately display subtitles in different positions yet?
I know giant fighting robot anime that I watch look like crap in VLC when compared to MPC+CCCP, and would hope that VLC would fix that before they start porting it all over the place.

Re:subtitles

[Anonymous Coward]

To quote Eclipse:

"What about VLC?

No. Just... no."

CCCP?

[Vectronic]

Damnit, another cold war?

Re:

[Stormwatch]

In Soviet Russia, subtitles read YOU!!

Re:

[wizardforce]

you have a point, MKVs in particular don't seem to play well... half the time the subtitles don't show up at all...

Re:

[Brian Gordon]

MKVs are very badly supported, and seeking is completely broken for FLVs and high-def video in any format. I'm really not much of a fan of VLC.. using individual libraries like libmpeg2 is a much better idea than just copy/pasting tons of code into the project and trying to keep it updated. Oh and VLC transcoding is just awful and it basically says in the transcoder dialogue box "Do Not Use This".

Re:

[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

[zakezuke]

Have they made it accurately display subtitles in different positions yet?

Valid point!

I use VLC often simply because it works. I recommend it to people who get a movie file because more often than not it works without having to troubleshoot codec hell. I am not a fan of it's user interface.

I am a big fan of the WinAmp user interface, esp it's use of the scroll wheel where it does volume or seek if you hold down mouse three.

Mplayer is pretty spiffy as well. The window front ends are far from stellar but the playback interface is decent.

Now everyone is going to say you can do custom keys (not that you can define mouse3 + wheel in mplayer AFAIK). Actually what we NEED is for a group to get together and propose a standard layout and propose a purpose for each action.

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.

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:subtitles

[JoeBorn]

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.

The Neuros device will use its own UI based on Qt4 FWIW. Remember the device will be a TV + remote control living room type device, so it's expected to be full screen and remote navigable, so the UI will be quite different from the PC version.

Re:

[zakezuke]

No we don't. Who's this group to know or decide how people use their computer, or what an interface should look like.

What we *might* need is a framework to make it themeable... you set it once and it gets carried over to as many apps possible. It'd be up to the distro to set sane defaults.

Who the hell was it that decided that the Hayes command set was the best for modems. Often times it doesn't matter what a standard is, as long as there is a standard. Who the hell was it that decided qwerty was best for typewriters even in nations that have a a ton of accents.

If you look at many a modern keyboard, you'll observe that many of the f-keys are repurposed for commands such as Save, Print, and what not. Good idea. There is nothing worse than having to hunt around for common commands in a giv

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:

[TheRaven64]

I assumed subtitles were an OS X specific bug with VLC. The text rendering is almost impossible to read, and they show up right in the middle of the screen, not on the bottom where every other video player puts them.

Re:

[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:

[SeaFox]

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.

The issue is VLC. It does not read any of the text layout or styling information in SubStation Alpha format subtitles. And .SSA/.ASS is the most popular subtitle format in MKVs for anime fansubs because its so flexable. If you're looking at an encoding made

Re:

[SeaFox]

Isn't the real culprit, or at least the one anime fans should be up in arms about, is whomevers is ripping the most anime is ripping it to MKV?

MKV isn't the majority container format, yet -- and some fans are, which is why some fansub groups do releases in multiple formats. But just as there are people that are annoyed with MKV releases, there is also people that are annoyed at AVI releases at a time when any PC made in the last four years can play a standard def h264 stream smoothly. H264 gives them better

Re:

[SeaFox]

Nice reply, thanks. AVI seems to be a weird choice across the board. Its ancient, so maybe the excuse is its compatible with the majority of installed platforms...

That is the gist of it. Wikipedia's article [wikipedia.org] actually answers most of your questions on AVI.

But, again, I'm not aware of any platform that can't handle mp4 wrappers.

Not platform, but player. And what's the media player with the largest installed base (for better or for worse)? Without an extended codec pack installed, WMP will just look at you funn

Re:

[lightversusdark]

Subtitle files are typically an ASCII file with each line having a timestamp (in frames) with the text to be shown at that time.
Not a lot to get wrong really.

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

Re:

[lightversusdark]

That was an awesome post.

Re:

[KURAAKU Deibiddo]

Thanks for the positive comment; I guess all the time I've spent idling on various IRC channels (which, with the exception of #mplayer [irc] and #mplayerdev [irc], are mostly anime-related) has to count for something.

I'm involved with a couple of fansub groups, as well, and that's where most of the knowledge of subtitle formats comes from; most groups are moving towards soft-sub (ASS) MKVs with x264 video for their primary releases, and the quality of stuff out there is very good, with subtitles that are generally be

Re:

[TheRaven64]

I realise I am talking at slightly cross-purposes with the other posters in this thread. I have only used VLC to play subtitles from DVDs, not from any other sources, and other DVD players have been able to display them correctly with the same disk.

Re:subtitles

[houstonbofh]

I would not be surprised if Ti and company fix this. That would mean the code comes back and it fixes it for all of us.

Re:subtitles

[ruinevil]

VLC subtitle support doesn't follow the SSA/ASS specifications at all. It essentially converts it into an srt file, and tries to play it. AAC audio with high-profile h.264 video in a Makrosta wrapper with ASS subtitles is the current standard in the anime fansubbing world. VLC not only renders the subtitles stripped of all styling, but since it is optimized for video streaming, it drops frames like crazy. The combination of these two issues leads "n00b leechers" to complain to the fansubbers, which annoys them greatly. This, and other encoding issues lead to the formation of CCCP, which attempted to standardize what people use to watch fansubs, and also provides a single location for fansubbers to send leechers for encoding support. I believe that CCCP only uses Free software, making it somewhat unusual in DirectShow filter packs.

Anyways, last year, an anime fansubber found that VLC would not render lines with more than 256 characters. Therefore he created a script that would put hundreds of characters into bracketed comments after each line. VSfilter, the DirectShow subtitle renderer on Windows, and libass, the renderer that is part of mplayer, would ignore bracketed comments. VLC, however, tried to render the contents of the brackets, and the bug was triggered, and no subtitles were displayed.

After the script was tested in a GIANT ROBOT ANIME, much hilarity ensued. Eventually driven by complaints, a VLC developer came by and claimed they lack the developing manpower to implement a subtitle renderer. However, the "excess length" bug was patched within a week. Maybe TI money will provide them with the developer resources to actually implement a ASS/SSA renderer.

Re:

[JoeBorn]

\Maybe TI money will provide them with the developer resources to actually implement a ASS/SSA renderer.

Neuros and TI are good candidates for funding this kind of stuff since Neuros and TI make money on every device sold, regardless of the type of software. It's to TI's benefit to have VLC working well on their silicon, since enlarging the body of open software that runs on their silicon makes it easier to get TI based devices to market. It's good news for any potential customer trying to get a device to market, and that's good for TI.

Re:

[zakezuke]

AAC audio with high-profile h.264 video in a Makrosta wrapper with ASS subtitles is the current standard in the anime fansubbing

Is it? I rather thought that Anime fansub groups preferred to hardsub than to softsub. Reason is this, so some other group doesn't steal their styles, or so their subs don't get ripped and then in turn get sold as a commercial product. Also there is playback performance, advanced SRT/ASS effects does suck up CPU time which you might notice on lesser systems.

My info could be out of date.

Re:

[MostAwesomeDude]

Most groups that release the higher-quality H.264 + SSA in Matroska containers follow a pattern of hardsubbing the OP and ED, and softsubbing the rest of the ep. Allows for very fast subbing, while still putting an original touch on the video.

Re:

[SeaFox]

Is it? I rather thought that Anime fansub groups preferred to hardsub than to softsub. Reason is this, so some other group doesn't steal their styles, or so their subs don't get ripped and then in turn get sold as a commercial product.

OCR Subrippers are surprisingly good nowadays.

So many people like VLC for it's "play anything" attitude that perhaps this is a case of the "industry" being held back by VLC lousy subtitle support. I personally think the popularity of hardsubbing and AVI files is still the resu

or MKV support?

[SuperBanana]

It's also still unable to seek properly in a lot of mkv files, and doesn't support their chapter functionality. I stopped using it on OSX when Perian (ie Quicktime Player) started supporting MKV (including chapters), subtitles (including styled ones!), etc. It's become my strong preference.

Re:

[Clock Nova]

You're right about Perian and QT Player, but it unfortunately cannot handle alternate audio tracks. I have a few mkv files that have commentary tracks embedded, and QT Player freaks out and only plays that track with no way to turn it off. So it's still VLC for me.

Re:

[SeaFox]

Have you checked out Chroma [chromaplayer.com]?

Re:

[Pope]

You may need QT Pro for this, but if you Command-J to get the movie advanced options, you can enable or disable every track present, including audio and video tracks.

Re:

[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:

[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.

Everybody now!

[GigaHurtsMyRobot]

Everybody needs a little Vendor Loving Care.

CueCat 2.0

[Collective 0-0009]

Can we now have ads that can "link" to perform actions?

A good example is... When I see an ad for a new show starting next Thursday, I want to press a button (or soft button) and say "record that show". Same goes for PPV. There is tons of money in this for advertising. Linking televisions ads to websites, programs, or anything else related to a PC is the future, but I am too lazy to try it. Will this be the ticket?

Re:CueCat 2.0

[Sparks23]

TiVo actually supports this when a provider marks ads accordingly; you will on occasion see a little '(Thumbs Up Icon) To Record' banner atop an ad for a new television show or a TV movie. (Some ads, like those for a new SUV or whatever, also occasionally have 'Thumbs Up For More Information' banners, where you can get an informational video about the product.)

However, most ads do not have the appropriate flags.

How open?

[OMGZombies]

Will it be really open?
Open enough so that I can modify its software circumvent those pesky broadcasting flags [arstechnica.com] and record whatever I want, even American Gladiators?
If so, we're on to something.

technology has never been the barrier here.

[spazdor]

Not to poo-poo what looks like an awesome technology, but we're all free culture varmints around here and we're well-acquainted with the reality that the more useful things a media-playback appliance lets us do, the harder Big Media will work to bury it.

Here's hoping that once this box is ready, it's still legal to buy one and plug it in.

Dude!

[Sfing_ter]

Sweet!

Could not resist. :D
But having tried a couple of the "bring your files from your computer to your tv in another room" devices, this would be a great advancement.

all hail VLC

[Danzigism]

this is definitely great news. VLC has become my media player of choice for both Linux and Windows and hell even in NetBSD. i'm looking forward to seeing how it performs with some new devices. in particular, it'd be nice to see a mobile version for Windows Mobile and other mobile OS's. However it'll be tough to beat TCPMP. but for those looking for the least bloated media playing software loaded with all your typical codecs, VLC is definitely the way to go. any Linux users out there know why VLC won't play

No hail from me

[GeekDork]

I find VLC highly lacking in several departments. It's gotten so bad that I switched back to WMP on Windows, while I've been using xine and mplayer under Linux after short forays into VLC. At least the default user interface is worse than what gmplayer has, and I've found some "amusing" issues with video playback, e.g. broken seeking in WMV (fails to display correctly until the next keyframe comes along).

The UI and configuration is an exercise in magic numbers, trying to play a DVD routinely requires more

patent license fees

[yincrash]

there are a lot of patents that VLC implements that the market generally says other people own. For the most part, the patent holders don't go after personal downloaders, however I would think that this company would have to pay for quite a few licenses if they want to sell this.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

Most of the world does not recognise algorithmic patents as legitimate. VLC is developed primarily in France and so can be distributed with no legal issues. They can make devices using them in China and sell them in the EU without any legal problems. Sure they'll miss out the US market, but with the way the US economy is going at the moment it's not likely to be a market with a lot of spare cash to spend on luxuries for much longer anyway.

Re:

[hakr89]

Sure they'll miss out the US market, but with the way the US economy is going at the moment it's not likely to be a market with a lot of spare cash to spend on luxuries for much longer anyway.

You overestimate the financial responsibility of the US.

Re:

[Wesley Felter]

They ripped all the codecs out of VLC and replaced them with legally licensed versions. So yes, they will be paying a lot of license fees.

Re:

[Neil]

VLC is licensed under GPLv2 - surely that's not compatible with the kind of per-copy royalties that organisations like MPEG LA want in their licensing deals?

Re:

[Wesley Felter]

That's why Neuros/TI ripped out all the GPL codecs and replaced them with proprietary ones.

Re:

[JoeBorn]

All the video codec's are implemented in dsp's, all the audio is done on the arm side. TI has, with a kind of subcontracting, libraries for every codec available. They will only use the framework & rtsp/etc implementations. The hard stuff will be done in their own lib's (for which they pay the license fees)

That's right, and furthermore, the bulk of the licensing issues is about patents, not copyrights, so generally, you pay the patent holders and use code from whatever source you want, and they don't care.

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:

[ruinevil]

If you have it compiled into mplayer, all you need to do is type -vo aa for black and white ascii art using AAlib, or -vo caca for colored ascii art using libcaca. Personally, I find the black and white ascii art to be more watchable.

Re:

[karmatic]

I had a laptop that simply wasn't fast enough to do DVDs in Linux (many years ago). It could barely handle it in Windows, and the drivers weren't as good for Linux.

I ended up watching a number of DVDs in an AALib enabled version of Xine. This would have been around 6-7 years ago.

Hmmmm.

[WindBourne]

Might these be Cable set-top boxes that are no longer going to be needed? They should have done this long ago to make the set-top box indespensible. Yet, they are like so many companies that do it when they are on the way down. Sad.

uh ?

[glazou]

My ISP here in France already offers that. I have a port of VLC able to view the TV-over-DSL channels streams on any computer of the house, record, transcode on the fly and so on.

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: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:

[NitroWolf]

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.

Hmm... lets see:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 365255320 2007-03-05 00:00 battlestar.galactica.s03e17.avi
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 362100230 2007-04-18 16:42 battlestar.galactica.s03e17.rar

Hey look at that! It's smaller! Now multiply that by 1000... or more. That's just on a 365MB file. The ratio goes up slightly o

Re:

[NitroWolf]

Who the hell rar's videos/torrents except newbs?

Umm... pretty much everyone distributing video over the internet that isn't streamed?

Re:

[NitroWolf]

Gonna double post this, because you are a fucking idiot:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 365255320 2007-03-05 00:00 battlestar.galactica.s03e17.avi
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 362100230 2007-04-18 16:42 battlestar.galactica.s03e17.rar

Look! Smaller! Wow, that was hard to test. Multiplied by 1000 or more times, you have quite a bit of space saved. Imagine that. Idiot.

Re:

[NitroWolf]

Is it a big fucking problem to unrar those files? If you want, you can always create your own project VLCRAR.

Yes, it is a "big fucking problem." For a number of reasons. First and foremost, it takes a long fucking time to unrar a 4, 8 or 35GB file. I don't want to do that if I don't have it... and I don't have to using a properly designed media viewer. VLC is not a properly designed media viewer.

Also.. there's the space issue, which you wisely choose to not mention as being "trivial" when it clearly is n

Re:

[NitroWolf]

And you think you're gaining disk space raring videos?

Yes. Yes I do. See above.

-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 365255320 2007-03-05 00:00 battlestar.galactica.s03e17.avi
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 362100230 2007-04-18 16:42 battlestar.galactica.s03e17.rar

Multiply the savings several thousand times and you have a non-trivial amount of space saved. The real issue, though, is the time it takes to unrar... and for what? Nothing. There's no reason to unrar it unless you are editing it.

Re:

[NitroWolf]

I have a question. Why not decompress the RAR file and then play the movie? (or keep it in your archives)

Because it's a pain in the ass to decompress it and there's absolutely NO reason to. It's like asking why not burn it to DVD and watch it that way... because you don't want or need to. You can watch it directly from the hard drive.

Why decompress it? There's no need to, I can watch it directly from the RAR files with a properly written media player. VLC isn't a properly written media player.

The point

Re:

[NitroWolf]

You forgot the last reason. You're a whiny bitch.

Translation: Waaaa! I was proved wrong so I'm going to call names and throw a fit. Waaaa!

Rar decompression does not belong in a media player. The VLC devs are perfectly right in not implementing this. Get over it.

Unfortunately for you, media is distributed in RAR format. Like it or not, it's the way things are. As such, RAR decompression DOES belong in a media player, since media is distributed as such. The VLC devs are hypocritical morons and are compl

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)

Two cheers

[simong]

I have an OSD so I'm all for Neuros getting involved and bringing VLC to the platform, as it should fix a few of the shortcomings of the current video player, which out of the box won't play most QuickTime movs and streaming WMV files. However, I also get the feeling that VLC has been moribund for while: 1.0 was tentatively announced a couple of years ago yet there hasn't been an update from 0.8.6 for far longer, and there are bugs that have been unresolved for as long. I've started playing with media serve

VLC is "mature"?

[dangitman]

If VLC is considered "mature" for an Open Source project, then that's a pretty damn low standard of maturity. Is Open Source held to a completely different level of user expectations than proprietary software or something?

Re:

[Jamie Lokier]

The user interface sure isn't much to write about, but it's ability to basically play video files and play them well is better than Totem, Xine and even Mplayer in my experience - and also quite a lot better than the proprietary software/hardware set-top box combination that I work with.

So I would say it's video playback is very good and that is a certain kind of maturity, but it's user interface (and as others have said, subtitle support) are not.

VLC also does unusual things - that it was the original poin

Doesn't work? Then just f*cking fix it!

[meist3r]

God, I could shoot all of you "this and that doesn't work properly"-crybabies. It's OPENSOURCE ... you don't like the way it works ... change it. VLC is the first player that I didn't need a ridiculous codec pack for. It was the only software that properly played DVDs from different regions for me. And god damnit it's free as in "you're free to leave if you don't like it". Now I use Linux and there are good alternatives. For Windows on the other hand ... not so much. I'd still rely solely on VLC for playin

Re:Like Tivo Hijacked Linux?

[TheRealMindChild]

Hijacked? Talk about sour. The GPL(v2) was about sharing changes. Its nature was NOT about keeping people from making money or keeping them from locking down the hardware that it ran on. What it comes down to is you (general) opted for the shitty men's room style toilet paper and you are bitching your ass hurts from wiping.

Shoulda got hijacked by someone with class...

[argent]

I'm sure glad FreeBSD got hijacked by someone with class.

(yes, I know you can't hijack a willing aircraft)

Re:Like Tivo Hijacked Linux?

[tpgp]

Its nature was NOT about keeping people *snip* from locking down the hardware that it ran on.

I'm afraid you're wrong; the purpose of the GPL was to allow the user to take back control of their systems; the GNU manifesto, predating GPLv2 even states:

As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes.

Re:

[dintech]

Yes but we wouldn't have got to hear that beautiful toilet paper analogy, would we?

Re:

[Night Goat]

What it comes down to is you (general) opted for the shitty men's room style toilet paper and you are bitching your ass hurts from wiping.

Very nice analogy! I chuckled after reading that. I couldn't decide on whether to mod you funny or insightful, so I had to do neither and post.

Re:

[tepples]

The GPL(v2) was about sharing changes. Its nature was NOT about keeping people from making money

Neither is GPLv3. Nothing in GPLv3 prohibits people from distributing copies for a fee or selling support services. It just prohibits the kind of bullshit that TiVo and the video game console makers have tried to pull.

or keeping them from locking down the hardware that it ran on.

If a device maker ports a GPL program to a device, but it puts a lockout chip in the only hardware capable of running the changes, then what are the shared changes worth?

Re:

[RiotingPacifist]

How did tivo hijack anything? they used it under the terms it was provided, and made the source changes available.

The GPL says nothing about private use or resale, it just says share the source (well actually, just give the source to the people who you give the product to)

Re:Like Tivo Hijacked Linux?

[jedidiah]

Tivo certainly violates the spirit and intent of the GPL.

The fact that there was some weakness in the way that
RMS tried to make them "play nice" doesn't alter this.

Re:

[RiotingPacifist]

The spirit of the GPL is to keep the code open so everybody benefits. For example, if TIVO were to write new device drivers or a nice TV interface, everybody would be able to use them. GPL was always about the code never about the users or the hardware, just because RMS has gone off in a new (IMHO worse) direction doesn't change what the GPL (2) was about, and tivo did not violate that, by locking their hardware

Re:

[jonasj]

*sigh*

please READ THE GPL VERSION 2 before talking about what the spirit of it was.

or if you did read it, you have misunderstood it, so go read it again.

Read what part?

[tepples]

please READ THE GPL VERSION 2 before talking about what the spirit of it was.

Some people have read it and have drawn a different interpretation. Please quote the part on which you base your interpretation.

Re:

[jonasj]

You said, "The spirit of the GPL is to keep the code open so everybody benefits. [...] GPL was always about the code never about the users or the hardware".

Okay. The opening words of the GPL v2 are "The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users.".

So, we have a license which states in the first

Re:

[tepples]

The spirit of the GPL is to keep the code open so everybody benefits.

From the GPLv2:

the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software

What is the point of changing free software if one cannot run it?

For example, if TIVO were to write new device drivers or a nice TV interface, everybody would be able to use them.

On which hardware would everybody be able to use the changes?

Re:

[RiotingPacifist]

What is the point of changing free software if one cannot run it?

but you can run it, just not on the TIVO. Its about improving the software it doesn't matter if you can run it. What about the supercomputers running linux, are you going to complain because you cant use their improvements too? You can go out and build your on TIVO box.

On which hardware would everybody be able to use the changes?

on tivo like hardware, e.g if the TIVO has a nice tv tuner, you could buy that tv tuner and use it in your desktop, if they find a bug in the kernel, that bug gets fixed for everybody.

TIVO didnt violate the license or spirt of the license a

Rights of the OWNER of a piece of hardware

[tepples]

but you can run it, just not on the TIVO. Its about improving the software it doesn't matter if you can run it. What about the supercomputers running linux, are you going to complain because you cant use their improvements too?

Anybody who is the owner of a supercomputer that runs free software can test changes to the software on that supercomputer. By contrast, anybody who is the owner of a TiVo DVR, which is known to run GPLv2 software, cannot test changes to the software on that Tivo DVR because of the lockout chip.

You can go out and build your on TIVO box.

Since when? The other software in a TiVo box is copyrighted and not licensed for use in home-built DVRs. TiVo also holds patents on essential DVR methods in Slashdot's jurisdiction, which it has not licensed for us

Re:

[RiotingPacifist]

Since when? The other software in a TiVo box is copyrighted and not licensed for use in home-built DVRs

The GPL only covers GPL software, they are free to do what they want with the rest of their system, the same way Novell, Canonical & Mozilla are free to ship proprietary stuff along with theirs.

Anybody who is the owner of a supercomputer that runs free software can test changes to the software on that supercomputer.

And anybody who owns a TiVo-like box is free to test changes to TiVo software. The GPL is about freedom, that freedom includes tat of hardware manufacturers to do what they want on their hardware.

To put it an other way, If you make lazer sharks there is no obligations to give everybody lazer sharks, just to gi

Re:

[RiotingPacifist]

on hardware that I own, the lockout chip will keep it from running.

Without this freedom, "ownership" becomes more like rental than ownership.

Don't by a TiVo box if you dont want one then.

Why should the manufacturer, and not the owner, have this freedom?

Why should the owner and not the manufacturer have this freedom?

How does one build a home-built DVR that recreates the exact hardware environment of a TiVo DVR, including proprietary software whose ordinary interactions with the free software must be tested?

The same way one goes about building a super computer, you buy the parts and then the software. The GPL isn't a free lunch, if the software isn't available then you have to write your own. The GPL guarantees the freedom of code that has been GPL'd nothing else.

But per the GPLv3, there is an obligation to let someone who buys a laser shark tweak the pulsing controller of the laser or give the shark its shots.

Yes but that is GPL3 not GPL2 which is what the linux kernel is and (hopefully) always will be under. Under GPL3 you'll never get any s

Re:

[tepples]

Don't by a TiVo box if you dont want one then.

TiVo owns patents on essential DVR functions that are valid in Slashdot's home turf. Which non-patent-infringing DVR should I buy to modify?

Why should the owner and not the manufacturer have this freedom?

Because the owner of a physical object has specific rights under state law. Also, imagine if there existed no PC on which to run modified GPL software. This is the case with DVRs: I know of no non-patent-infringing DVR platform on which to run modified GPL software. (MythTV likely infringes U.S. patents.)

How does one build a home-built DVR that recreates the exact hardware environment of a TiVo DVR, including proprietary software whose ordinary interactions with the free software must be tested?

The same way one goes about building a super computer

Why must a DVR be as out of reach as a supercomputer?

you buy the parts and then the software. The GPL isn't a free lunch, if the software isn't available then you have to write your own.

As far as

Re:

[jedidiah]

No. There is no difference.

The intent is subversion of the law or the social contract. The fact that it
is "legal" doesn't alter this. The intent is evil or criminal even if the
perpetrating entity can't be charged with anything.

Evil intent can exist in the absence of a crime.

Re:

[ksd1337]

Um, I use VLC on an HP Pavilion 8670C with Windows 2000, and it hasn't crashed yet. Maybe there's some other reason it's crashing.

Re:

[geekoid]

Just an FYI:
I ahven't had any iossue with VLC in over 2 years;which is about as long as I have been using it.

I am using it on a home brew win2k system.
It's a Celeron with 2 gigs of ram and an nNidia card.
Maybe you ahve an issue with your codecs, or your registry? or maybe I'm really lucky.
Or you are watching something with odd features.
good luck

Re:

[zakezuke]

I ahven't had any iossue with VLC in over 2 years;which is about as long as I have been using it.

I have had issues with it when the video file is corrupted. On the one hand, that's more a fault with the video than the player... but on the other VLC shouldn't crash because of a fault with the video.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

It's not the Windows version. The OS X version is also very crashy, and a lot of the preferences don't do anything.

Re:

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

Though I would hate for the business world to think of OSS's probability of success (in business model terms) as synonymous with the percentage of SourceForge projects that pay off in a financial sense -- even if the denominator included only active projects that set out with that goal in the first place. :-/

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]

Re:

[Phroggy]

You haven't actually bothered to read the GPL, have you? You can either ship the source code on a CD with the product, or you can include

a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

Re:

[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.

Re:

[Phroggy]

It'd be great if this happened more often. A great first step is "we take this code and modify it for our purposes, instead of writing our own code from scratch," but it's so much easier to deal with if you can get your modifications folded back into the official project, so you can easily stay up to date with new features without worrying about applying your modifications to each new version. Not to mention, everyone else gets to benefit too.

Re:

[jedidiah]

It may or may not be "mature" but it certainly is handy for
rescuing me from that legendary and comprehensive multimedia
support that's supposed to be in Windows.

Re:

[jedidiah]

There's a big difference between "acceptable" and "does obscure things well".

Yes, your pet feature is obscure. You're a freak, I'm a freak. If this weren't
the case the state of subtitle and CC tools in general would't be as pathetic
as it is.