I don't have any questions directly, just wanna say that I love VLC, it's one of the first programs I install on any computer, and I will continue to use it as my primary media-viewer for the foreseeable future.
The number of features that the devs have packed into VLC is staggering; I've been using VLC for almost 15 years now, and I still find new things about it occasionally. Fun fact (though probably not as surprising to an HN crowd as it is to most people I tell this to), VLC can also be used to convert media to different formats, AND works as a quick ad-hoc media server if you want to display something on a TV. This can be really handy if you have a video file in a weird format and want a way to quickly watch it on a device that doesn't support weird formats.
I think I'm going to donate. Keep up the good work folks!
I set up a Win10 box recently and was kind of stunned to find that the built-in Media Player is now b0rked to the extent that it can't play media. Practically any media. Even with codec packs installed it won't play any of my hundreds of h264 DVD rips, it won't play the few WMVs I still have kicking around, it won't even play bloody MP3s. I think I found one weird-codec MP4 and a couple of ancient AVIs it deigned to accept, but that was it.
Or I can spend 30 seconds installing VLC and be 100% confident that it'll handle anything I throw at it. If I could fit a Lascaux cave wall into a USB port it'd play it.
Congrats to everyone involved in making this software. The world would be a sadder and more frustrating place without it.
Software that lasts over 10 years should be celebrated. Software that is still just as relevant after 20 years is extraordinary. If VideoLAN were a startup, it'd be a unicorn.
VLC (and ffmpeg) are nearly singlehandedly keeping the world's media accessible. Otherwise, video would probably be a walled garden (subscribe to Adobe Cloud, share to Youtube, etc.).
I built a win7 HTPC about 6 or 7 years ago after not having used windows in AGES, and it blew my mind how awful it was finding codecs. Learning to avoid spyware and viruses really does require practice, and when you haven't spent the past decade visiting sketchy download sites, you really lose an eye for what's what.
I still recoil at the thought of being told "no, that's a container, not a codec!"
TBH, I'm still surprised at how awful some video stuff is. I've actually had about 5 false starts trying to make Plex work, and I'm trying it again (yeah, I never learn). Now the codecs and transcoding and stuff works on modern hardware, but it simply refuses to index content that you don't rename to please the master. It's absolutely insane. Software designed to make your life harder, not easier. There's a reason I just point Kodi to a NAS share. (speaking of awful configs.... but at least it plays!)
Huh. I find that interesting - for myself, Plex worked immediately, out of the box, was incredibly easy to use, and has held up like a tank. I’m watching a show off it right now at the moment; actually!
I just installed the Server on my MacBook or Windows laptop, installed the Plex channel on my Roku stick, added two folders, one for films and one for TV Shows, and I have never looked back.
Not saying your experience couldn’t have been the exact opposite - I’m just wondering what particular issues you ran into? Plex is solid af for me.
>Well that is going to be a problem. Plex has a proper Naming Convention 2 that it expects you to follow. As This particular set of videos is not part of TheTVDB.com's database, Id recommend you reformat it to something plex is going to recognise.
That just doesn't make me happy. I get that the Plex use case is "indexing downloaded TV shows and movies", but I find it annoyingly prescriptive.
You can use "Fix Match" when Plex doesn't link up certain titles. I also find Plex incredibly easy and believe you have quite a big ask for identification in a free to use and very robust media management system. It's like complaining that self-checkout at the grocery store doesn't "just know" what groceries you are buying while refusing to scan any of the barcodes. Further, this is for an unlimited inventory of items and not limited by any boundary of supplier, shelf space, or category.
I've also added FileBot to my routine which improves organization of media, but Plex usually does well with unmodified naming.
So actually, my gripe is that Plex refuses to show the content at all. I'm looking at Fix Match and it looks it's for incorrect matches, not content it refuses to index.
I recognize the perils of asking for the moon and stars from free software. The issue is, they chose to make it insanely featureful at the expense of Just Working :)
I'm not afraid of work; I've spent days across local and containerized solutions for downloading, proxying, and outputting. It's possible to rename files in my download software, I estimate it at about 1h additional effort. However, the content I most often download is not yet available, so I'm not investing the time in generating those rules. So far I've been just playing with content that doesn't justify the time investment in creating rules. For example, often this content is uploaded by different people in different file formats. There's no one renaming catchall until you know specifically which sets you want to use.
I never asked for automatic categorization or metadata retrieval or album art or IMDB links, but it's forced on you by Plex :)
I remember 'back in the day' anytime I would set up a friends PC I would go and download the latest version of "K-Lite Codec Pack Mega". And one day a friend told me about VLC and it changed my life (from a media-player standpoint).
But don't pick the latest Codec Mega Pack for there are bugs. Pick the version that you read on a forum works almost perfectly. It's the one prior to the one that's prior to the absolutely newest one. THAT one! Also download your preferred MKV codec, because it's not included in the mega pack. Because it's not a codec.
VLC, you saved most of my sanity. Whatever was left. Thank you.
Let's be honest here about our youths (or current lives): if we weren't consuming media compressed by hand tuned, artisanal release groups, things probably wouldn't be as hard.
To use a firearms metaphor -- when you're looking for the performance optimizations of wildcat rounds, don't expect to be able to buy at Walmart.
Though worth noting that VLC + AnyDVD HD just works there. Even if you don't have a Java installation you can still play the main feature, without menus. I was pleasantly surprised by that.
25 years ago, or so, Microsoft introduced the Windows Media Player, and it was impressive, because before that you needed a different player for every format. WMP went through a number of mutations, some better, some worse, but for the last 10 years or so, I've found it to be pretty useless. It fails on the most common formats, like you've described. Sometimes it's hard to find something it _will_ play.
VLC is my media player of choice. It. Just. Works.
I have not run Windows in any serious capacity in about 12 years, but I don't remember Windows Media Player being that bad, and I thought that Windows now had a license to H264 built in, so I'm actually a bit surprised that a rip wouldn't work. Any idea what the issue was?
No idea. I'd been using Win 7 before that where Media Player mostly managed fine (probably with codec packs). VLC had audio glitching issues on that box but doesn't on the new one, so I quickly lost patience with trying to debug MP. Diagostics and codec help links are utterly useless.
Went to play a mkv file and it wanted me to pay $1.99 for a codec. I had and prefer vlc but I'm also lazy. Unless given a reason I was not gonna switch my default program. That was reason enough.
I gave up using anything other than VLC long before you did. [I'm not trying to play a trump card here, I'm saying you had a lot more patience on this than I did].
What did me in was realizing the insanity of installing the "Gordian Knot Codec Pack" (or whatever it was called back then) every time I refreshed my OS ... and hoping it would work. That did work for a little while until the traffic cone finally opened my eyes and I never looked back.
set up a Win10 box recently and was kind of stunned to find that the built-in Media Player is now b0rked to the extent that it can't play media.
Weird. I've basically ended up only using the Win10 default media player since it handles basically everything I throw at it with at least as good performance as VLC, even on a pretty low power Surface Pro.
I wish the video conversion was simpler, more intuitive, and provided better feedback. My impression is you have to "stream" to convert a file, and then it just sort of happens without you knowing when it's done. And the settings are...odd. Selecting a framerate/resolution is still old school - provide some common defaults, or % choices to match the video's ratio. Very clunky. --- I just tried it and it keeps repeating itself trying to overwrite a file, had to force close it, though it did convert!
Yeah, admittedly typically when I do video conversion, I use ffmpeg nowadays, just because I am comfortable enough with the command line and it's easier to script.
That said, whenever my dad needs my help with any video stuff, trying to talk him through ffmpeg command line args is tricky, and while VLC's interface is a bit weird, I've managed to talk him through how to use it. It's not ideal, but considering that it's free, works, and supports basically every format imaginable, we forgive it...certainly better than when I was using AutoGordianKnot as a teenager :).
Handbrake is great, though IIRC it doesn't encode into any weird formats. For reasons too annoying to go into here, we needed to convert some weird Intel Indeo file into a WMV/ASF, due to some weirdness of a program that he needed to use for work only supporting WMV stuff.
Reminds my of a program called Super that did video transcoding back in the day. It worked decent but the download site was the worst I have ever used even to this day.
It doesn't seem to work with mp4 or mkv containers out of the box. I tried it recently to deshake a video and it was quite frustrating to use, although I managed to do it in the end.
If you do a lot of conversions - you might want to look up Handbrake - it has a more intuitive interface, but uses FFMpeg under the hood (another project managed by VLC folk that is world-changing by itself. It's almost impossible to find a video-related software system that doesn't have ffmpeg at its core, commercial or open source)
I only found out fairly recently that it can stream youtube videos (mostly, it does fail sometimes for seemingly no reason), which is great for those of us who end up clicking too frequently (read, all the time) on the related videos tab.
It also mean that you don't see the ads, but there are extensions that can do that too.
Yes, it can play YouTube videos. And it can even show you the link to the video in ints info no, so you can download it. That's what I used before youtube-dl appeared on the scene.
I learned vlc makes it really easy to get videos onto my ipad over wifi. Truly a lifesaver. Donated to them straight away. Extremely useful and effective.
How was VideoLAN started? I remember "Media Player Classic" and "K-Lite Codec Pack" were popular back then and when I installed VideoLAN and it blew my mind. Extremely fast, no buffering and very lightweight. I am 26 but I have been using VideoLAN as long as I can remember. The best media player.
My memory is that early VLC was actually a bit slower than MPC, at least on my low-powered Windows 98 PC of the time (cobbled together for schoolwork from spare parts). There would be skipping or a loss of sync between audio and video on some heavier clips that didn't happen on MPC.
But what I primarily remember in making the switch was that VLC could play everything I threw at it, right out of the box, without installing a bunch of sketchy codec packs. And that also allowed me to basically just throw the VLC binary onto my flash-drive, and then be able to open any videos as needed from parents'/friends'/school computer by just plugging in the usb stick. It was definitely a game-changer.
The last bit 100 times over. The pain of trying to play AIV and DIVX files 15 years ago was generally miserable. To me VLC saved me from codec hell on, iirc Windows ME, and I've never looked back. Downloading and installing codec packs back then felt like it was a dice roll to getting a virus. It was also the only player I've used that could easily play FLV videos back then. Honestly, VLC is the only software I shove on friends computers if we're trying to play video.
I remember MPC did hardware acceleration better than VLC, which is why I used it. I had some old Athlon 64 CPU around 2010 (IIRC) that couldn't handle some videos without acceleration from the GPU.
Yeah. It was a game changer with respect to being very obviously lightweight + purely functional, and it was very cool to me that it was available on linux and windows. It may have been the first cross-platform app I ever used.
I forgot about those K-Lite Codec packs and all that - even back then that stuff had bloatware with it, which was why vlc was so refreshing.
The video at the end of the press release explains the story.
But in tl;dr: form:
Ecole Centrale Paris campus network was managed by students. In 1995, they wanted a faster network, to play video games, and upgrade from their Token Ring network.
The Univ did not want to pay so they went to see partners, and one said "put the satellite feed on your network to justify the need for a better network. We'll pay for it, instead of having 2000 dishes and decoders.". This PoC "Network 2000" was a success. Some students restarted the project in 1998 and called it VideoLAN.
In 2001, VideoLAN and all the software projects (Server, Client, network, libraries) became GPL. VideoLan Client became VLC. Community added Windows, macOS support.
In 2008, I created the VideoLAN non-profit to escape the university and make VLC grow.
2008 makes sense, about the time where k-lite codec pack and media player classic started to be eclipsed! Wow. Thank you for the best video player out there, for all those exciting, strange and exciting codecs!
To clarify, the partner you went to was referring to paying for the costs to get the satellite feed onto the LAN, as opposed to footing the bill for upgrading the network?
Assuming the former, that is a very nice intersection of deploying the technically most ideal solution, and business management.
Heh, I remember VideoLan from early 2k research university days and using it to play multicast video streams out of places like JPL and other uni test things. The LOL let's do something to justify better network rings so, so true.
Ah I have fun memories of configuring Token Ring networks and playing with Novell NetWare to get my lab to connect properly. I can see why you'd want to upgrade from that though, 4Mbps was pretty pokey, even back then.
I just want to say thank you. VLC remains one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. It just works, and while I mostly use it as a simple player, any time I needed some more advanced features, they were also there. Most unusually, VLC doesn't get worse with time like so much modern software does. No bloat, no ads, no removal of settings, no inexplicable UI redesigns for the sake of redesigning. Truly the gold standard of software.
Do you "like" the IINA project, assuming you're familar with it, and is there anything you can "take" from it? What are your thoughts on it?
I used to always install VLC in all my machines. One day, I found a file that had wonky audio -- it randomly sped up and slowed down, but in a somewhat bearable way (it was a 2h-movie,) like some weird flutter was going on. I didn't make much of it at the time. Later, I got another file that would randomly lose audio. As in, sometimes, the audio would cut for a while and then come back. Except I used to replay this file often and noticed it happen in different places every run -- this got me thinking it could have been a software issue.
At the time (this was roughly 4 years ago, I believe), I happened to see IINA mentioned somewhere, and I therefore gave it a go. It seemed to consume more CPU, but it didn't have the wonky audio in neither of these files. I became a fan and, while I keep VNC installed "just in case", I get this feeling that IINA has higher compatibility and a better interface. For example, IINA has what seems like a better algorithm for finding subtitles from a path, and it's just more well integrated with macOS.
I wish I could go back to VLC, but I keep feeling like it's going to fail me or that the UI isn't as polished/well-integrated into macOS. I hate that I feel this way because I honestly feel like I'm "betraying" this wonderful piece of software that is VLC.
I guess there isn't really another question. I'd like to say thanks, and here's to hoping that in the near future I'll go back to VLC. You have done a remarkable job and I think you should be extremely proud of yourself! VLC rocks! :)
If it makes you feel any better, IINA ships with x264, dav1d, and libbluray ;) Speaking as someone who works on IINA, the team behind VLC is excellent and I'm very thankful for the work they do.
When will VideoLAN focus on color accuracy (colors are slightly off by default)? I suspect most users don't notice but e.g. Quicktime on supported formats adjusts colors according to monitor color profile and video color profile and it's visible for trained eyes. I can adjust manually my VLC too in colors but it's not exact science and just by comparing and personal feeling. I wished I could optimise videos as good as my TV is doing it in VLC (but this is also beyond colors).
No it's not only this. I have to change Hue, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Gamma slightly. Quicktime on Mac does a better job in this. VLC is not color accurate by default or not optimized for subjective pleasing color results (unlike most TVs nowadays) but the manual sliders can compensate it. However it's annoying if you change monitors. Then the settings are off again.
First of all, thank you for VLC, for choosing the GPL, and for being one of the too few examples of French excellence in tech ! I can only sympathise with stories in Grandes Ecoles involving "found" cones :)
What's coming for the next 20 years? Are there any challenges that the VideoLAN project has unique expertise on that it can bring out ?
Somehow, VLC is both one of the programs with the most useful features and the least bloat I've ever used.
What does your project management do right to find the right features without adding bloat? This is the kind of thing giant software companies struggle with, and they have the advantage of feature-tracking scripts on their programs.
Was working with the x264 crowd fun or exasperating or ...? Video-encoding is such a polymath topic (compression, perception, optimisation) and that code was so smart. I clearly remember mb-tree coming out and x264 quality/bitrate performance changing from good to supergood, and reading Dark Shikari's check in note about taking the implicit dependency graph and using it to propagate the relative quality of the blocks and it was a 'wow' moment. Also the Loren Merritt quote page still holds up well http://www.x264.nl/developers/Dark_Shikari/loren.html . Thank you
The issues related to commercial licensing of x264 probably ensured that Dark Shikari would never want to work on video encoding things again even before she burned out and quit software development entirely a few years later.
It's the buying/selling age. There is technically no legal drinking age in France, but rules about minors (parent responsability under rule of "common sense", parent must be present if under 16, illegal to have the minor drunk no matter what).
Eg your parents giving you a small glass of champagne at new year when you're 12 is legal.
It was created by a group of students at an urban university in a country where the legal age to drink alcohol is 18. Such conditions often lead to collections of traffic cones.
All I get is that it's an "in joke" of sorts that has just never changed. What I'm asking is: is there anything more than that? Such as: why hasn't it changed (not that it should)?
This might just be my own environment, but it seems like VLC's ability to stream from Youtube breaks very frequently.
Is that just a side-effect of Google constantly updating their YT infrastructure, or do you believe they are intentionally introducing changes to sabotage the ability for third-party programs such as VLC to render their streams?
Thank you, the organization and of course the maintainers of all this wonderful software that you maintain! I recently tracked down and reported my first bug in one of the projects and the maintainers made the experience an absolute joy!
To the question: I keep hearing from my younger peers that they don't see any value in out-of-browser software. To me, that's their loss. But if this attitude is prevalent, do you feel you are having a harder time attracting talent than say 10-20 years ago?
wow, I had no idea indeed. Interesting (and dispiriting) to know.
(It is frustrating already that when you say that you program, a certain kind of youngster asks "frontend or backend?", and when you say neither, they say knowingly, "oh, fullstack!" (>_<) )
What happened internally when you discovered that you were given a false severe grade CVE? I remember seeing many articles suggesting users uninstall VLC.
Woah, I didn't realize it was false! I remember hearing about that at the time. I had installed VLC at work (generic office, non-tech industry that just uses windows office software) and was worried I might get in trouble, so I uninstalled it.
I've seen people on macOS switch to IINA in droves because the interface looks very slick and modern (yet functional!). I understand VLC is not in the business in chasing the latest UI fad, but the first thing people who don't know VLC notice about it is how archaic it looks.
Are there plans to sandbox / harden VLC against security vulnerabilities? While my jolly roger days are long gone, and virtually all media I play are from trusted sources, VLC probably ranks top 5 by attack surface among the software I run regularly.
The problem could also be solved by putting vlc itself in a sandbox. There is no reason a media player should have direct access to all of your files anyway. I wonder if the flatpak for vlc is set up with strong sandbox rules.
>Probably do a multi-process media player, like Chrome is doing, with parsers and demuxers in a different process, and different ones for decoders and renderers. Knowing that you probably need to IPC several Gb/s between them.
Chrome and other browsers and apps, and drivers like virtual webcams, and libraries like Syphon, can all pass "zero-copy" image buffers around between different processes by sharing buffers in GPU memory (or main memory too of course) and sending IPC messages pointing to the shared buffers.
That's how the browser's web renderer processes efficiently share the rendered images with the web browser user interface process, for example. And how virtual webcam drivers can work so efficiently, too.
>IOSurface
Share hardware-accelerated buffer data (framebuffers and textures) across multiple processes. Manage image memory more efficiently.
>Overview: The IOSurface framework provides a framebuffer object suitable for sharing across process boundaries. It is commonly used to allow applications to move complex image decompression and draw logic into a separate process to enhance security.
And Android's "SurfaceTexture" and GL_TEXTURE_EXTERNAL_OES:
>The image stream may come from either camera preview or video decode. A Surface created from a SurfaceTexture can be used as an output destination for the android.hardware.camera2, MediaCodec, MediaPlayer, and Allocation APIs. When updateTexImage() is called, the contents of the texture object specified when the SurfaceTexture was created are updated to contain the most recent image from the image stream. This may cause some frames of the stream to be skipped.
>The main benefit of external textures is their ability to render directly from BufferQueue data. SurfaceTexture instances set the consumer usage flags to GRALLOC_USAGE_HW_TEXTURE when it creates BufferQueue instances for external textures to ensure that the data in the buffer is recognizable by GLES.
And Syphon, which has a rich ecosystem of apps and tools and libraries:
>Syphon is an open source Mac OS X technology that allows applications to share frames - full frame rate video or stills - with one another in realtime. Now you can leverage the expressive power of a plethora of tools to mix, mash, edit, sample, texture-map, synthesize, and present your imagery using the best tool for each part of the job. Syphon gives you flexibility to break out of single-app solutions and mix creative applications to suit your needs.
The situation has changed a bit, though. There are practical and technological means to address most of these concerns, though it would require some work. Admittedly, I have a very Linux-focused perspective. So here we go, as the devil's advocate:
> - you need to be able to open files without user interactions (no file picker), in order to open playlist, MXF or MKV files;
> - you need raw access to /dev/* to play DVD, CD and other optical disk (and the equivalent on Windows);
> - you need ioctl on such devices, to pass the MMC for DVD/Bluray;
> - you need the same if ever you have a database of files (media center oriented);
Well, portals can also punch holes selectively to select a folder, I think. Plus, the database can sit inside the sandbox.
> - you need raw access to /dev/v4l* for your webcams and be able to control them;
Pipewire should sidestep that issue, though it
> - you need access to the GPU stack, which is running in kernel-mode, btw, to output video and get hw acceleration;
> - you need access to the audio stack, also in low-level mode;
> - you need access to the DSP acceleration (not always the GPU);
> - on linux, you have access to x11 for the 3 above features, which is almost root;
Wayland is here to stay. You just need access to DRI, which is a common use-case with flatpak/DRI. Admittedly, I know nothing about DSP interfaces. Not sure why you'd need low-level access to the audio stack, and not just pipewire or pulseaudio.
> - you need access to the system settings to disable screensavers, and adjust brightness;
> - you need to expose an IPC (think MPRIS on Linux);
All of this is handled via d-bus or portals (inhibitors, MPRIS), so fine for flatpaks.
> - you need to unzip, untar, decrypt, decipher and so on;
Usually provided as part of the Flatpak runtime.
> - you need access to mounts to be able to see the insertion of DVD/Bluray/USB/SD cards and such;
Well, desktop environments usually offer to open new devices with vlc. That could be a lost feature, but I didn't even know it was there.
> - many OpenGL client libraries need access to the /etc too;
Not sure about this one. Do they? What for? Couldn't a sandboxed /etc do?
> - you need access to the network, as input and output (think remote control);
Yes, you're right, that's one extra permission. I wish it was possible to ask for it at runtime with flatpak, on first use. I don't think even Android supports asking for this at run-time.
> - you need access to /etc/ (registry) for proxy informations, fonts configuration and accessibility;
> - you need access to the fonts and the fonts configuration (see fontconfig).
This doesn't fulfil the "without user interaction" bit, though, does it? The problem with those "let the user pick a file and the program just gets an opaque file handle"-style solutions is that they break down for any kind of file format that implicitly or explicitly consists of more than one single, atomic file that can stand for itself and doesn't require accessing data stored in other files.
E.g. playlists (letting the user pick the playlist through the OS-blessed file dialogue isn't enough, as you also need to access all media files referenced by that playlist), any kind of multi-part files (multi-part MKVs, multi-part RAR archives, whatever...), subtitles (the current expectation is that if you open a video, the video player is able to automatically find matching subtitle files stored in the same directory), locally stored HTML documents (your browser might need to load additional CSS/JS/images/... and you might also want to follow any links without having to go through a file picker each time...)
Thank you. In the link in your reply to a sibling thread, you asked for donations, and I'm happy to oblige. I know you're based in France, but is there a U.S. non-profit entity I could donate to (e.g. SPI)? The reason being that $WORK will match my donation, but sadly VideoLAN is not on the approved list.
The VLC player is incredibly popular. And a bunch of libraries that are part of the project are also pretty well-known (less so by end users I suppose). But - I have rarely, if ever, seen uses of:
* VideoLAN Server
* VideoLAN Bridge
* VideoLAN Channel Switcher
The press release doesn't focus on them much, either. I don't see them on the project page. Can you describe what happened with them?
Also - how you've chosen projects you've started more recently (like multicat or the VLMC editor)?
Hey jbk just wanted to take this chance to say thanks! VLC has been year over year some of the most consitently good software I've ever used. Thank you for all the hard work I'm sure goes into making a killer product.
Curious whether there are/were plans for a VLC-lite that eschews the many more advanced features (transcoding, streaming, etc) and focuses purely on playback with as little overhead as possible?
Maybe I missed this discussion already but as much as I love VLC sometimes it feels like I'm using a semi truck to drive to the store and back.
Just here to say: After all these years, thanks for not falling into malware and adware temptations. Should I say mad props also to a fantastoc milestone of 20 years.
Why doesn't VLC have good support for casting? I mean LAN is in the name - I shouldn't have to use a half-baked Chromecast solution that's proprietary, can't be a server and can't display most subtitles.
No, your chromecast downloads and runs a webapp, and you give instructions about what to play from your computer/phone. That's hlw you can play a webradio and turn off your phone for example
I started it and I asked about casting in general. Chromecast is the only type of casting VLC supports; because of that I think its not living up to it's name.
Casting is generally hard; the protocols are undocumented and proprietary in general and are usually quite limited in the formats they support and function in ways that are not necessarily conducive to casting content that isn't hosted on the web.
In the 1990's there was a communication protocol named VideoLAN which was apparently intended to send video over ethernet faster than regular ethernet would do,
I found it used in professional print mastering where the large-format printer(s) which printed the masters were connected to an NT3.x server by VideoLAN using ethernet cable, then a second NIC having regular ethernet drivers connected the NT box to the artists' network who were using Apples.
With the amount of data they were sending in one direction once it got started, they were really streaming and apparently multicast was a click away when you wanted all the printers to print the same thing at the same time.
Naturally this was well over 20 years ago, but I imagine there was some nice wizardry to get old computers to perform so much better than they could as office machines.
Probably still have that driver somewhere, IIRC the driver would install in XP (but only to one of the few NICs in the INF file) but the pro printer app did not have an XP version and even the NT4 version would not install in W2k or Wxp.
Can you add to VLC a support for reading subtitles with the os screen reader? Currently only PodPlayer supports that after KMP turned into an adware.
Also, if you can offer native accessibility support would be much better for screen reader users. Currently, I need an extension for NVDA to use the VLC player.
The easiest way, I know of, is to to just under 100% using the sliding scale in the lower left corner and then go to the Audio menu and increase the volume. A click on Increase Volume goes up to the nearest number divisible by 5 (i.e. at 97%, clicking Increase Volume goes to 100%; at 92%, you need to do it twice).
I always loved using VLC, but I watch a lot of tv shows and as far as I know there's never been a good way to remember playlist position (except from some plugin I never got to work). Has this ever been a feature you have considered adding?
I wish the upload to iPhone UI in the browser looked better, the page that loads when navigating to http://iphone.local It's hard to know what has already been uploaded to avoid duplicate uploads. It works great on my local wifi though.
Additionaly is there any plan to incorporate youtube-dl in VLC for iPhone? It would be super beneficial to be able to download an entire YT playlist for offline consumption with VLC instead of first downloading it on a computer and then transferring the files to VLC on a mobile device.
Do you view videolan as a platform that should support an endless array of features and plugins and codecs, or do you view it more like a product that needs to keep cutting the fat as time moves on?
I'm not sure open source really applies to an ML model, I suppose you can obfusticate it to "close it". Regardless, prior art here is open source (http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Nnedi3).
Will there be a way to turn off all of the extra library functionality? I just want a video player. Like QuickTime Player but with more format support.
Would you port VLC UI from Qt to something like Electron or some other web-based solution? I hope not, but checking in terms of UI toolkit trends and solutions...
You guys rock and the entire Linux community owes you big time.
Once you installed videolan you were ready for all media formats.
It was so tiresome to tell the people you convinced to try Linux that no, by default they couldn't play their media, that they needed gstreamer this and that.
You made the transition to Linux so much easier to lots of people by offering a simple to use very feature rich application everyone needs and uses.
VLC is certainly the program I always recommend to everyone, since it reads all formats and its GUI is perfectly serviceable for most people. But I never use VLC myself to watch video files, simply because VLC is, and have always been, for years, consistently slower when seeking in all the commonly used file formats which I encounter. It’s not exactly slow, it’s just… noticeably not as fast. It is especially bothersome when skipping through a video to skim it, which I often do. I currently use mpv (https://mpv.io/), which is much faster at skipping, even though mpv does not have a GUI to speak of.
By default, VLC tries to seek exactly to the timestamp you tell it to, which may requiring reading and decompressing a significant number of I-frames.
Various other players, including mpv and MPC-HC, will instead just snap to the nearest keyframe and display that instead.
Try turning on "Fast seek" in VLC's Input/Codecs preferences tab. It's still not quite as fast as other players, in my experience, but it's significantly better.
> Try turning on "Fast seek" in VLC's Input/Codecs preferences tab.
That is a bit better, but still not close to what mpv does. That option also causes VLC to sometimes get “stuck” while skipping, i.e. when you skip many times in quick succession, sometimes the playback gets to a certain point, and any skips will then not skip past that point – you will have to wait a few seconds for normal playback to progress a bit, and then you can skip again. This interrupts your flow, makes you wait (and forces you to partially watch a section you expressly wanted to skip), and is, needless to say, very disruptive when skimming a video.
MPV does seem super fast in general. I had a 4K HDR video file recently that the default Windows player couldn't play (black screen with only audio), VLC played but playback was choppy and the colours were washed out, and MPV played perfectly smooth with correct colours.
Honestly quite like the lack of GUI on mpv. It's my quick viewer for media files and does that job very well. I have a few of the keyboard shortcuts memorised but if I need much more than the basics that's when I reach for VLC.
There might be an accuracy/speed tradeoff. mpv encourages skipping with keyboard shortcuts rather than clicking in a timeline, but I don't think it actually guarantees those shortcuts will skip the same time ahead.
It also might be pre-decoding to enable trick play (rewinding etc).
No tricks, mpv just jumps to the nearest keyframe, which allows near instant skips. If you want to do time-exact skips, you need to skip to the keyframe previous to your target time and then decode normally from there, causing a delay. I presume VLC does the latter by default and can be configured to do the former.
If you only want to go forward it's not quite as bad - in a lot of files most frames are skippable (B frames) and you don't have to decode those unless the target frame is in that group (miniGOP).
I used to be a huge MPC-HC[0] (Media Player Classic) fan. It's funny, but I liked it mostly because of the way subtitles were displayed. MPC-HC always seemed to get the job done perfectly, and when I had to use VLC at the time, I've always run into some problems.
I kept using MPC-HC for about two years after the development was halted. When it was time to look for an alternative, I gave VLC another try and was pleasantly surprised. The problems I remembered running into were no more, and the project seemed more mature overall. I'm enjoying it ever since.
I'm personally fond of mpv, mostly because it's "light" - it starts faster than VLC, and it (by default) pops up a single window per file (so I can easily have multiple things open, rather than VLC's default of opening everything in one instance), and I personally favor the minimal UI (okay, complete lack of UI).
However.
VLC always works. Sometimes mpv randomly stops working on a machine, or gets undermined by codec support (OpenSUSE, I'm looking at you). So when that happens... I just open my media in VLC. Because VLC works everywhere, on every system (oh, that reminds me that it's the best Android media player), on every format.
mpv also is opengl ain't it? I remember it always lit up the fans on my Mac, and I figured that was the reason. Since Mac OGL compatibility can be shaky.
It is indeed not trivial at all that a large official organization decided to contribute a significant program/project under the GPL rather than a permissive license. Thanks goes to the Ecole Central Paris for that part.
For the longest time I have been a foobar/winamp user on Windows.
But on Linux, the music player situation is atrocious. I surrendered to VLC et voilà. It bugs me to no end that I use a video player to play music files but that's life.
It plays everything, it doesn't need an insane backend scanning framework, it doesn't randomly crashes, its controls have been consistent for years and I can easily select the output device. I hate using it to play music but I love that I can use it to play music.
Oh, and I can't wait for someone to release a VLCMedia distro with a keyboard/kiosk mode to get rid of XBMC/Kodi which has an insane amount of incoherent keybindings and defaults.
edit: I also use cvlc to create an RTSP stream from pi-0, those streams are read and converted by a pi4 to HLS files in ssh shared folder with a VPS that has an index.html file with a js player. Works flawlessly. Only downside is when wifi gets flaky. How cvlc is the easiest and fastest option to do that on a pi0 is beyond me but thank you.
I stumbled on the name a few days ago and as a matter of fact I still have an `apt install deadbee` in my history but no packages in repositories. Don't remember why I didn't follow through. Ah, yes, the github page had no packaged releases and I missed the sourceforge link.
Did you have any negative experiences with Audacious? I have found it to be a nice, powerful yet easy to use audio player that is very fast and built with GTK (or Qt now?). Not very well known but excellent software. And as a bonus, it comes with optional old school Winamp skin :)
I agree. After having tried several other players (Amarok, Banshee, Rhythmbox...) I have settled on Audacious. It's quick to start, plays every format I need, and is not as invasive as other bigger programs.
Amarok 1.x was the best music player I have used, subsequent versions lost the X-factor. Clementine is the spiritual successor and it captures most of what was special about Amarok.
VLC is a great software package for sure. However, if you are seeking a Linux focused music player, I have enjoyed Exaile, having tried many different alternatives.
No, it doesn't support enough format yet, the UI isn't practical and latest flat version crashes. I would have stick with it if I could have setup a default folder from which to start browsing files (~/médias/music rather than ~).
Yea, it's solid and the android port is excellent and by far the best video player available there too.
Even on android the upnp client is very good.
The only issues I've had are when i first installed in one OnePLus7 a lot of my videos seemed to have some kind of timing issue playing (looked like 5 FPS). Suspect it was to do with the 90Hz screen and eventually was fixed.
Gestures to change volume and brightness are top QoL features.
Interestingly, VLC is the only video player I have on my (Windows) computer that does not "just work". The default setting will have issues to convert TV range properly to PC range so the video is "washed out". I see no such issue with any other players like MPC-BE, MPC-CE, or MPV. If I remembered correctly I have to manually change the renderer mode or whatever it's called to make it work. To be fair, I didn't experiment much since I'm content with MPV.
My young daughter has grown up with VLC playing our "home movies". We usually end up watching videos from the prior year around Christmastime. The "Christmas cone" (as she calls it) is something she associates with the season. This year she even asked if it was "Christmas cone time" yet.
The cone needs to be festooned as a conical "party hat" on February 1. If I had art skills I'd make this happen.
I've been on Linux since circa 2000. I was using mplayer2 to play most media. VLC was a big advance as it seemed to work better with videos with encoding issues in terms of recovering the stream and whatnot.
Pretty much all players are just libavcodec, so the only differences are coincidences or default options, not original research in the player app. This goes double for encoding apps.
Seeing a bunch of people walking around with traffic cones on their heads at FOSDEM a while back really made me appreciate what a strong and vibrant contributor community VLC has. Thank you to everyone who contributes!
I've always worried about how high value a target VLC is. Many are using it to play files that were downloaded from who knows where - it wouldn't take much to find a bug in a decoder or some other component and then exploit it with a payload in a highly sought after movie.
It's the main reason I contribute $20 a year to VLC. I know it's open source and there are eyes on but between distribution, etc..., someone paid needs to be involved imho; please consider doing the same.
I thought it was way older than that to be honest.
I must have been using VLC for around 16 years myself. When I was a teenager my friends and I would film our weekend bike rides around the city – sometimes uploading them to Google Videos back when that was a thing. I remember often struggling to get the video formats to play on Windows Media Player because back then there seemed to be a lot of competing formats and WMP didn't always support them. Just off the top of my head I remember, 3gp, mp4, avi, wmv, divx, mpg & m4v. I was having trouble getting a video to play one night and a friend told me to try VLC and I haven't looked back since.
VLC just works. It's also light weight – which was import when comparing to RealPlayer and Quicktime on an early 2000s PC. The UI is also extremely clean and simple when compared to other media players (especially those in the mid-2000s).
Now 15 years later I'm still using VLC almost every day. It's probably the second or third thing I'll install on a new system. Quicktime player is pretty decent on Mac, but it doesn't play everything and there are things it doesn't do that I use all the time on VLC like the 100%+ volume.
I can't imagine how much time and many headaches VLC has saved me over the years. It's easily one of the best pieces of open-source software ever made.
I've had some sort of computer for over 26 years but as far as I can remember VLC is one of those few graphical desktop applications that I've relied on for the longest consecutive time.
In so many situations where you want a video player, VLC is always there and it always works.
I wish I could donate to more projects but I try to focus on privacy organisations. If VLC started charging for a lifetime license tomorrow I would buy it.
The #1 video player that always worked. Can you imagine a time before Youtube and cheap hosting for a college student? Well, that was a time for me involving FTP servers, hosting on some place with great bandwidth, a time of Emule, Limewire, sharebear?, I can't recall it all.
There were so many video extensions like .avi, .mpeg, and my favorite was .dvix. When you use some reguar player, it was always say "codec not found". I always knew it would run in VideoLan. VideoLan you are my codec saver and many hours saved and enjoyed!
I have enormous respect for VLC and what it brought to video in general. But, recently I have been using mpv because I love how snappy it is, especially when seeking with the mouse wheel.
Thank you for an amazing piece of software that I use daily! I got a question I've been wondering about.
When I first encountered VLC, most other popular media players had very embellished UIs with tons of chrome and bitmaps everywhere. Apart from superior performance and format support, VLC stood out by being unapologetically minimalist and basic in its interface. Was that intentional? And were you ever tempted to go the same route UI-wise as other media players?
> Was that intentional? And were you ever tempted to go the same route UI-wise as other media players?
If you suck at UI, hide your UI. :)
Else, we're working on updating the UI, but that's very difficult for a small open source team. And that's going to make a lot of people unhappy, so we're working on options to get the old look possible :)
Oh great.. I'm actually a fan of certain UI upgrades/revamps, when done appropriately.
I know I'm in the minority here when I say this - between the fine folks at HN - (and I truly do understand the sentiment), But I can't help myself... sorry fellas!
I don’t really understand the praise for VLC. I might be wrong here but isn’t it basically a GUI around FFMPEG? While VLC is great at playing anything you throw at it, that’s pretty much all due to the hard work of FFMPEG devs. The parts that VLC adds - the GUI - is really not that well done in my opinion. However it is absolutely critical that we have some sort of open source, cross platform, multimedia player, and for that I applaud it.
Yes, much of the demuxing and decoding relies on libav, but there are other demuxers and decoders in VLC as well. The library for handling DVD/BD playback is also distinct.
Managing playback (flow, state, buffering..etc) itself is not a facility of libav so that is managed by the app.
Congratulations!
Around 2004 maybe I guess I switched from mpc+k-lite, VLC is still unbelievably good and never gave me a reason to look for a alternative, that’s half my life. If vlc can’t play it I delete the file. I love to drop torrented movies to my iPad via Browser, or converting and streaming from iPad to tv in real-time.
Before Christmas I used it for something very nice and spent 25€ on a donation and you can too.
I've recently increased my usage of VLC when I discovered that there were no good podcast apps for macOS. Specifically, I listen to serial podcasts in batches, so there's a very clear to-listen list and the episodes can be quite old. For some reason, even the open source RSS readers refuse to accept that someone might want to keep a long backlog of articles (podcasts are RSS feed where the article has an MP3 file, in case you didn't know).
VLC natively can display the RSS feeds, but sadly doesn't have a notion of what is "already listened". So I save the episode list to a text file and have a script that pops a line off the top, saves the MP3, and I listen directly to the MP3 in VLC.
So, if you know how I can automatically save both the track position and track number in an m3u playlist, I'd love to hear the secret!
Three feature requests:
1) Make it possible to disable the playlist feature completely.
2) Make it possible to start it a second time with another video concurrently.
3) Make it possible to use a list of regex on subtitles, to filter out SDH and other stuff I don't need.
Maybe I should have said for MacOS, it does not show that option (also not in the advanced options). The ability to play videos in sync side-by side would be perfect to visually compare encoding quality.
Happy Birthday! What a superbly useful, solid piece of technology. Don't forget when this came out, the only option to watch video on Windows was to pay money, or try Windows Media Player, which I don't recall ever successfully playing any video I ever threw at it !
Thank you for the excellent program! It seems to be the only video processing library that I can use for all Apple systems, and, unfortunately, I need to use it, because RTSP...
There's very few dependencies that I will include without too much hesitation, and VLCKit is one.
I remember pirating anime back in the 200[2-7] era and having to hunt for codecs to play anything. (Pirating was the only way to get anime back then.)
Windows movie player sucked and wouldn't work with hardly any of the series being distributed over KaZaA, eMule, BitTorrent, etc. You'd need DivX, or QuickTime, more frequently some obscure and sketchy codec that came with its own `.exe` installer.
When VideoLAN came on the scene, it played everything. It also supported proper subtitles, so anime sub groups stopped baking them directly into videos. (The switch to MKV was huge for fansubs.)
Just to chime in here with the love for VLC, it's very rare for me to continually use the same program for years while it gets updates, doesn't lag my computer, and just works.
Is there a technical reason why the subtitle delay on the iPad build is limited to +/- 5 seconds? I don't think there is such a limitation on other platforms. Sometimes the sub timings are off by a lot and this can make it impossible to get things to sync up.
The reason I ask is this is literally the only feature I've ever noticed as lacking, which is pretty amazing on what is otherwise a fantastic piece of software that I've used reliably for many, many years.
I love VLC and have used it as my primary media player on every machine for as long as I can remember.
I recently started exploring the command line options and I wrote a short (very basic) article on getting started with the VLC command line in case anyone finds it interesting or useful: https://ericra.com/writing/vlc_commands.html
Many many years ago (during undergraduate days), we used to download MKV animes at campus lab (yea yea bad practice, I know).
Typically, we didn't have admin rights to install the necessary codecs for watching those movies. Guess what? A friend told me to download "VLC portable".
Guessed what? It worked automagically.
Now I work on various OSes (Windows/Linux/Mac), and VLC is still my default multimedia player.
It's really an awesome software. It just works! I heard back in the days that they got some sponsors to improve security. Since it's running on so many computers, I was wondering if anyone is aware of any security issues. On my side, I didn't heard of any, but I also didn't really look deep into it.
Recently went back to ios after a few years in the android sphere. Didn't realise how spoilt I had been until I tried to get some video and .mp3 files onto the device! After looking around for a while I found a very simple method using VLC and their local wifi network sharing feature. Big love forevrr vlc, always there in my time of need.
Sharing Via Wifi has been exactly what I needed twice in the past few months! Having the ios vlc just host a local web page so that any device on the wifi can drag and drop files in a web browser is so cool.
The only reason I use smplayer instead of VLC is its ability to search and almost always find and save a subtitle from opensubtitles.org painlessly. VLSub provides the counterpart feature in VLC but the search requires tinkering with the name and saving subtitles doesn't save to the right place/randomly fails.
Just the other day I was trying to view a small USB camera I had plugged into my Kubuntu machine. Cheese couldn't find it... kamoso was crashing... uninstalled them both. Pointed VLC at it as a capture device and it came up instantly!
Amazing pieces of software, thank you VideoLAN team.
I think VLC is probably the piece of software I've used continuously the longest, mostly because I've always taken it with me when ever I switched between Windows, Linux and Mac over the past probably 18 or 19 years I've been using it.
VLC is Awesome. Wish the plugin framework has support to capture all the keybindings. For example writing a plugin to delete the currently playing video file using del key is not possible without changing the frontend c++ qt code.
Can someone explain why I can't get VLC from the standard Fedora repository and instead have to enable rpmfusion? I vaguely recall that it had something to do with proprietary codecs, but I never really understood the details.
First of all, thank you so much for your amazing software!
Second, are my files bitrotting or has the quality of some decoding plugins degraded over time? I mostly observe issues with WMV and MKV files that I don't see in other players.
VLC is great. I've been using it since at least 2002 and it works where other players do not, or where other players are missing codecs. I am looking forward to the next 20 years of VLC!
It's funny. For a lot of the time on Ubuntu, I could choose to install a few million gstreamer plugins and fail to watch anything or be up in minutes with VLC. Baller software.
I remember those days. Around 2010, i waited 2 hours to download VLC from my dialup setup.
Average download speed was 3.6kbps and download size was 18 mb i guess.
VLC is one of my favorite projects of all time. Hard to believe I’ve been using it this long. Happy birthday to the project and congrats to all the contributors!
I remember when us Linux desktop folks would run Windows Media Player 6.4 under Wine because it had the best support for all the codecs out there. (Especially all the DivX movies and TV shows out there.)
Also in the early 2000's it was super fashionable for EVERY Linux app to have a needless server/client model. VLC is quite the prime example of this.
I’m likely going to get downvoted to oblivion but as good as the video player application is, the development experience when trying to incorporate the SDK into your own software is utterly miserable.
I’ve given up trying to use it after searching for a solution and not being able to find one and asking in the support forums. I presented a clear description of the issue and example code and was rudely told to not ask developers to write my app for me. It’s happened a few times in exactly the same way over the years. Each time, I foolishly think it will be improved and spend even longer polishing my question, making sure the same old code builds etc. It’s always the same. Miserable.
Charitably, I see so many messages along the lines of “I wantz to build video app- pls helpz” which must get tiring but not as disappointing as asking sensible questions and proving source code.
> the development experience when trying to incorporate the SDK into your own software is utterly miserable.
It's not miserable anymore, but yes, it's far from good. If you are not doing something very simple, it can be very hard, and there is no support team to help you.
Examples should be better those days, but the road is long to go.
The number of features that the devs have packed into VLC is staggering; I've been using VLC for almost 15 years now, and I still find new things about it occasionally. Fun fact (though probably not as surprising to an HN crowd as it is to most people I tell this to), VLC can also be used to convert media to different formats, AND works as a quick ad-hoc media server if you want to display something on a TV. This can be really handy if you have a video file in a weird format and want a way to quickly watch it on a device that doesn't support weird formats.
I think I'm going to donate. Keep up the good work folks!