VLC is one of those programs that has really proved itself a stalwart of the FLOSS community. I feel like VLC is in a rare category of software that is great because:
1. It's existed for long enough that we know it won't just go away and break our hearts. (I used VLC to play videos on BeOS back in college in the late 90s.)
2. No matter how many iterations it goes through, it's still intelligible to would-be time travelers from the past. I.e. didn't get caught up in the "must change the UX around for change's sake" epidemic that still seems rampant.
3. It's always had acceptable performance, perhaps owing to being born in a time of no goddamned Electron apps.
4. It's dependable across platforms, even platforms that I'm unfamiliar with or don't like. Need to play a video on Windows? I don't even know what crapware to download, because I download VLC, because I know VLC runs on Windows and will greet me as a familiar friend in this strange and foreign land.
Dr Scott Atran on economic incentives and sacred values:
> Much more is know about economic decision making than moral decision making. Very little is known about sacred values. [In political negotiations] the standard view is to leave the hard questions of recognition and who you are for last, and you try to build things slowly through economic small steps, and person-to-person discussions. [I find that] when sacred values are in conflict, that is a formula for another hundred years of war.
> Now what do I mean by sacred values? Well, they are values that are very strongly tied to the emotions, to your sense of who you are within your community, and you are usually not even aware of them. It is a little bit like food: people usually are not aware of food until they are starving, [but then it becomes the one value people have]
> The same [is true for] sacred values: sacred values are the frame within which all social and economic transactions are possible, and again you usually are not even aware of them, until another society or group challenges them. Then they become dominant.
> In our [secular Western] society we do not have standard principles of sacred values any more, except for our children and perhaps our nation, everything is supposedly fungible. Of course, if I asked you if you would accept a million dollars to sell off your child, you would say I am crazy. If I insisted on it you would think I am a sociopath. But that is exactly the way people feel when one offers them a material incentive to exchange their sacred values.
#4 really is amazing. vlc is probably the ONLY application that I took with me when switching from Windows to Mac/Linux 10+ years ago. It's as essential to my multimedia computing as vim is to my text editing.
If you are still on Mac, you should check out IINA(https://github.com/lhc70000/iina). I switched to it when I needed to watch 4k videos on my Macbook and it out-performs VLC.
I think VLC's cross-platform compatibility hurts it here as IINA uses some Mac specific APIs.
My gripe with VLC on Mac is that the fullscreen mode is not a real Mac full-screen. It just maximizes. There is no way to put it besides another chrome tab for example (quicktime and any other program lets you do this)
I agree with everything although with #2, VLC really could use some UI/UX improvements on both desktop and iOS. Hard to complain though when it's been stable and efficient for all these years - I'd rather have a few odd/annoying UI issues than a bloated piece of garbage!
Here's a few that I remember most:
1.) Desktop - Volume "slider" (since it's really not on Windows) is difficult to adjust, especially to get back to 100% exactly or any other precise volume level (25%, 50%, etc.)
2.) Desktop - mouse slider affecting volume results in a lot of accidental volume changes, especially when using a Trackpad.
3.) iOS - When going back from playback to a list of media on your local server, the list refreshes to the top every time. Very annoying.
4.) iOS - connecting to a Local Server is awkward for pre-saved ones. You have to touch the saved setting and then it just pre-fills the login info without notice instead of connecting immediately. First few times it felt like it was doing nothing, until I realized what it actually did.
5.) iOS - Adjusting brightness/volume during playback by swiping is not precise and too sensitive. Very difficult to get the setting to desired level if it's not extreme and lifting your finger usually results in another change afterward.
It's missing keyboard shortcuts for some operations (slowdown and speedup) and missing some common shortcuts that other video apps have mostly converged on (unmodified left/right for short hops, up/down for volume).
Many of the auxiliary menus are inconsistently partitioned. For example, if you're looking for a color setting in Tools->Effects & Filters, it's unclear whether it'll be under Color or Essentials.
These are minor things, but that's what good UX is all about. Tragically, new style guides and frameworks often pitch themselves by explaining solid UX principles then claiming the way to achieve these is a total rewrite using their system.
>No matter how many iterations it goes through, it's still intelligible to would-be time travelers from the past. I.e. didn't get caught up in the "must change the UX around for change's sake" epidemic that still seems rampant.
I remember the nightmare of downloading random codec packages trying to get video to work in the late 90s, early 2000s before I found VLC.
More than ever it's a shining example of high quality software driven by a desire to simply make things work.
It stands in stark contrast at a time when the tech industry seems hyper focused on business models that lock users into crippled platforms and extremely invasive tracking.
While I definitely agree with you that VLC is a gem I'd like to add that on Windows there's a - AFAIK - more feature-rich open source project called MPC-HC.
My main reason for using it over VLC is that it's comically easy to download (just press "D") and sync subtitles (pause in the beginning of a sentence -> CTRL+6 -> select sentence -> F5).
Last time I checked this was a lot harder in VLC. It required a trial-and-error method to try and get the correct delay.
I love MPC-HC and still use it on a Win 7 box plugged into my TV but sadly it is no longer actively developed[1]. Because I strictly use it for local videos and don't run anything remote through it I don't worry too much about the lack of updates. But I imagine a day will come when it will no longer work on some new version of Windows.
Wow, was it really that late? perhaps it was. Maybe my memory is shot. I definitely remember using VLC on BeOS at one point, but it must have been a couple years later than I thought. Thanks for keeping me honest :-)
"Well, it's important to remind people that we don't make money out of VLC and that there is no business model around it, we're not Mozilla or Facebook. VideoLAN only receives donations and that's not enough to hire someone. VLC developers are either volunteers (the majority since VLC started) or have their consulting business around open source multimedia."
Good point: there is plenty of software where people have no issues with buying a new licence every couple of years,
Compare that to (in my case) sixteen years of happy VLC usage across many different computers and phones, and it's obvious that I have some donations to catch up on!
I naively thought free projects were as resistant as VLC when it comes to manipulation for the sake of money, but big and even often cheered ones gave in.
A bad business model can be worse than having none.
Out of curiosity, have you considered monetization strategies like an open pay-per-video store? VLC is awesome, and I kind of wish it got the monetary compensation it deserves hah. I've heard that indie movie distribution is a dreadful space.
Certainly no expert in the field here, but maybe a store/market built around vimeo's "on demand" stuff? A partnership with vimeo whereby VLC would get a % of sales when purchased via VLC might help both parties (more exposure to vimeo via VLC, revenue for VLC, etc).
"When you buy a VOD, you will be able to stream its videos for as long as they remain on Vimeo. If the seller allows, you will also be able to download the videos to your computer and devices, DRM-free."
What is annoying is many groups like this make it hard for us that have employers that will match donations for non-profits to donate.
I tried to get OpenBSD added to our companies system awhile back but the group that manages that process said they did not get a response from the OpenBSD group when they reached out to them to get a bit of information.
I can (and do) donate outside of my companies process, but they are missing out on additional money.
* Recurring SEPA transfer? (Europe-only AFAICT)
* Use their Paypal link, see if you can enable recurring payment there? (I'm not familiar with this though)
Thanks for the link. It had honestly not occurred to me to donate before. VLC has been around for so long, and has always worked well, been unobtrusive, and made so few unnecessary changes, that I have taken it for granted. I wish I could say the same for other open source software, then I might donate to them too.
Why donations via Paypal? Paypal sucks and steals! They make up their own (totally unreasonable) rates for exchanging Euro's to USD..
Better show an Ethereum address or so, it's just a few minutes work and might render a much larger donation due to the expected increase in price over time.
Paypal is "easy" to setup and maintain for many donation type cases like this, and provides an incredibly low barrier for entry to accept donations, this low barrier of entry can easily make up (to the developers) for the skimming done by paypal with fees and bad currency conversions. Also keep in mind that people in europe are likely not converting to USD when donating, the VLC non-profit is europe based so there's likely not a conversion there happening. It's going to happen USD to Euro though. And if that's still a concern, you can also do a direct bank transfer in europe pretty easily as they provide that information, making it without fees for a lot of EU citizens.
And while they don't have an Ethereum address, they do have bitcoin and monero, two of the biggest players in this space. It would be nice to see more options just so that one could use whatever cryptocurrency is going to have lower transaction fees at the time.
maybe because a lot of the potential people you might want to donate actually use paypal?
there's already monero and bitcoin donation addresses there, but paypal is something most people already know about and can deal with (from multiple currencies around the globe).
I've downloaded a couple of hundreds of euros last year to various open source and Internet advocacy projects, and I've always used PayPal to do so.
I love the projects I've donated to, but not enough to trust them all not to fuck up storing my banking info. This way, I have all my donations easily available via one interface that I don't use for much else.
* VLC 3.0 "Vetinari" is a new major update of VLC.
* VLC 3.0 activates hardware decoding by default, to get 4K and 8K playback!
* It supports 10bits and HDR
* VLC supports 360 video and 3D audio, up to Ambisoncics 3rd order
* Allows passthrough for HD audio codecs
* Can stream to Chromecast devices, even in formats not supported natively
* Can play Blu-Ray Java menus: BD-J
* VLC supports browsing of local network drives and NAS
At the end of the App ProRes White Paper released earlier this morn there's an explicit warning about using ffmpeg:
In some instances, unauthorized codec implementations have been used in third-party software and hardware products. Using any unauthorized implementation (like the FFmpeg and derivative implementations) may lead to decoding errors, performance degradation, incompatibility, and instability.
This means Perian and other software that might use ffmpeg in some form. Clearly it's not working with the current OS and causing problems with AV Foundation, which QuickTime and FCP rely on.
I have studied this last year. Yes there are some decoding bugs sometimes. I have seen them in After Effects in some special case that you can avoid, and in some Blackmagic hardware. No issue in in most softwares (Quicktime, FCP, Adobe softwares, DaVinci etc.). Note : we are not sure the bugs comes from ffmpeg. We fixed a bug last year in the alpha encoding of ProRes 4444, since then we didn't find anything wrong besides that you should use -q 1 (Quality 1, with 4 you can have a little blur in subtle background patterns).
TL;DR : everything is fine but don't use it for broadcast.
I have been jumping between Videostream, Plex and VLC nightly in the last few months. They seem to play all kind of video files but subtitles remain to be a hard problem. VLC simply doesn't support it (or I didn't figure out how to enable subtitles). Videostream is buggy. Plex works with a specific version only (had to downgrade to get back subtitles)... The search continues I guess.
I like plex, despite its mysterious failures during streaming (dropped wifi, stuttering on old-generation chromecast). The UI is clear, easy for me to organize, and sub-organize things for my kids to use.
Story time: this past summer I wanted to travel from Canada to Florida (3 days 2 nights) with just me and two young kids. To save on airfair I decided to drive. I bought myself the dlink DIR-505, one of those vehicle power bars, packed my laptop running plex, plugged in my portable drive that houses all my media, and I had a mobile hotspot the kids connected to from each of their devices to watch movies using plex, it was intuitive enough for them to use. With each having headphones, I even streamed my music to the car's bluetooth using plex. We went for 12hrs on our longest day, it was a huge relief from the boredom at times.
I've never had a problem with subtitles though, can you explain what you mean?
How is Videostream buggy for you? I've been trying Videostream, VLC nightlies, and Emby. The latter two were buggy for me, but Videostream (although it is just Chrome embedded rly whatever that's called) works. So I just went for a one-time Premium tax and now I can stream. Including with a remote from my Android phone.
PS: and it has Opensubtitles support. I do sometimes have to resort to using VLC to grab subtitles (for a diff language) but even VLC sometimes does not work. Then I gotta resort to, well, a web browser to grab the sub.
I was running 1.9.6, after an auto update to 1.10.something subtitles stopped working on Chromecast. I looked around and found a thread[1] with many people reporting the issue with many versions of Plex. One guy said he reverted to have it working again so I tried that and... it worked! I haven't updated Plex since then. Good to know that you have subtitles working with the latest version, maybe I will update when I get home, fingers crossed!
This is also useful in case the amazon/google spat flares up again.
With this I guess it should be possible to daisychain from twitch to chromecast via vlc if they start another game of brinkmanship over access to video.
In case you're confused, eterm was just proposing this as an option. At this time the Twitch app does support casting from the desktop, Android, and iOS [0]. This roundabout solution would only be needed if Amazon decided to remove that functionality.
You don't have to dig around for the underlying video stream, you can actually just paste a twitch stream link straight into the vlc network stream dialog, I'm not sure what magic it does but that's worked even well before this new version.
I've found videostream[1] to be amazing. Kind of sucks for the small team making it that VLC has this built in now, but I guess their startup was always on shaky grounds.
I've had issues with Videostream, but it worked ok.
I don't think it sucks per se - VLC was always publicly planning to add Chromecast support (it's been out on a couple platforms for a while, just not the ones I care about)
Yup, I've been using videostream for years now. Seems like Chromecast support in VLC was always just around the corner, glad to see it's finally out there.
If you need this on a regular basis, check out Emby or Plex. They do transcoding on the fly for your entire media collection and fetch metadata online automatically for a really nice browsing experience. I certainly wouldn't describe either as crapware.
VLC does seem great for a one-off use case though.
No offense, "my video collection" is vague. What are you trying to watch? With which applications? Like, do file file_name_of_file_which_doesnt_work and post it here, or on their forums. For MPEG2 and VC-1 you need a license key for hardware acceleration. [1] They already give you a H264 license with the device but I think the default ffmpeg doesn't have support for OpenMAX by default. So you gotta compile ffmpeg with that. Instructions are on the forums.
Here, I would take the opportunity to publicly congratulate to Jean-Baptiste and his team for the great job they are doing, and thank them for the joy they are bringing to many people.
I just looked it up and I still don't quite understand what clacks are supposed to be, other than an inside joke for Terry Pratchett fans. Do people actually use clacks for side channel data or is it just a way to keep Terry's name out there?
Specifically, the reference is to so-called GNU messages in the clacks system, where GNU is a prefix code meaning “send the message on, do not log, and turn the message around at the end of the line and send it back again”. These messages were used as memorials for deceased clacks workers - the message would never be delivered, and would stay in the system for as long as the clacks stay running. Hence, the worker’s name will be spoken for - hopefully -eternity.
Congrats on the release. VLC, or "the cone", as some non-technical people call it is a household name. We have not been able to use it as a verb yet but when you can answer so many questions with "just use VLC" you know you have an amazing product. Thank you for the hard work and keeping VLC relevant.
One day, people from the VIA association (VIA is a students’ network association with many clubs … amongst those is VideoLAN.) came back drunk with a cone. They then began a cone collection (which is now quite impressive I must say). Some time later, the VideoLAN project began and they decided to use the cone as their logo.
I love the Santa hat on the icon, too. More projects should be playful with their logos. I hope VLC constructs additional pylons for many years to come.
I can't seem to find the 64bit build of the 3.0.0 release on the web nor on the FTP. Is there not one? Further, are there any advantages of using the 64bit versions over the 32bit? Any disadvantages? [edit - just saw this in the changelog: * 64bit version of VLC for Windows is recommended. And there is another post in this thread about it which I did not see, apologies, it looks like they will be arriving in a little while.]
Help -> "Check for Updates" tells me I'm on the latest version even though I've only got 2.2.6 on Win10 (- and I still can't find the x64 build on their page!)
This is great! I was trying to play some somewhat obscure media files the other day with foobar and it wasn't doing a great job of it. Then I remembered that VLC must play it and not only did it, it played them almost flawlessly.
In the way a smartphone has replaced dozens of other pieces of electronics in most people's lives, VLC kind of replaces many other pieces of software. Sustaining a project like this to 3.0 is a huge accomplishment.
> there are still a lot of pain points if you have a 4K display. otherwise it's mostly fine.
I personally love the rather small text and thus the giant amount of screen estate on my 27 inch 4K screen on Windows. But other people might have different preferences or visual acuity.
text size is easy enough to change; i do love how it renders on a 4K display though.
im really talking about dpi scaling though. there are still a fair amount of apps I use frequently that don't do a good job. the recent qbittorrent update looks horrible for me. some electron apps have awkward proportions but are still usable.
One could argue that having to scale up to 150% is a pain point. If I'm switching to a 4K display I would want to use the maximum resolution at 100% scaling.
How is it a pain point? It's literally a preference designed to work with HiDPI displays. And it was set to 150% automatically (because EDID contains info about the monitor's physical size).
In my experience, yes. I tried an Dell XPS 15 for a few weeks and the 4K pain points were evident with apps like Audacity, Photoshop, and VLC. I ended up learning more about Apple's high-DPI approach:
Can someone explain how VLC is able to skirt around codec licensing issues?
How has VLC been able to play mp3s, DVDs, and other media formats natively when other players were forced to pay licensing fees, hence the need to buy media players 10 years ago?
Not quite. If that were the case, piracy sites like TPB would be forever safe in a country that doesn't recognize US copyright. We've all seen how that ends up. I haven't heard of a single attempt of a patent holder to challenge VLC (not that I'm complaining).
Also, they're distributing the software to people in countries where those patents are recognized.
LAME hasn't included an mp3 encoder for these same reasons, even though its FOSS software.
I always assumed the reason no one bothered VideoLAN was a combination of the fact that 1.) VLC truly has remained a non-profit project, unlike many other FOSS software that makes money via some kind of business model (ads, premium support, etc.) and (less likely) 2.) everyone loves VLC so much that even the people possibly affected by the licensing don't care because they use it themselves.
How is there no relation? They're both protected forms of IP from the US. If someone in a foreign country violates this, the US makes international efforts to stop it.
The enforcement of rights is a proper function of government. Unfortunately the government does not protect everyone equally.
Copyright holders have formed a few broad, cross-industry associations in order to protect their rights as widely as possible. These organizations represent the combined interests of many powerful people and so are able to exert significant political influence.
There are no equivalent organizations for patents, and the numerous industry bodies that manage licensing are often very small, narrow in scope, and lack the funding to lobby effectively.
I think it might be because they engineered their own solutions for decoding those. Licensing fees usually need to be paid out when you use the decoder made by the company. If you figure out the format and roll your own decoder, though, I think you don't have to pay licensing fees, especially when the software is non-commercial. You can't pay for VLC so there's no damages.
What you described applies to copyright. Patent licensing is different.
There can be damages even for no-cost software because it isn't measured by the profits or earnings from the software but by the market loss on other software profits.
Nice! I tried a 1080p mkv video on 2.2.8 before upgrading and it used around 8-9% CPU. After upgrading, played the same clip and it was under 1%. Nice performance increase there!
Congratulations VLC team! I remember yours being the first software I used that "just worked" with anything I threw at it. It was incredible.
I stopped using VLC because of the whole Rebuilding font cache issue every time I opened it. It soured me a little more every time until I finally just stopped using it. I wonder if that issue is fixed.
Congratulations on the release. VLC has been my player of choice for quite some time now. I've been using the 3.x nightlies for some time now to get hardware decoding of 4k. Is there any way to see whilst a video is playing:
a) Is the video being hardware accelerated?
b) Is HDR being displayed? Most TV's pop up a little HDR icon in the top right if it is.
Are you seeing any performance difference in 32 vs 64? I'd imagine the vast majority of newer Windows PC that ship can do 64, but is there a great reason to run 64-bit VLC?
I have been using DAUM POT player instead of VLC for a good few years.
Can someone who has used both, point me to areas where VLC is better ? (VLC's fast forward has never quite worked well for me)
I really like VLC as an organization and its open source nature. But, until now I have found it to be lacking in some areas as compared to POT player.
I use Pot Player on Windows, and VLC on android. Pot Player is the best media player I've ever used. Started using it 3 years ago and haven't looked back.
Assuming your fast forward problem refers to something that happens when you jump to a new time, that's just a different default than other media players. I think it was jump to time vs jump to frame, but I haven't used it in years.
As for why change, personally Kakao doesn't seem trustworthy.
Hrrm. Gave it a spin with a HDR 4K video on a non-HDR screen with default settings. Washed out, over-saturated, unwatchable colors.
Tried finding tone mapping options. Apparently, those are only available for the OpenGL for Windows output. Changed to that (automatic is D3D11). Great, nice colors.
Full-screened. Then back to windowed. Crash. Happens on many (but not all) 4K HDR MKV files here.
So yeah, not really working at all that well. Back to Potplayer for now (I had been using VLC for years, but for 4K videos it just wouldn't work all that well).
What format does ambisonic audio get stored in? I remember over a decade ago they had a method for storing the various harmonics in Vorbis streams in an Ogg container, but I don't remember that going anywhere.
I accidentally selected "always continue playback from where you left off" for audio files instead of restarting from the beginning, how can I undo this change? I don't see any relevant settings in preferences (on macOS 10.12).
On Mac VLC 2.2.8 (I don't have 3.0), go to Preferences, then Interface tab, then in the middle of the list you'll see "Continue playback" with a dropdown menu. That'll fix it.
>BD-Java menus and overlay in Blu-Ray
>BluRay text subtitles (HDMV) deocoder
Does that mean this version includes libbluray? Right now, if I want to play a BD I need to use an older version of VLC that was compiled with libbluray.
I opened messages and saw a barrage of debug messages about Lua script for metadata fetching failing. I guess that was causing 100% cpu. Did a settings 'reset all' and restarted and that seems to have fixed the issue. But now I cannot open the messages dialog box. Will file a bug.
We had to redesign a new kind of module called a renderer that has some weird capabilities and of course the Chromecast being kind of undocumented didn't help.
Because we merged the architecture for mobile and desktop, because we changed the decoding API to get GPU 0-copy and CPU 0-copy, because we needed a lot of changes for 4K and HDR.
Awesome. I'm actually looking forward the Apple TV version.
I currently have Infuse 5 to play 4k HDR content via NFS, it's mostly working. VLC was able to play a movie that none of the other apps were able to play but it was missing HDR. Can't wait to test the new version now.
From my own experience, a few months ago, on Linux mpv was still the better choice (more performant, better image quality, some more polished/reliable features like subtitles) as long as you don't mind the minimal UI (or use a front-end).
I tested this with an mpv developer. This depends on a lot of factors, as you might be used to with mpv, but mpv was overall just as power efficient, if not better. This was done months ago with a nightly build of mpv and a nightly build of vlc, I'd be happy to do more extensive testing later if there is interest, but I decided on a particular power friendly configuration for mpv for laptop usage in the end.
I am having trouble on MacOS. I have version 10.11.6
When I select Playback > Renderer, it's connected to Chromecast alright, but when I press play, nothing happens.
Edit: Ok, it happens to some videos (they are h.264 videos), other videos seem to work fine, but for some reason, changing volume doesn't seem to have any effect on it. Is it by design?
I wish the macOS version were as mature as the Windows one. Many shortcuts are missing, video is stuttering if played from external HDD, audio equalizer settings can't be saved and their values are not shown on the equalizer, etc.
Just tried the v3.0 on Mac and still the video is stuttering. I believe the quality even got worse with the same settings compared to the previous version.
On the other hand, the UI has been improved a bit which is good.
Do you have a child? Wait, that is a rhetorical question: you don't. Because if you did you would realise that this statement makes little sense, unless you specifically decided to have children as a form of economic investment, which is unlikely because it's probably the worst economic investment you can make.
Would you perhaps like to watch the video I linked and spend some time on personal growth, instead of wasting it on attempts at being edgy with extremely predictable hypotheticals?
I've taken up your offer, & am watching video you linked to. I'm not interested in the personal growth you're suggesting though; I've already been spending some time thinking about how I can behave empathetically to those around me without being a sociopath since I don't actually feel empathetic towards them. Mostly I've focused on not being aggressively cynical. My life's functioning pretty well as is, but I did recently go through a break up of a 6 year relationship where a part of it had to do with my inability to form deep emotional connections. Which is a part of my life going well: I am happier not being in a relationship I'm incapable of supporting
Predictable hypotheticals are predictable because they're based on a simple premise that you yourself are able to consider. The thing about cost is that we can show how much people are willing to be selfish when it's 'sacred' or 'righteous': if children are valuable, why not sell your child for 1M, & then spend that helping a dozen kids from Haiti? https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/buy-child-10-hours/story?id... . It's because you've decided your one child is more valuable than 12 others. You care about your child because it's _yours_. An extension of you. So here's shown that you're greatly overvaluing yourself at the sake of others
So what I'm taking away from that video is that sacred things which give people a sense of meaing causes them to do irrational things as stupid as suicide bombing. Seems to support my perspective that nihilism is a great way of life that helps people lead rational lives free from that mindfuck that's religion (& by inclusion of children coddling in sacredness, that too)
But I can see why he has to say we should be using idealism to sway those taken in by idealism: nihilism doesn't generally push itself through fanatics, it lives on by being a simple rational idea that one has to personally consider & then realize. Gets into ideas of "The Selfish Gene" & needing some way to inoculate against these ideas which press on because they are self serving rather than rationally founded
you know how I know you're just being edgy and not actually a sociopath? sociopath don't feel guilt/shame about their sociopathy and therefore don't broadcast it in search of validation - your original comment was bait intended to draw someone into this debate wherein you could validate yourself. my guess? your distraught over your recent break up (whose cause you've reductively concluded was "sociopathy but actually was probably just some mixture of arrogance and selfishness) and you're narcissistic enough to participate in this charade rather than introspect on.
I haven't claimed to be a sociopath-- I know I'm not one. I'm not manipulative. Similarly I'm not a narcissistic because I don't have an exaggerated feeling of self importance: I believe everyone, including myself, is worthless. In person people find me selfless, & other times selfish. You've observed the latter aspect. I've only claimed to be a nihilist & rationally inclined. Being apathetic doesn't make someone a sociopath
Not sure where validation has come into this. I fumbled pointing out that there should be room for considering what the cost of a life is worth, & was instead met with attacks on my character. You're going out on a limb, making assumptions based on the slightest bit of information you've been given. Kind of goes along with my whole point about nihilism not pressing its ideology: people who have some righteous stance press their assumptions on others
Now in being told I was only giving predictable hypotheticals I decided to open up, reveal some raw humanity. But it's a kind of catch-22 fallacy: you're a charade whether responses are facetious or sincere. Similar to the catch-22 fallacy of having to be distraught over a break up because either you're torn up over it or you're just acting like you're not
Introspection happens, most often internally, but sometimes I drop a line into the id, hooking on to something: https://serprex.github.io/w/%3b but go on, reject an alternative human experience, label it 'edgy'
Sure, but the example served to illustrate which sacred values are left in secular Western societies.
If one's first urge is to then reply with "yes I would sell my child!" that only proves two, highly related, things. One, that this person completely missed the point. Two, that this person is apparently unable to get over themselves, since the discussion is clearly not about them, yet they somehow manage to interpret it in a way that is all about them.
I don't care about appearance: I get it started and go fullscreen anyway.
I care 1000x more about basic solid function, like chromecast and subtitles and dvd menus. Casting to roku maybe. I'm donating now, what they've done needs to continue.
Wow... how didn't I notice that. It really does work now. From UI's perspective it would be even better if one could still skip forward/back, change volume and brightness while still having screen rotation locked, but hey - we can't have it all :).
Thanks VLC team for all the dedication and good work. You're the best.
I think you can still do all that stuff by dragging your finger on the screen with rotation locked? Left/right sides are volume/brightness, bottom is seek.
EDIT: This only works if you change the preference to set playback orientation to "landscape", not if you lock orientation.
On Windows Phone, the option does not disable auto-rotation (thus, forcing portrait mode). Instead, it locks the screen to the current rotation state, so you can stay in landscape mode even if you rotate your device. Found this to be much better.
What about trying to monetize the software ? Just say that it "cost" 19 USD / year / family and leave the software libre, no license number / checking, nothing. (= Just trust the user and ask them to make a yearly donation for each home)
I like having the same player across systems and haven't ever had problem with HD in it; basically, no incentive to leave VLC. I've probably used it for about 10 years now, and it's always done the job. Why wouldn't it be worth using?
Out of interest, what are the other options (specifically in my case, for MacOS). For me, VLC has been the most stable and least wonky option for years now, but I'm not sure I'm aware of everything that is out there.
I use in on windows because it has great windows support (official installer, all the things), but on unix, mpv is the way to go (especially if you prefer GTK apps, there's gnome-mpv).
1. It's existed for long enough that we know it won't just go away and break our hearts. (I used VLC to play videos on BeOS back in college in the late 90s.)
2. No matter how many iterations it goes through, it's still intelligible to would-be time travelers from the past. I.e. didn't get caught up in the "must change the UX around for change's sake" epidemic that still seems rampant.
3. It's always had acceptable performance, perhaps owing to being born in a time of no goddamned Electron apps.
4. It's dependable across platforms, even platforms that I'm unfamiliar with or don't like. Need to play a video on Windows? I don't even know what crapware to download, because I download VLC, because I know VLC runs on Windows and will greet me as a familiar friend in this strange and foreign land.
My hat is off to you, VLC!