So, it's the first time we do a coordinated release of VLC.
We're doing it for desktop (Linux, Windows, OS X) and mobile ports (Android, Windows Phone, Windows RT, iOS) but also for Android TV.
It's been quite difficult, but we're finishing the work we've started 2 years ago to move to mobile: the code base is now ready for that, without hacks.
So, a lot of the cooler stuff for mobile are going to happen for 3.0.0 though...
And for developers, now libVLC should be usable for most platforms, notably to create apps that play videos.
Just wanted to say thanks for the project, great to have something like this cross-platform and open. Users should, if financially possible, donate when they download it.
I'm in Paris, and I think there are clever ways to create new business around video consumption (B2C and B2B) because there is so much frustration around watching experiences...
Isn't it possible to do hardware decoding of certain video streams as of iOS8? Will you be able to do hardware decoding of MKV-wrapped H.264 files in later releases?
I get told "This app is incompatible with all of your devices." and for each device says "This item is not compatible with your device". I have 7 different devices on my account, most with Android 4.2+ which is marked as the minimum version.
Nowhere on the app's page does it say it is a test version, or why it is blocked from every device, nor give a G+ link. Here is an article which is where I saw this first, along with links to install: http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/vlc-gets-first-major-relea...
This is all very confusing, and quite frankly a rather hostile user experience.
I think it's a bit much to hold them accountable for poorly edited articles on venture beat. A hostile user experience is a world without open video players.
The Play Store page could just start with "This software is currently in private beta, and only installable by our testers." How is anybody who arrives at that page supposed to figure it out?
It says the Android version is released today. Note no mention that Android is in beta, limited to testers only or anything similar.
I have no issue with VLC and like it well. They have done a great new release, which is welcome. They even went to the trouble of writing a long press release, getting quotes, and apparently talking to people at venture beat.
But then prevent installation of the android version without any clue as to why, undermining that previous effort.
Same problem here. Can't install it from Google Play on my Nexus 4, Nexus 6 or Nexus 9 because it's incompatible with all of my devices for some reason.
Thanks for the project. I use it at home and work extensively (public education - we have thousands of machines that use it) and have done so for years. It's one of the best examples of free open-source software.
EDIT: I rarely do, but I went ahead and donated $20 (yea, not much, but like I said, public education ;)) via the link someone posted below as well. Keep up the good work!
MediaLibraryKit and MobileVLCKit links on the ios page (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html) seem to be broken - not that I have any need for them, but thought you might like to know.
Would there be a way to implement libVLC as a replacement for Quick Look in Mavericks and Yosemite? That would be fantastic!
Right now (as you may know) Apple depreciated Quick Look and it no longer works with far too many video formats even if one has the old version of QuickTime installed with Perian.
Quick Look's media support is pretty sparse, but that's due to its use of Quicktime X for most video and audio. QL supports plugins from third parties though so... yes. You don't need to replace QL, just build a plugin for it.
See the post at the bottom of the link above. In a nutshell, things like Perian that used to allow Quick Look (not to be confused with the QuickTime Player) to preview a bunch of video formats got hosed when Apple switched over to "AV Foundation" or something.
Considering how many less video formats work with Quick Look after "upgrading" from Snow Leopard to Mavericks, I personally consider it "depreciated" at least in principle.
Quite a lot of Mac users (especially those that work with a lot of video formats) have been waiting for something to fix this Quick Look issue for some years now.
The best you can do at the moment is install this to see thumbnails in Quick Look for some video formats:
Do note that current plugins for Quick Look video do nothing more than be able to display static thumbnails of various video formats even if you have Perian installed. Unlike with Snow Leopard and Perian in the past, you won't see the actual video and audio run in Quick Look with AVI, MKV, etc formats.. That's where the libVLC can come in, I hope.
In iOS I'm seeing 2.4.1 Feb 12th update offered but then 'No longer available' when I hit update
Looking forward to checking out the local streaming changes - DLNA stopped working for me a while ago, although I didn't take the time to figure out if the problem was with PMS or VLC.
jbk - With 3.0.0 do you have any plans to switch the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows installers from NSIS compiled EXEs to MSIs to make it easier to deploy and/or customize which features are installed?
The only reason for asking is that I came across the .wxs files on your Github page. [1] :)
Typically in the Anime scene VLC is known as being inferior. Many cases MPC-HC with the MadVR renderer and Xy-Vsfilter or XySubFilter for subtitles are recommended for superior playback.
Do you have any input on this, perhaps to debunk the inferior claim (maybe it's due to subtitle rendering?) or if any improvements to catch up?
Anyway, thanks for the software. I love VLC, using the portableapps.com version here at work to stream radio and watch TV shows during lunch hour.
While this used to be true, it's not anymore. We have a good SSA rendering platform, we support HLSL shaders since this release and we have good up and down scalers...
I think the reputation on that end has been a bit overblown for a few year now. It was most definitely true circa 2009 or 2010, but I watch a fair amount of anime and have had a pretty solid subtitle experience for the last few years. Solid enough that I rarely use other players anymore.
I once tried to use VLC to stream an MP4 stream captured by some kind of 3rd party driver so that others could use their VLCs to connect to it and watch what's on air. However, as soon as I begin streaming, it always hung on me (normal playback of the same MP4 captured stream is fine). Were there any improvements in streaming part of VLC? Is it even supposed to work?:)
Thanks, top notch player, I use it exclusively on all my PCs.
Can you be more specific on those specific cases?:) Is the bitrate or maybe stream format a problem? Is there a configuration that will always work (we can even forget about MP4) right now?
I can't say enough good things about VLC. It has its quirks (the glitch when switching between videos in a playlist is annoying as hell), but when it comes down to it, there is nothing comparable, at any price. I use it professionally in an audiovisual company I started a few years ago, for screening films on huge screens outside, and I've tried several alternatives (often to address problems that turned out not to be VLCs fault, like the fact that Apple ProRes format literally cannot be played back reliably on a laptop computer at high resolutions, including in Apple's own players) only to be horribly disappointed in them.
The playlist features are great. It's smart about multiple displays, and can be configured in such a way that it always get's the right display...we have two different types of projector (one is 1920x1200 resolution the other is 1280x800), and VLC is the only player that can be configured to always open the video fullscreen on the projector and put the controls on the primary display. I can't say enough about how important this one is. It's incredibly configurable...it's kinda stupid how busy the display is, by default, and it can be a little tricky to find all of the various OSD options, but once the configuration is right, it's perfect. It looks as good as any player I have for nearly every format, including DVD and Blu-ray, so even if the client brings me a film the day of the event, I can pop it into a playlist and expect it to Just Work(tm) (with the exception of high res, lossless, ProRes, which has to be converted to a compressed mp4 or similar, first).
I've often considered making a custom version just for my kind of use case...it wouldn't take much to make it perfect for professional cinema usage (well, maybe there's the DCP question which I haven't researched lately), or at least for low and mid-range type cinema options, for indie film events and such. An automatic compression option for loading files that are in lossless formats, no glitch on switching between videos and images in a playlist (assuming the video mode doesn't have to change, the import step could normalize videos to one resolution and color depth, as well), and maybe some built-in auto-calibration options (with a video input). Would be amazing.
Not entirely sure, as we haven't done any big video screenings since last summer (we mostly do outdoor screenings, and it's been too cold for that), and I haven't tried the new version, at all.
But, it was an issue that was present for a long time, and I found a discussion on the mailing list from maybe three years ago when the problem first surfaced. Someone explained that it was an intentional change, but my understanding was that it was only supposed to happen when the video mode changed (i.e. to a different resolution or bit depth). But, we tested it extensively with videos that were identically processed (same container, same compression/encoding, same resolution, same color depth) and it would still glitch. We minimized its visibility by setting the background of the OS to black and hiding all icons and toolbars, which made it close enough to invisible that our clients never noticed it. But, I could spot it, and in an otherwise flawless and reliable experience it was always really annoying.
I'll check the new version out as soon as I've got some free time. We'll need to prepare for the new summer season in a few weeks anyway (we're in Texas, where it gets warm early), and I've been planning to switch to running our videos off of a Linux system, instead of Windows, since I'm finally seeing acceptable audiovisual performance as of the past year or so.
This is probably semi-off-topic but seeing all the helpful questions and answers in this thread I figured I'd ask:
Is it possible to create a play-along track (along the lines of synced subtitles in a .srt file) or just use a subtitle file with a transparent/invisible font that is either sent to or readable by another app or plugin?
I only ask because I've been trying to think of ways to create synchronized "lighting tracks" that control my Hue lights. Controlling Hue lamps is very basic and involves sending a set of valued to a given lamp that tells it what hue/saturation/brightness to display.
I figured since subtitle tracks are already built to display time-synched info and there are plenty of editors for captioning a video and saving the subs in a small secondary file, it would be an interesting way to trigger other things like lights or other electronics.
I just don't know how a plugin or "companion" program might read the string being displayed at a given time or a player like VLC might write that data to another program while it's playing.
Is this just me misunderstanding how it all works or is it something that could be done with another app or a VLC plugin?
Interesting... I wonder how much overhead it would take to keep polling like that. I'm not a software or web developer but I like learning things and I'm no stranger to throwing together ugly projects just to see what I can do.
Right now it seems like most of the Hue apps for integration with video work in one of two ways: either sampling color values for what's on screen/what your smartphone's camera is picking up or using companion mobile apps that listen for audio triggers.
The first method tends to result in lots of color changing and it can be distracting in practice. Even if you weight it to be less sensitive, I don't need the lighting to change all the time.
The second method requires you to either edit the audio track to add cues or be involved in the production of the original video. Again, not easy to add after the fact.
Basically I want my "mood lighting" to subtly follow or complement the mood of what's on screen without lots of rapid disco-light changes but I also want the ability to throw in the occasional "punctuation" like bright flashes when there's lightning or an explosion on screen.
I figured a "script" along the lines of a sub track would be a great way to do it since a sub track is already just that: a small file with a script for when to send a string of data to the overlay at certain times. If there was a way to use srt files or the equivalent, you could distribute them easily and load them up in a VLC plugin when you fire up your DVD/Bluray. Probably wouldn't sync up with every pirate rip out there but as long as it worked with the "standard" versions on disc or your home rips with easy editing, it would be a neat project.
Wonder how one would go about writing a plugin for VLC that essentially duplicates the subtitle functionality but sends the data to a server process or other companion app that's listening for lighting values on the fly.
According to our WWDR contact, there is no way to blacklist trademarks you own on the App Store, so we need to send DMCA take-down notices for all infringements. We sent 39 against 48 apps last year and it takes apple up to 3 months to pull the apps, even for obvious violations.
VLC is no longer available on the US App store. It was pulled, probably either by Apple for no longer being in compliance with App Store guidelines, or by VLC because a last-minute bug was found. I do not know which is true, and neither Apple nor VLC is talking about it.
This is untrue. Apple is just publishing it in different regions at different times. I had a call with them 3 hours ago and they told me that it can take up to 12 hours (!) until all regions have it.
As usual, we never enable updates for .0 releases, because there are always important regressions that we need to fix first, before sending them to everyone.
I'm sorry, I meant "One version behind was was the newest before 2.2.0" I realise that was confusing now. I said it in case there was a bug in 2.1.5's updater that was not present in 2.1.4's.
Does this mean if someone turns the phone camera midway through the video to a different orientation, VLC will autorotate the recorded video at that time?
As far as I know, .MOV has only one transformation matrix, so you can't do that.
But this fix will help with mobile vides, where cameras for performance reasons don't actually rotate recorded videos when you're filming in non-default orientation - they just note the rotation in transformation matrix, which was ignored by VLC until now.
The carousal on the landing page has some elements not the same size as the rest. That causes the text below to shift in sync with the carousal's rotation. That is very annoying when reading the release notes below, especially on a small screen.
There have been rumors of an upcoming release offering Chromecast support. I don't see Chromecast listed as an input media for 2.2.0. Does anyone know if this is being worked on for a future release, or am I overlooking something?
Yes. We've been working on ChromeCast, and many other features for 3.0.0. It's been merged since a long time, but is not completely usable, therefore not released.
On linux I use mpv (best and most actively developed of the mplayer family, imho), which has had zero-copy HW accel (vdpau and vaapi) for quite some time now. But on all other platforms I enjoy VLC. Kudos to the team, it was a long time coming and must be quite gratifying to see it come to fruition.
I know this is not the most appropriate place to ask. Last year I tried creating subtitles for a movie in Tamil and VLC rendered the texts incorrectly like in the very old browsers. Is the unicode rendering improved in this release?
Not that it necessarily matters but I believe this is only the "appified" version for WinRT and "Metro" apps. The regular version that would be the analogue of the OSX version still looks like the classic, barebones VLC of yore.
Well, it's mostly because we are waaaaay more organised and focused than before and we're focusing on the mobile for now... But it will change later this year or early next.
VLC is awesome, but it's sorely lacking one feature on OS X -- which is the ability to open multiple movies at once. I surely hope this is something they'll ad at some point!
Does anyone know the status of blu ray menu support for VLC? I heard it was being worked on but I can't find any current info on the status and challenges associated with it.
It is a term used by people who dislike videos in portrait orientation who spout things like "my eyes are horizontally next to each other, not vertically". I have no idea how it started or what it is so successful, people have had no such zealous anger against portrait photography or art. Using an appropriate orientation is an advanced technique, blindly hating one is bad.
Plex/xbmc is a more of a home entertainment system. Vlc is merely a media player (that is incredibly awesome at what it does, thus the reputation).
I use xbmc on my TV in the front room because it tracks where I am in a series and which movies I've seen. I use vlc on my computer to watch a one off documentary or something.
I think you could build a plex or xbmc like system using vlc but to compare them I think is comparing apples to oranges.
For what its worth I stick to XBMC when I don't need a web interface. Plex isn't entirely Foss, xbmc is.
Cool, this means I can access the network from Lua plugins again, which was accidentally broken (for a trivial reason, code-wise) in 2.1. Apparently the bug was fixed almost a year ago [1], but the functionality remained unusable in the 2.1 patches.
It's still not aware of renamed/moved files on OS X. Every other app picks up the new location of a file if you move it while it's in use, but VLC complains if it encounters a moved file in the playlist, getting stuck in an infinite error loop if you have it set to Repeat One.
Not sure if this is added, but for me the two killer features would be a network/smb file browser for being able to play from my NAS box.. and Chromecast support (already on the horizon) ... those two would be killer imho.
I'm probably doing something stupid, but on I can't seem to get the "Resume playback where you left off." feature to work on Windows. Is there an option somewhere I need to enable?
Should be enabled by default. Just seek within a video file to any position that is not at the very beginning or the end and close VLC. Once you play that file again it should prompt you to resume the playback.
EDIT: of course this doesn't apply to streams or non-seekable files
This only appears to be working for me (Windows) if the file has been opened once via the Media -> Open File menu. Opening a file by double clicking means that it doesn't appear, unless it has already been opened once with the menu.
Weird... after I opened a file using the "Media->Open File" menu item, it started appearing. (It now works even in cases where I open a file by double-clicking on it. Strange)
The only reason I downloaded it was for this feature. This dead simple feature which was available in 1976 (or whenever) when VHS came out. It should be in every digital player at version 1.0.
Very poor work. It's really spotty, and it shows up as a bar at the top of the window on seemingly random loads, about 10 percent of the time. Whatever video player VUZE uses works 100 percent of the time and doesn't stupidly ask you if you want to start at the last position. This seems like a feature that should take five minutes to implement and they managed to mess it up bad.
I agree. I actually rolled back to the previous version since there's an extension that works perfectly for this that is broken by the new version. Check it out:
What is the story of VLC and the Apple App Store. Has Apple rendered any verdict or is it just submit each version, hope for the best, sometimes yes sometimes no, randomly with no comment?
As long as the Supreme Circle Jerk consisting of Phil Schiller, Eddie Cue and Tim Cook feels like it, it'll be available. The day their food doesn't taste quite right, the bisque isn't warm enough, etc., they'll arbitrarily ban it.
The 64-bit Windows binary is getting deployed on the mirror right now.
> Wouldn't that improve performance for something like video-decoding?
64-bit is a tradeoff for video, less CPU usage, but more memory pressure, so the improvements are usually limited... It's more important to have good hardware acceleration, than 64bits.
> Also, it's disappointing to see there's still no native (and automatic) subtitle-seeking feature.
x86-64 is such an ABI improvement over x86-32 that it's always 10-20% faster, even with the larger size pointers. Win64's ABI is a little worse than other platforms for libavcodec, since it has some callee-saved SSE registers and everyone else is caller-saved, but still true.
Hardware decoding is much more important for power savings than anything else.
Most standard video decoding code uses CPU feature detection and hand-optimized ASM for important bits, so x86-64 doesn't really add anything worthwhile for most video players and encoders - most of the magic is done in SSE/AVX codepaths anyway.
For most stuff, 64-bit makes surprisingly little difference. And it adds the complexity of needing to release two versions or an installer with both in it, which increases your bandwidth. VLC only uses about 5% CPU on my i7 to play a 1080p AC3 video. For most end user stuff, the difference of 64-bit is unnoticeable, a 1-2 % difference maybe. For certain things, it matters. Things like encoding or compression. Compressing files in 7-Zip can see a 5 to 10% increase in speed, for instance. If you routinely compress a lot of files that take minutes to package, it can be noticeable and add up.
We're doing it for desktop (Linux, Windows, OS X) and mobile ports (Android, Windows Phone, Windows RT, iOS) but also for Android TV.
It's been quite difficult, but we're finishing the work we've started 2 years ago to move to mobile: the code base is now ready for that, without hacks.
So, a lot of the cooler stuff for mobile are going to happen for 3.0.0 though...
And for developers, now libVLC should be usable for most platforms, notably to create apps that play videos.