Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

As a backup, of course it may be a useful tool. I've used both MPlayer and VLC for such purpose for a long time on various OSes. I have for long time seen the mess of multimedia on Linux with 587925 audio and video players, each one with its own UI or written in its own language. At least when they use the same backends there is not duplicate work in that regard!

So don't read as if I'm saying VLC is useless. I just say on long term it is not a viable solution. Especially not in USA where the legality of some plugins is shady; which is why its better to buy a Fluendo Bundle instead. In that regard, it may not even be wise to distribute ffmpeg/libavcodec/xine/vlc/libdecss in Extras-*

Also, Windows users are familiar with VLC having a GUI. On Maemo, it doesn't have one.

I quote from Wikipedia Maemo entry:

Nokia provides these frameworks to be used; not mimicked.

Ofcourse, there are situations where you're OK with an alternative. Qt besides GTK, WebKit besides Gecko. Not ideal, but OK. But if you have for example some applications using WebKit and other Gecko you're not sharing memory from shared libraries where you could, and if you use a Qt application in a GNOME desktop you must load a lot of extra libraries which also uses more resources besides the fact it doesn't look good (yes, even with qgtkstyle).

So if you look at VLC from this angle (duplicating work, different expectation/outcome from desktop port) it is not a very good addition. Instead, we want the right plugins in GStreamer. So if you cannot play content in a multimedia player using GStreamer multimedia framework talk about it here so we can instead get it supported. GStreamer supports tons of plugins as well on Linux/x86-{32|64} hence solution could be as simple as compiling it for Maemo because it already works on Linux/ARM, or we could team up and ask Fluendo to port to Linux/ARM, either by paying then individually for licenses or getting Nokia moved to pay for it with a discount license.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

So, it's okay to have modular software, but it's not okay to expect modular cell transceivers in a handheld device.

See what I did there?

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Most people don't care about legality of plugins. The only problem with the legality of the plugins would be its inclusion into Maemo Extras as you pointed out. And for most people who are new to the platform they shouldn't be sent out of extras. For everyone else they could just easily add a VLC repository (if they were to offer one) while waiting for whatever alternate solution there is.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Yeah, I see what you did there: you applied something I said about software on embedded hardware.

What I said about software applies even more on embedded software than desktop software because of limited resources.

In hardware is much more limited. Especially embedded hardware. Modularity comes at price of more power usage and more size used. Same for features. I'd also love to have dual SIM, for example, or be able to replace the WLAN later with 802.11n, but that is not possible either.

Question is also which interface you'd have that modular cell transceiver. I think we discussed the options before: there is no suitable one for handhelds for end users while on x86 hardware from netbooks and up you can have MiniPCI Express.

That is why Apple solders their stuff, and does not allow user to replace. The side effect is ofcourse you are dependent on them and have to upgrade whole hardware. Well, Nokia benefits from such side effect too. Else we'd just upgrade our phones ourselves the whole time.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

So, you didn't see what I did there. And who said anything about Apple?

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

I could see VLC being a big problem on Android- due to byte code translation (Coreplayer team tried and quit), but hardware access is not restricted in Maemo- is it?

If truly optimized to the N900's drivers and OS, would VLC not perform as good as Mplayer?

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Please explain your riddle.

Me, for example of embedded hardware modularity design choice.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

It's called "MPlayer".

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

You were asking developers to be modular because of limited resources, but you argue that it's not reasonable for manufacturers to do the same. I consider that a contradiction, and your reasons seem to be just rationalizations.

This comment has more to do with planned obsolescence and less to do with modularity. More to my point about contradiction. With your reasoning, wouldn't it be more in a software developer's interest to share fewer libraries with other software? They could then force the user, because of limited resources, to have fewer choices, which appears to be your agenda anyway.

I think I'm gonna fork gstreamer to daperlstreamer...

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Here's my pleasant experience with the Almighty VLC that can play Every Format Known To Mankind:

http://i29.tinypic.com/2rcl461.jpg
http://i32.tinypic.com/35n1qae.jpg
http://i28.tinypic.com/5wb5lk.jpg
http://i27.tinypic.com/33vkuas.jpg
http://i32.tinypic.com/2gx2xl0.jpg
http://i30.tinypic.com/qyh6w5.jpg

Excuse the cartoons.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

@joppu

I've had that issue myself occasionally. Seems to happen to whatever other players (including mplayer) that I throw the file into. Oh well, at least VLC will play it rather then just show you black space like Totem lol.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

@joppu
How much did Anti-VLC LTD paid you?

if you hate vlc that much then just skip it, no one is forcing you. Also, did you tried to run it few times or you only tried to screw VLC? ;)
It seems you just fast forward it + taken the screenshot without given it any time (To breath)

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

I stated several reasons with that being one of them, yes.

Yeah, and for reasons I stated your compare is invalid because you compare software with embedded hardware. :rolleyes: It is only a contradiction if you refuse to take the different situation into account.

No, because features are going to be shared with other applications. Other applications need C library, or want to change volume, or want to have EQ, or want to decode MP3, or want to use X11, or want to show a PNG.

My agenda is to have one good, default touch UI multimedia player with legal codecs, using the backends which already exist on our desktop (which means that we for example use GStreamer and not Phonon). Alternative for such interface is installable, but uses same frameworks, hence only difference is UI. Example is interface for stylus, or Ncurses. There are no other multimedia players because there is no demand for them, because everything is already modularized yielding no differences. Hence only a few exist, each with different UI. Its the very essence of open standards and modularity.

Won't bother me as I won't see it cluttering my system, just like 4000 Linux forks from GIT are not bothering me. But if they were there when I'd search for Linux kernel in my APT repository it'd bother me.

And I really don't want to go back to 90s having QuickTime, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and such installed so I can play some stupi format only supported by these players... so we provide our codecs via multimedia framework to whatever application supports our API. That there is a different multimedia framework for KDE than for GNOME is not a huge problem.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Nah it happens to me too, it's generally a poorly encoded file when you see that. Nothing seems to play it, delete and find it somewhere else. :)

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Well, in this case its MKV. Also notice the double subtitle.

Totem would tell you about a plugin available to download to play the content. A rather nice and useful feature IMO.

I think in latest Ubuntu version you even can buy Fluendo codec packs directly from Ubuntu.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Anyway, I found that file (I am kinda downloading it) would take more than 12hours to get it done (I Just want to make sure).
By the way, this reminds me that I only get it with .mov format (for obvious reasons).

For now can we all stop fighting about VLC/MPlayer/Others and GUI/None-GUI + QT/GTK.




Edit:
http://i34.tinypic.com/2ryfrjp.jpg

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Unless you're developing for those players you cannot judge their usefulness. It's like claiming that Qt isn't needed because there is GTK. Not all applications are developed the same way and not all applications have the same kind of code. Mplayer for example cannot be easily extended to handle menus because of the way it is programmed, so forget proper DVD playback on Mplayer. VLC on the other hand works great with menus but may be slower than mplayer. As you can see you win something - you lose something.

For some, it is better to (let's say) write another media player just to fix this kind of problems. For others it is better to have more than one players because of their license (OK, both mplayer and vlc are GPLv2+). It is even possible to need more than one players just to handle different development models.

Unless you are able to predict which development model, code organization, community behavior, etc will prevail, you cannot judge. And as long as you're a simple user of those players (just like I am), you may (at-most) use them. If you start writing code for one of them then you can try to unite all of them under a universal player that will be everything, but I doubt that this is possible.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Notice that the file wasn't like that all the time, that's just a really annoying bug that happens randomly and also when you rewind the file. It's probably due to a weak processor (laptop, VIA C7-M, 1600MHz) (also note that the N900 has max. 600MHz clockspeed) and h.264 decoding that takes a lot of CPU time. Surprisingly MPlayer plays the file flawlessly

Atleast SMPlayer has proper DVD menus if you enable them in the menu.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

If only developers are entitled to an opinion about the usefulness of their software then why do developers like it when users provide feedback, find bugs, port software, review software, use their software, donate to project, write translations,

That is 2 choices. The only 2 we have on Maemo with one officially supported.

None of this fixes the root of the problem. Which is what abstraction layers do. They fix problems long-term. On short-term they have to be migrated to though.

All niche examples which don't warrant inclusion in APT repository.

It is rather easy to predict what is desired: a touch UI player which plays the multimedia content the user stumbles upon. The rest is pub talk for men with beards who have stories about ASM coding, but are otherwise irrelevant.

For end users its great to have APT repositories with useful applications. Touch UI applications. Instead of 53985092852 which mimic one another, or all kind of CLI applications, or all kind of stylus applications. This problem has different root though.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

If you really saw what I did there you wouldn't continue to lecture me about software modularity. But please, don't let me stop you...

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Yes it would, but then it wouldn't find anything thus wasting your time. =P

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

This, and the rest of your long argumentation is based on the wrong assumption that VLC is a stand-alone media player.

VLC is a media playback and streaming library and a set of user interfaces (Qt4, Cocoa, HTTP, ncurses and CLI). Whether you use the built-in user interface or just the library with another front-end is up to you - VLC has some GTK front-ends by the way (I never tried them so don't ask me more).

Some years ago, gstreamer guys decided to invent a forth major OSS media framework (in addition to Xine-lib, ffmpeg and LibVLC) instead of improving any of the existing ones. I can see several reasons why they chose that path: First, it's always easier to start a new project with your own code than to learn to extend an existing one. Second, gstreamer is LGPL, which allows proprietary codecs Third, some people want to use glib and gobject. Forth, I guess gstreamer might be more generic, e.g. Farsight supports real-time communications, which is in fact quite different a thing than media playback.

That's all fine, but please don't blame VLC for being not modular. This only exhibits that you don't know what you're talking about. (By the way, over 80% of VLC is code is in modules, or if you count underlying libraries, probably well over 90%...)

As far as I know, it's just MPEG-TS over RTP, which is perfectly standard.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Beware that you are quoting the VLC 1.1.0 changelog here. VLC 1.0.3 does not work on N900 or not well at all.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Which anime is that? I think I've watched that one recently but I can't recall the title.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

So the soon to be released VLC revision is not going to work well with the N900 and the original post is incorrect? :confused:

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

That's hardly comparable, first of all it's on Vista and secondly I guess it's on a desktop (?) with dual core processor (?)

Ever heard of this thing called a "filename" ;)

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Ah, hehe didn't know why I didn't think about it. Guess I haven't watched that anime yet then.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

1- Win7 & vlc will work the same under Linux (if you want a screen-shot/I will provide it to you)
2- It doesn't mean anything I just set vlc to work only on one processor and I couldn't notice any change in performance.


@Laughing Man: I don't know this anime ,but I also saw many pictures of it (avatars? / signatures?). The only thing I did was searching for its file-name ["Toradora"].

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

You all might think that I'm a fanatic VLC hater, but let me tell you a story. I first attempted to use VLC a long time ago, it was pre 1.0 version. First thing was that the ***/SSA (styled subtitles) support was horrible. Secondly there was noticeable delay when pausing and pausing also caused the current subtitles disappear. The image scaling was horrible and VLC added some sort of light blur to anything. And the random artifact hell that also occurs after seeking, Well, I uninstalled it almost instantly.

Well then, some time ago they released the 1.0 version that was supposed to be "stable" or "feature complete" version as seen on the version number. Well, I'm delighted to say, that atleast they tried and the ***/SSA support is decent. Their brand new and revolutionary instant pause :rolleyes: -feature doesn't work correctly and there is still the delay but this time only in audio. I mean seriously, this thing has been in development in 8 years now and the still don't have proper pause in a media player! Well, the "corrupt image" but still occurs regardless of the file. Well atleast I gave it another chance but I'm still not impressed. Perhaps this VLC thing is for the same people that think Internet Explorer is a good browser because they don't know of better...

****ing censors, A S S is "Advanced SubStation Alpha".

I'll install it on my N900 and I perhaps even might use it if it plays every file flawlessly

1. No need.
2. Are you saying that it's the same thing as 1.6Ghz VIA C-7M?

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Is the OP still correct though, or will the newer VLC not be designed to work well with the N900?

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Yes, we are aware of it.
The confusion exist because along with the changes of the 1.0.3 at the same changelog they put also the changes/improvements for the v1.1.

In any case 1.0.3 is now complete and 1.1 is the next version coming.

edit:
I found this VLC Media Player v1.1 base port for Nokia N900 / Maemo 5 :)

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

1- Ok.
2- In a logic way (one cpu vs one cpu) it is the same but mine would be only faster by 200mhz but in performance it isn't. You can't compare cpu's in this way.
Anyway, to get into the point. Last time I used VLC on my intel m (celeron) It didn't have any problem with it (&this was with an old vlc version) so can be compared with your VIA CPU.

Just before hitting "Submit Reply" , I want to tell it wasn't really necessary to post all your screenshots to tell us that you dont like VLC. ;)

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Since we've taken it there, can you tell me how to integrate the video output into the control UI in Linux? In Windows, it works just right, but on Linux Mint, it gives the video output in a separate window from the playback controls. I tried adjusting the settings, but no cigar. It really annoys me.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

That's surely because how farly inferior it is compared to MPlayer. sudo apt-get install smplayer, you'll be surprised in a positive way. ;)

Of course it was necessary! I just have to tell the world I'm right! :D

VLC being a horrendous piece of sofware isn't just my opinion, it's a fact.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Use the same version as the one that works for you on Windows... probably anything 1.0.0 or later.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

ok, I think I didn't understand what you mean here.

VLC should looks like this http://linuxmint.com/software/pictur...s/1556/VLC.png (This screenshot from linuxmint.com) and you can install it from here http://linuxmint.com/software/files/7/vlc.mint

If I get it right, you just played with your vlc settings. Go to tools->performance-> 1- Click on reset or 2- check the box "Embed video in interface" *you will find it in interface section*

if you are talking about making a desktop (like no3) for vlc then you just go to desktop#3 and start vlc with full screen + with compiz you can notice it will be as part a big cube (if you enabled that plugin)

That's it ;)

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Your advice is dead on, but the effect isn't the same. It STILL outputs to a separate window. Not sure why. I installed right from Synaptic, so not sure what the deal is.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Just wanted to note that VLC on my Ubuntu machine also shows a separate video window by default, so Chris isn't imagining things here...

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

@christexaport Are you using Ubuntu 9.04? The Ubuntu folks messed up on that one such that it uses a separate window. This is not the case in 8.04, 8.10, or 9.10.