Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

joppu, i find your hate of VLC and overall negativity on these boards in every topic funny to say, at least, sad as well. Why? Why so serious? Why the negativity? VLC is the best "out of the box" player out there (media player classic is ok too though). I really dont understand your problems. Pixelation/artifacts can happen even on a quad-core if the file is badly encoded or is not encoded in the "common" way. And mind I say it happens only with MKV files, because they are simply more advanced with more features with a wider range of algorhytm possibilities. It happens, its normal, nothing is perfect, ever, face it, open your eyes, stick your head out of the sand, brother. If you dont like VLC, then dont use it, dont reply to these topics. Easy as that. Your attitude "i know best" is getting old.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

@ dmj726, I'm using Linux Mint 7, which I believe is based on Jaunty Jackelope, aka Ubuntu 9.04, I believe. Glad to know I'm not crazy...

@ Jack6428, let me sort of stick up for joppu on this one, because I see where he's coming from. I'll explain his stance in a nutshell, so let me know, joppu, if I'm offbase.

One of the tenets of open source is to not do the same work twice. VLC reinvented the wheel instead of improving the proven and working gstreamer.They provided a great app experience, but at the expense of the OS's growth. They could've upgraded or added to gstreamer, but they kept the codecs closed only for VLC's usage.

Joppu wants all apps to work WITH the development previous devs have worked hard on to make it better. He is totally against splintering apps and doing work twice. I see his point, and look at VLC totally differently now. He's made a valid point, and we need to really look at how we choose and use code with the betterment of the OS in mind.

Had VLC done things right, most apps would work well, and it'd be all about the best interface. As they've done it, its the workability of the app that is its calling card, when they could've easily added them to gstreamer instead to improve the video experience on Linux across the board. It is a selfish move by VideoLan, but not a cardinal sin.

I'll continue to favor VLC because it is the best performing player for me. But I'll be looking for the same improvements to gstreamer to create the same experience in all players down the road, all for the betterment of the OS experience overall.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Ummm. That is so wrong in so many ways.

a) VLC is older than gstreamer. So no adding there.
b) mplayer (which joppu favors) is even less modular than vlc (if modularity is the issue at hand).

Still both use video libraries which can be reused by other applications if they want to.

VLC didn't reinvent the wheel, either (gstreamer is "just" a set of libraries, VLC is both: set of libs and GUI(s)).

Again. That is completely wrong in many ways. gstreamer and VLC use the same de-/encoders and playback libraries, libavcodec and ffmpeg for example. Same goes for mplayer.

So I don't see where VLC should or could have added to the much younger gstreamer project and can understand why gstreamer was developed even though other solutions were already there. Licensing is one of the issues.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

All I know is that in Windows, VLC plays files other players can not and I do not have to search for codecs for it to work.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Thanks for clearing that up, range. I officially learned alot in that post. Now I have to say this:

Why ARE you tripping, then, joppu?! I don't see why.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

@christexaport: you looks like you are rushing with your judgments :)

Back to your vlc issue, it seems what the other guys said is right.
Here is the solution: http://openthoughts.me/blog/2009/07/...n-ubuntu-9-04/

http://openthoughts.me/blog/2009/07/...n-ubuntu-9-04/

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

@ f(x),
I'm not judging. I like VLC, and its my preferred player. I just tried to see from joppu's perspective, but after getting the info from range, joppu's stance has little merit. I wonder why he feels the way he does?

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

So I'm running an older version on my Linux setup. NOW I know why the video window wouldn't bind...

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

I think VLC killed his dog :P

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Because he doesn't like VLC - which is totally fine. I don't like xine (another multimedia solution with its own set of libs) either. But yeah, he's a tad too vocal with it, IMHO :)

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

VideoLAN project, started 1996, open-sourced early 2000, fully functional at that time (though no Windows support at that time).
gstreamer project started from scratch early 2000.
Now tell me who's reinventing the wheel again?

So why is he supporting (s)mplayer which is not using gstreamer either, is it?

VLC was developped when gstreamer DID NOT EXIST. How the heck were the then developers supposed to contribute to a non-existent project? If there is NIH syndrome, it affects the gstreamer folks at least as badly as the VideoLAN project. They could have built and improved on top of pre-existing FFmpeg and/or VideoLAN instead. They decided to go their own way. That's fine. Contrary to you, I believe mono-culture would do OSS a disservice anyway.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Don't confuse me with that other guy that was talking about the lack of the modularity.

What modularity? I have not ever talked anything about modularity!

The core of the problem is, that everyone says "ololol vlc plays everything, its so good, everyone should get it since its so awsome" but in real life it is mediocre at the best. I just despise the way everyone is hyping up the software that is just fundamentally so crappy.

Bravo!

Correct.

Uhhh, okay? Can you point out an example of a thread where I'm being so "negative".

How it's the best? Have you ever even used (S)MPlayer?

Media Player Classic indeed is one of the best media playback solutions in Windows environment.

Is VLC way the "common" way? Like how everyone has to make specific version of their HTML site for Internet Explorer 5 just because it fail miserably with standards?

Normal for you, since you use VLC.

Here you are just proving your ignorance, .mkv is the container, not a video format. You are probably referring to h.264 encoded video here.

Yes, naturally you know everything so much better than me.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

I have no accurate statistics, but I believe mplayer to be the most popular media player on Linux. OTOH, gstreamer would most probably claim to be "the common way" for being endorsed by FreeDesktop and quite a bunch of distros (including Maemo in fact).

The implication that VLC is not obedient to standards is offensive. VLC receives a lot of invalid bug reports to support broken files from stupid embedded devices or random crappy FFmpeg-on-Windows front-ends. It is also well-known to be rather strict about properly formatted MPEG streams or SDP syntax for instance.

But obviously, you only care about Matroska. Matroska is a fine format, doubtlessly the best in terms of features coverage. But it is so damn complicated that it's easy for authoring software to screw it up, difficult to fully support on the read side. That said, VLC reads iMKV quite fine if you build the native libmatroska plugin. If however you rely on FFmpeg through VLC, then it sucks, so it depends on your VLC package.

As for those subtitle formats you're complaining, the biggest problem has been crappy support for upstream libraries. Lets face it, the maintenance history of libass is a mess. To make things worse, VLC did not see a proper release for 2 years between 0.8.6 and 0.9.2. Comparing with (s)mplayer is unfair if you use the bleeding edge SVN mplayer/FFmpeg version with the official VLC release. If you really want to compare properly, use bleeding edge master branches for both of them.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Yes, gstreamer offers an excellent framework but the performance leaves a bit to be desired.

I still don't get it, why does it then still cause the artifact mess when jumping in time and dropping frames? Or is it a feature of the player itself?

Yes, it's always the upstream. How come FFDSHOW on windows and MPlayer have had the proper subtitle support for longer? Are they using a different library or what?

It's not my fault that the SMPlayer installer installs the latest SVN of MPlayer and the official VLC installer installs this "outdated" version.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

@joppu:
You know that I was joking about vlc/dog. Anyway, seriously it is stupid to say VLC is the best or X is the best.
You know that you are getting pissed of from a software? (Something that isn't even real!)

You don't like VLC its ok, use something else.
Here (I am also having with it mplayer,xine , real player)
I tends to run everything on VLC & When some things don't work I try mplayer/xine (Currently available only on my old pc's as I stopped using it)

joppu: could you please stop repeating what you are saying over and over in the same thread?


We got your points:

1- Joppu don't like VLC
2- Joppu won't mind using VLC if it runs fine and fits his need
3- Joppu prefer other players than VLC
4- Joppu wants a better subtitle player
5- Joppu might sacrifice a player into anther for performance
6- Joppu is a free person that he can use any software for his need like everyone else
7- Joppu lists could go forever...
...

Kindly, it is really enough. if you like to discuss this topic again (lets wait till VLC v2) ;)

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

This has nothing to do with following standards. It has everything to do with looking for the nearest key frame.

It's open-source, you can check it out yourself and compile. Besides, VLC has nightly builds for MacOS, Windows, Debian and Ubuntu to my knowledge.

Anyway, if you're happy with smplayer, good for you. That does not mean EVERY BODY else should use smplayer.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Joppu just thought that VLC insulted him personally when his anime went all messy, and now he has eternal grudge against it, and of course, everyone who uses VLC.

If someone likes to use VLC, then let him do so. It's none of your business what media player somebody uses. Your actions resembel to the witch-hunts in the 16th century :/

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

GStreamer was first made public in 1999, we celebrated our 10 year anniversary this year. Citation: GStreamer 0.0.9 released! 1999-10-31 from http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/news/

Regardless it is good to have multiple projects that work on similar things. We even collaborate a little. I spoke with some VLC guys at GSoC Mentor summit last week and we talked about further collaboration on stuff like BluRay support.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

I love it when we get developers from various projects in a thread all talking about finding the nearest keyframe and collaborating on BluRay support.

But redenisc, you have to remember that this is primarily a user forum, so people are going to click on the official installer on the web page, not download the source and compile the latest svn with the native libmatroska plugin. If you want users to have access to bleeding edge versions of the app, you have to provide a not-too-difficult way for them to download packaged binaries of these versions.

I like the gstreamer backend too, I just don't understand why the maemo media player constantly says "format not supported" on standard XviD / mp3 AVIs when the same video plays fine in VLC or mplayer. Doesn't it use the standard ffmpeg decoders? Is this a problem of the media player or the gstreamer plugins? Could we get custom gstreamer plugins for Maemo that add support for all ffmpeg-supported codecs?

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

This is another question, so I'll ask it in another post.

What is the command line way to set up an http wmv stream from /dev/video0? What about also sending a stream to the screen as well?

Is there also a way to run VLC from the command line, and when it is finished playing the thing you asked it to play, it quits rather than staying in VLC?

If I could get a command line, I could even package it up like the old "Peekaboo" project for the NITs...

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Note that the dsp stuff gets moody at times (on my prerelease firmware). On several occasions I had "format not supported" on files that previously played back perfectly. A reboot later, they were ok again.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

aha... DSP limitations... That could explain a lot... So the problem with the Maemo gstreamer plugin is that it can't fall back to non-DSP playback.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

That's why there is http://nightlies.videolan.org/

You have to remember that most normal users want a trade-offs between features and stability, rather than always the latest features.

When you're writing a library such as FFmpeg, maybe you can ignore this problem. But when you're shipping end-user software to millions of (mostly clueless) Windows/MacOS/Linux users, you just cannot ship the latest GIT version to everybody everyday and without testing.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

I built and put gstreamer0.10-plugins-ffmpeg into extras-devel this morning.

This should handle some of the quirkier video and audio codecs found in files.

A word of warning, the library takes 5MB in root so maybe I should move it to /home/user/.gstreamer-0.10/plugins/ for my next package upload.

UPDATE: also vp6 which is not quirky :) This will require flvdemux to play flv files, which I will try and package later today.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

As I understand it, it /opt would be better. See http://wiki.maemo.org/Opt_Problem

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

/opt would be fine for me but that means Nokia would have to change their GST_PLUGIN_PATH default environment which I doubt they will.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Using maemo-optify moves the file into /opt/maemo/<whatever> and adds a symlink to where the file originally was. So using maemo-optify should not require a change of GST_PLUGIN_PATH.

Anyway, thanks for the upload. More codecs is never a bad thing.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Hey, when you VLC critics are able to play all those "fine" hentai vids that no other player can- you will feel real bad and will then like VLC ;)

Actually, some are pretty cool in an artistic kind of way... :)

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Thanks, I put a new optified gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg into extras-devel

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Sorry if you got confused. I will attest that the latest VLC has less compatibility problems with all of the various media files I use than any other media player on Windows or Linux. Its not hype for me, but testimony. I preferred Totem's interface, but just like on Windows, I always had to pull out VLC when things went awry. Now I just stick to it, and its all good.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

You sir are my current personal hero, you just made my n900 so much more useful.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

zaheerm: thank you for the package, but the Maemo media player still doesn't play any extra videos, including videos that should play via ffmpeg. Is there something that you have to do that will make the media player use your package rather than simply failing with "codec not supported"?

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

I just restarted after installing which gave me thumbnails for videos that were not showing up before, and the videos actually played! Not sure what needs to be restarted in /etc/event.d, however, to allow you to play the videos w/out a reboot...

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

the media player process needs to be restarted. also if you have flv files you should install gstreamer0.10-flv. if you have mkv files you should install gstreamer0.10-plugins-good-extra and then run as root: tracker-register-mimetype -c Videos -a video/x-matroska

that should really be a postinst in that package as well as restarting media player. maybe i should get the gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg postinst to restart media player.

if you have videos that dont play with the media player after this, let me know the type and codec info and i can either get more stuff packaged or let you know what is needed.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Sorry if this has been asked elsewhere, but Im looking for a codec to allow me to play a HD .avi video file. My N900 plays normal .avi's, but it fails to play this high Definition .avi, which is XivD.

Any help appreciated.!

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

if you put the file up somewhere for me to download, i can see why and if necessary package up stuff so n900 can play it.

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Thanks, this is the video file.


http://www.digital-digest.com/movies...ast_stand.html

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Hmm I wonder if there's a wiki article on playing video formats. This would be great material for it (for the n900).

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

There is some stuff here:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...n_Media_Player

Re: VLC Player Officially coming
 

Great point!

We need specific playback parameters of what the device will play out of the box, since a lot of users will only use what the device came with. Unless there is a simple way of adding codecs or a player with (perhaps) more ability through the repository for the N900.

Like it or not, this site is going to get overrun by non-techs that bought the device and will have MANY questions that will cause MANY of you here to roll your eyes.

Change is a commin' :eek: