VLC Saw A Lot Of Exciting Work Thanks To Google Summer of Code 2018

[starshipeleven]

You can file me under moron because I chose to engage with your substance-free post about Hurd. Feeding the troll is the mistake of a moron. Guilty as charged.

Wrong thread for that.

Here your first post is the insane hallucinatory nonsense about VLC leaking your info to third party servers through Bonjour. While you are using MacOS.

[DavidKL]

If you don't know what Bonjur/Avahi/Upnp are and what they actually do, and proceed to fill this void with your imagination you're either a moron or an agent.

You can file me under moron because I chose to engage with your substance-free post about Hurd. Feeding the troll is the mistake of a moron. Guilty as charged.

[starshipeleven]

If a pre-Snowden world perhaps your rhetoric might be more persuasive.

It's not rethoric, it's know-how.

If you don't know what Bonjur/Avahi/Upnp are and what they actually do, and proceed to fill this void with your imagination you're either a moron or an agent.

In another topic, I was assured that Firefox is beyond reproach, by virtue of being open source.

No, we told you that being opensource allows you to inspect it instead of speculating wildly.

[DavidKL]

If a pre-Snowden world perhaps your rhetoric might be more persuasive. I suppose a time machine is in order.

Of course, one didn't need him to know the fix is in in so many ways. All that is required is the ability to read the news.

Verify then trust, not the other way around. Or, be foolish. It's your choice.

It must be very comforting to adhere to the motto: "Since knowledge is power, who would want it?"

We live in a world where it is an established fact that the US government labeled people who read the Linux Journal "dangerous extremists". Please apologize for that, somehow, whilst attacking me simultaneously (and bragging, of course). Surprise me. I've never seen that kind of post before.

In another topic, I was assured that Firefox is beyond reproach, by virtue of being open source. Simultaneously, I was advised to use TOR. Well, there is no reason for the latter to exist, is there — if the first bit of advice is based in truth. People are, though, so often content to indulge in unresolved cognitive dissonance when it's the easier path.

[starshipeleven]

I find it a tad suspicious that it now automatically involves itself in a user's local network on OS X (via Bonjour), with no apparent way to disable that via the GUI. It makes me wonder what else VLC is doing with networking, especially given Google's involvement. Let me guess... it's tracking what people are watching and uploading information about that to some 3rd party (or several).

You should really stop speculating about things you don't know shit about, as this only shows you have paranoia issues, and spread FUD for other weak-minded people.

Bonjur/Avahi/Upnp are services designed to allow OTHER APPLICATIONS in a LAN to reach a specific client without knowing who it is beforehand. They only work for devices in the same LAN. (if you enable Upnp on the the router then the UPNP applications can ask it to open ports, but that's an UpNP-only thing and not relevant for LAN-only services).

They are completely tangential to sending over data to some server, any application in your PC can request network access and unless you have a whitelist in your firewall (either the PC's own or the hardware firewall) they will be granted such access. PARANOIA GO WILD!!!!

So, in case you didn't know, VLC is a media server, https://www.videolan.org/vlc/streaming.html and as such it has to advertise its own presence to potential clients, using the most common services to do so.

VLC name stood for "Video LAN Client" (and now it is no more just a client, but still, "Video LAN" man, it has always been a local streaming application).

[grok]

Paranoid much? Hiding spyware code in an open source program might not be impossible, but unlikely.

There's also the avahi daemon on linux. This is supposed to be LAN stuff.
If you're concerned about this disable the Bonjour daemon on your OSX installation.

[DavidKL]

I find it a tad suspicious that it now automatically involves itself in a user's local network on OS X (via Bonjour), with no apparent way to disable that via the GUI. It makes me wonder what else VLC is doing with networking, especially given Google's involvement. Let me guess... it's tracking what people are watching and uploading information about that to some 3rd party (or several). I would not doubt if that is only one of the surreptitious things VLC is doing these days. It would be in keeping with the latest trends in OS X (now "MacOS") and Windows in particular. I've read that Quicktime Player already does something similar, along with Apple's Spotlight (which reportedly gives a list of every file you open to both Apple and MS). It seems we're in a race between Apple and Microsoft to see which vendor can make the more user-hostile OS.

It has three entries under local network in OS X:

Bonjour Network Discovery
Network streams (SAP)
Universal Plug'n'Play

[tildearrow]

Sincerely I don't use VLC since a long time, during the time it seem have lost its first goals, today I believe the MPV is way better than VLC!

What I hate about VLC:

- It slows-down/speeds-up (notable by a slight pitch change) audio. They say it's to synchronize to a system clock, but when I am the only client, it does not make any sense.
- The latency for the equalizer, the speed-up/slow-down effect and video seeking (and especially in weird/unusual formats (yes, I work with 4:4:4 H.264)) is horrible (especially on Android, where it can be up to *8* seconds!), when compared to mpv and QuickTime.

[grok]

Well I can see that motion is worse on a mediocre laptop LCD than it was on CRT at 100Hz. Haven't a modern 144Hz LCD to see how it looks. But I don't think I care much or even realize that VLC's renderer is supposed to suck.
I like that the GUI is easy to use and I hope they don't fuck it up with that QML rewrite by making it some kind of Android / Windows 8 GUI.
Some features are great like the keys among HJKL to set audio delay, this makes poor files entirely watchable once in a while. Aspect ratio and cropping are decent though they won't let you use arbitrary numbers (like for cropping the crap around a vertical video)

It's still better than streaming since I get instant seeks vs a three second wait, and I can pause it as long as I want without failing the download.

[rabcor]

VLCs problem is that they're using a shitty outdated super mediocre video renderer that can't match up to pretty much anything else, until that's fixed there's pretty much no reason to even use vlc over just streaming shit online. With MPV and MPC at least we have access to quality upscaling algorithms, smoothmotion/motion interpolation and other such nice (read: necessary) things.