LibreOffice Drops Its Experimental, Buggy VLC Integration

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice Drops Its Experimental, Buggy VLC Integration

LibreOffice has various "AVMedia" back-ends for supporting the playback of audio and video within the open-source office suite with GStreamer and other platform-specific options. LibreOffice also supported a VLC back-end for audio/video playback but after years of that code being experimental and not maintained, it's now been eliminated...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-Drops-VLC-Code

[Setif]

No new (feature) release for VLC since almost three years (02/2018).

[Murdock2525]

No new (feature) release for VLC since almost three years (02/2018).

That's about the time I gave up after 20 or so years. Long live Celluloid

[caligula]

Would anyone happen to know, what are the main advantages and disadvantages for each media player backend? Why can't VLC use gstreamer or the mplayer/mpv's backend?

[Sonadow]

Why can't VLC use gstreamer or the mplayer/mpv's backend?

Because GStreamer is a fucking mess. Every single decoder and encoder needs to be made available to the framework at compile time, and there is no way to 'add codecs' to it if it wasn't enabled during the build. This means if a distribution like Fedora built GStreamer with only a few encoders and decoders for the gst-plugins-base and gst-plugins-good, that's all the user is going to get. Installing things like libmpg123 or libx264 *after* GStreamer has been built and distributed is not going to magically make GStreamer gain mp3 playback or x264 encoding unless the whole damn framework and corresponding gst-plugins-good/bad/ugly is rebuilt.

This was a huge problem for distributions back then as they could not legally build and distributed the various libraries needed to compile gst-plugins-bad and gst-plugins-ugly, which contains codecs that most of the world is using (especially mp3, mp4 and mkv). Other parties like Packman and RPMFusion had to manually build their own versions of GStreamer with all the required dependencies (which are close to a hundred, by the way) just to deliver a working version of gst-plugins-bad and gst-plugins-ugly that could play most media.

FFmpeg has the same issue, but a huge advantage FFmpeg has over GStreamer is that a fully functional FFmpeg build only needs openSSL, libx264, libx265, opus, libvpx, libfdk_acc and LAME to be present at compile time as it already has decoders and encoders for most other formats and containers. That's why it's so much easier to get FFMPEG-based players working in a short period of time, and why even browsers like Firefox and Chromium prefer to depend on FFmpeg as it allows everything to be baked into a single deliverable.

More importantly, it is possible to have multiple versions of FFmpeg within the same operating system, each serving different applications. I have a copy of FFmpeg built with libx264, libx265, opus, libvpx, libfdk_acc and LAME which link with Audacity for audio editing and VLC for media playback, another version of FFmpeg built with gnuTLS, libx264, libx265, opus, libvpx, libfdk_acc and LAME for capturing and streaming my PS4 gameplay over HTTPS, and lastly, a third version of FFmpeg built with openSSL, libx264, libx265, opus, libvpx, libfdk_acc and LAME for capturing and streaming my PS4 gameplay over rmtp for Facebook Live, YouTube or even China's BiliBili. Try doing that with GStreamer and see how the audio framework in a Linux distribution gets trashed beyond repair.

That's why I always make it a point to build media players that do not use GStreamer.

[Awesomeness]

No new (feature) release for VLC since almost three years (02/2018).

Full API stability since three years (or more). Booooo!

[bash2bash]

VLC?? does that even still exist???

Wake up, the world has moved on to MPV. There is absolutely no reason to keep garbage like VLC around.

[DanL]

Because GStreamer is a fucking mess

I get your point, but LO is not a media player. I am fine with applications like that using Gstreamer for basic media playback if they find it easier. Gstreamer has an ffmpeg plugin for more obscure formats too.

All roads lead to Gstreamer.

Only in your little GNOME troll land.

[tildearrow]

I think they should just use FFmpeg and be done with it. This looks like overcomplicating things for an office suite.

[Setif]

VLC?? does that even still exist???

Wake up, the world has moved on to MPV. There is absolutely no reason to keep garbage like VLC around.

Which world are you living in?
Do you prefer using command lines over GUI in your world?
Because in my world our people prefer usability and a lot of them are just simple users.