LibreOffice Drops Its Experimental, Buggy VLC Integration

[Sonadow]

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.

The previous poster was asking why VLC is not GStreamer-based, and this was my answer.

As for LO, it's affected by GStreamer whether people like it or not. Again, imagine that a distribution only compiles and bundles gst-plugins-base and a subset of gst-plugins-good, specifically the plugins for theora, vorbis and mp3. This means that if I were to embed some kind of media file into a document or a slideshow, i can only embed vorbis and mp3 audio, or theora video. Anything else and the media won't play unless somebody builds all dependent libraries for all the different codecs, and then use those libraries to build the rest of gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-bad and gst-plugins-ugly.

FWIW, Fedora before v26 could not play mp3s because it was missing the corresponding libgstmpg123.so plugin that could only be built with mpg123, and before v31 Fedora could not play mp4 files because it was missing a suitable h264 decoder. Even though I could build my own mpg123 and Openh264, GStreamer will never be able to use them unless I rebuild gst-plugins-bad and gst-plugins-ugly to use those libs. And I don't have the desire to rebuild the audio framework on an operating system.

That said, who the hell in their right minds would embed and playback media files into documents or slideshows in LO? In all my years of using productivity suites, there is only one productivity suite that does this properly, and it (unsurprisingly) comes from Microsoft.

[ivan.cwb]

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.

MPV is awesome... My battery lasts for two movies, using hardware decode acceleration... VLC has a bug with dual-gpu and cannot use hardware-decode properly yet...

However, I keep VLC installed to download subtitles... VLSub is really awesome, and I didn't found anything similar to MPV (I think one of the players that use mpv has this feature, but it's not so complete like VLSub, that you can use choose your language or download based on file hash)...

[curfew]

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

I used to use Celluloid for a while but something happened and its HW decode on Wayland seems to have broken down. CPU usage is back through the roof whereas plain MPV can playback the same clips with minimal CPU usage.

[Vistaus]

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

If only VLC was stable...

[Vistaus]

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.

That's why Celluloid is so popular as a very easy-to-use GUI frontend for MPV.

But even MPV has a GUI frontend, although it feels more like a demo because it doesn't have any features. That's why everyone uses Celluloid, because it's simple for simple users, but still has a couple of easy settings to play with if needed. (and advanced users can use their MPV config file with Celluloid)

But no matter how you look at it, MPV has more market share than VLC these days, so the previous poster is right that VLC has fallen behind.

[Awesomeness]

the world has moved on to MPV.

No, it hasn't. It doesn't even have a proper GUI.

[Awesomeness]

If only VLC was stable...

It is for millions of people. Must be you then.

[Vistaus]

No, it hasn't. It doesn't even have a proper GUI.

MPV currently has more market share than VLC, so yes it has. Also, MPV has a barebones GUI and there are popular 3rd party GUI's like Celluloid.

[Vistaus]

It is for millions of people. Must be you then.

Yeah, me and tons of other people I know... plus the quite few crash and disconnection reports on the VLC forums and bug tracker, confirmed by many.

[torsionbar28]

I want to like LibreOffice. As a user of this office suite since the StarOffice Gmbh days of the late 1990's, I really truly do. Stand-alone, or only interacting with other LibreOffice users, its great. But the defacto file standard is Microsoft Office, at my work and in my school classes, regardless of how much I despise Microsoft. I've found SoftMaker Office has more feature parity with the MS versions, and its MS file format compatibility is vastly improved over LibreOffice, for both import and export. While SoftMaker Office is not FOSS, its modest price tag is well worth it, to me anyways, to have a superior Office suite on Linux where I can exchange files seamlessly with MS Office users, and not have to worry about wonky not-quite-right import/export of the files. SoftMaker Office also "feels" a whole lot faster and more responsive on the same hardware than LibreOffice.