LibreOffice Drops Its Experimental, Buggy VLC Integration

[Vistaus]

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 and export of the files. SoftMaker Office also "feels" a whole lot faster and more responsive on the same hardware than LibreOffice.

I share your experience with SoftMaker. Also, it's about the same age as MS Office, which also contributes to its robustness. SoftMaker ftw!

[Setif]

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

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.

You mean market share in Linux world, because Celluloid is only available for Linux and VLC is very popular among Windows users.

[finalzone]

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

GStreamer is better documented: https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/do...?gi-language=c
Let's also remind Collabora, one of LibreOffice contributor, also works on Gstreamer which is a framework that support ffpmeg via gstreamer-libav.

[brad0]

All roads lead to Gstreamer.

All roads lead to garbage.

[brad0]

Wake up, the world has moved on

Must be a Linux user, not living in reality as usual.

[brad0]

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.

You're being way way too generous with LibreOffice.

[r1348]

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.

You are aware right, that additional GStreamer plugins for pretty much all media formats around has been available in 3rd party repos like RPMFusion since, huh, forever? And that GStreamer has a modular architecture that doesn't force you at all to rebuild everything from scratch every time you want to add a codec, you can just build that one and plug it to the existed installed framework, which is exactly what Fedora is doing.

[polarathene]

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.

What makes VLC garbage exactly? It plays whatever video I've asked it to, runs fine. I can change audio track, add/switch subtitles, go fullscreen, scrub playback, adjust volume... all those common/basic features. They work well for me.

Not saying MPV is worse, I just don't have any issues with VLC. If you need more than the stuff I mentioned perhaps MPV gives you that, perhaps you have issues with VLC that I don't for whatever reasons, cool use MPV.

If only VLC was stable...

I play a video, it works. What isn't stable? Perhaps you're trying to use some niche features or run it on niche hardware or something? I dunno, but I use VLC and so do many others I know and none of us has ever had a stability issue.

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.

What market share? Where is this information from? You have actual stats or pulling figures out of bias/experience? I don't have anything tangible beyond my own social network and I know without having to ask everyone, that the majority would recognize VLC over MPV.

[skeevy420]

You mean market share in Linux world, because Celluloid is only available for Linux and VLC is very popular among Windows users.

I use MPV and SMPlayer on Windows and Linux

If you need a multi-OS solution that's a pretty good one, IMHO.

[skeevy420]

What makes VLC garbage exactly?

The default UI. I've never cared for their default UI since their earliest of days. Aside from that it's a fine player.