VLC 2.0 Twoflower Media Player Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VLC 2.0 Twoflower Media Player Released

VLC 2.0 (codenamed "Twoflower") has been released as a major update to this very popular open-source multimedia player...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA1OTM

[susikala]

Sadly, this only enforces my idea that releases and upping major version numbers is all about publicity and competition. Otherwise you'd find it pretty peculiar that a relatively short while after mplayer2 is forked/released, vlc follows suite. Not that vlc is an inherently bad thing.

That's why I like chromium's release numbering. They seem pretty arbitrary and you never notice any real big change (well, especially on the alpha channel), but the browser slowly improves all the time. Not that chromium is an inherently good thing, of course.

[Raven3x7]

Sadly, this only enforces my idea that releases and upping major version numbers is all about publicity and competition. Otherwise you'd find it pretty peculiar that a relatively short while after mplayer2 is forked/released, vlc follows suite. Not that vlc is an inherently bad thing.

That's why I like chromium's release numbering. They seem pretty arbitrary and you never notice any real big change (well, especially on the alpha channel), but the browser slowly improves all the time. Not that chromium is an inherently good thing, of course.

A) It's not a fork
B)Did you even read the article? There's a large number of changes in this release.
Besides there's nothing wrong with a quality project getting some well deserved publicity

[FourDMusic]

License change

You forgot to mention that they changed their license from GPL to LGPLv2.1+ (http://www.videolan.org/press/lgpl-libvlc.html). This will mostly benefit users since it will allow applications and plug-ins based on VLC to be built under non-GPL licenses i.e. more proprietary features.

While I'm not particularly fond of this idea (I'd rather have the companies simply release an open-source version of their features, but let's face it, that probably won't happen), I respect the VLC project's decision to put their users' experience before open-source idealists.

[GreatEmerald]

That also fixed the bug that prevented VLC from playing videos directly from YouTube. Yay, now I can see YT videos with hardware acceleration!

[DanL]

That's why I like chromium's release numbering. They seem pretty arbitrary and you never notice any real big change.

Google Chrome's (yeah, I know chromium != Chrome) release numbers suck and I can't believe Mozilla caved to the ignorant notion that one program is inherently better than another because it has a bigger version number.

[susikala]

A) It's not a fork
B)Did you even read the article? There's a large number of changes in this release.
Besides there's nothing wrong with a quality project getting some well deserved publicity

1. mplayer2 is very well a fork of mplayer. It's possible you left your reading comprehension at home?
2. Regardless of the number of changes, I said I find it curious how vlc ups to 2 just (or relatively short) after mplayer2 is released. For me, this is about publicity more than quality. And quality isn't measured in version numbering, sorry.

[Kivada]

Sadly, this only enforces my idea that releases and upping major version numbers is all about publicity and competition. Otherwise you'd find it pretty peculiar that a relatively short while after mplayer2 is forked/released, vlc follows suite. Not that vlc is an inherently bad thing.

That's why I like chromium's release numbering. They seem pretty arbitrary and you never notice any real big change (well, especially on the alpha channel), but the browser slowly improves all the time. Not that chromium is an inherently good thing, of course.

1. mplayer2 is very well a fork of mplayer. It's possible you left your reading comprehension at home?
2. Regardless of the number of changes, I said I find it curious how vlc ups to 2 just (or relatively short) after mplayer2 is released. For me, this is about publicity more than quality. And quality isn't measured in version numbering, sorry.

As opposed to what? The old traditional open source versioning scheme? "Ok, our project is 15 years old, we've just released version 0.3567.46.0057995487. We're just gonna keep going on like this with a version number that means nothing to nobody, doesn't tell anyone anything about what new features have been added or anything, it's just huge and has many decimal points thus you know the code quality must be amazing!"

Least with the Firefox versioning scheme I know what the browser is capable of at a glance, I don't need to hire a changelog Sherpa to find out whats new in 0.3567.46.0057995487

[smitty3268]

Great new feature

Multi-threaded decoding for H.264, MPEG-4/Xvid and WebM.

[XorEaxEax]

You forgot to mention that they changed their license from GPL to LGPLv2.1+ (http://www.videolan.org/press/lgpl-libvlc.html). This will mostly benefit users since it will allow applications and plug-ins based on VLC to be built under non-GPL licenses i.e. more proprietary features.

Actually from the announcement is says LGPL only applies to the libVLC engine while the VLC Media Player is still licenced under GPLv2. I see nothing wrong with this move since I think LGPL is a great choice for component style code, meaning you are only interested in changes made to the components (in this case libVLC) be given back to the original project.

And yes, multithreaded decoding sounds great! I also hope they have improved on stability when jumping around in video streams at 3x, 4x etc speeds, as it's the only time I've encountered crashes in VLC.