Features Coming For The VLC 2.1 Media Player

[KellyClowers]

Don't hold your breath, from what I read a while ago and even today on the forum - vdpau support in vlc is gonna require a lot more CPU for some (most?) people for unknown (to me) reasons, which screws the whole point of using vdpau.
That's why I stay with Gnome Mplayer, its vdpau support is better than in SMplayer and consumes almost no CPU when video is paused, unlike SMplayer.

I just use plain mplayer, or these days mplayer2

[Marc Driftmeyer]

You can quickly fix the bug by declaring it a feature, like corporations do.

There you go! Problem solved for Videolan. They are a Non-Profit Corporation.

[garegin]

new 2.1 feature. sort by album title for mac. it's ridiculous that in 2013 I can't order my music by album name.

[Ancurio]

Hmm, color conversions with GLSL. Am I the only one who want to show it to that Xvideo-on-GLAMOR guy? He had writing exactly that on the agenda.

Color space conversion isn't exactly rocket science.

[smitty3268]

I'm aware Awesomeness, I was more directing my comment to the linked post where the user stated the VLC has ALWAYS used more CPU than other movie player-- regardless of hardware acceleration or not. That its idling was just higher than others. Maybe its a generic bug, maybe its a bug due to architectural design of VLC, who knows.

Disclaimer - i'm not a vlc or video expert, but my understanding is this:

Most video players are rather dumb - they just decode the file and display it on the screen. Hardware decoding is perfectly suited to this task, as it can be done completely on the GPU.

VLC, on the other hand, has an entire pipeline that it sends the video down. That's where the "LAN" in VLC comes from, and it allows them to do random post-processing effects, etc. on the videos. However, at least some of that can only be done on the CPU, which means that after VDPAU finishes decoding on the GPU, it gets sent back to the CPU, the rest of the processing is done there, and then it gets sent back to the GPU again to finally be displayed on the screen.

Which means it is completely expected that you'd see higher CPU usage in VLC. Now, presumably they should be able to optimize that out - see if any further processing is necessary and in the common case just display directly on the screen like other players do. But i'm guessing that isn't easy given the architecture they have written into VLC.

[xgt001]

Don't hold your breath, from what I read a while ago and even today on the forum - vdpau support in vlc is gonna require a lot more CPU for some (most?) people for unknown (to me) reasons, which screws the whole point of using vdpau.
That's why I stay with Gnome Mplayer, its vdpau support is better than in SMplayer and consumes almost no CPU when video is paused, unlike SMplayer.

unfortunately, Gnome Mplayer always crashes for me

MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: vo_check_events

SMplayer works neat, though it consumes additional 2 - 4% of CPU... and I agree largely about VLC's CPU consumption

[Adarion]

Finally VDPAU!
I was so shocked when I discovered that VLC did not support it after I got VDPAU on UVD to run...
Of course all other improvements are also welcome.

[curaga]

As smitty explained, it's the architecture. This is exactly why you use mplayer and not VLC (or god forbid, gstreamer).

[GreatEmerald]

You're saying Blu-ray is already perfect or you've tried a pre-release and didn't notice much difference? I hope it's better than mplayer at least. Although the framerate holds up with low CPU usage, I get some tearing, which I thought VDPAU was supposed to eliminate. The audio sync isn't terrible but it could be better. Finding the right episode can be a challenge and it often starts playing with the wrong language. Not much fun when you're trying to chill out in front of the TV.

I'm saying that VLC cannot play Blu-ray and will never be able to, due to Blu-ray inherent DRM. Sure, you can sometimes crack it, but then what's the point of owning a Blu-ray video disc to begin with?

VLC, on the other hand, has an entire pipeline that it sends the video down. That's where the "LAN" in VLC comes from

I'm pretty sure the LAN comes from the same place where Client does. As in, Video LAN Client and Video LAN Server were originally created for streaming video over LAN on a campus. Now the name is completely deprecated and thus the VLC acronym has no actual meaning.

[Chewi]

I'm saying that VLC cannot play Blu-ray and will never be able to, due to Blu-ray inherent DRM. Sure, you can sometimes crack it, but then what's the point of owning a Blu-ray video disc to begin with?

I don't think it's that bad in practise. My optical drive packed up recently so I did some research to determine whether it was worth buying a Blu-ray drive now. I concluded that it was. Only BD+ titles, which are currently limited to Fox, pose a significant problem, and even those can be played with a little more effort. The rest just work, more or less. I don't buy many films as I don't tend to rewatch so I rent them by post instead. If there's one title I want that I know to be problematic, I'll just choose DVD instead, but that hasn't happened yet.