VLC 3.0-RC3 Released With Hardware Decoding That Works On All Platforms

[starshipeleven]

That's not an answer. Transcoding code is not related at all to the video output code.

His answer was "manpower".
VLC people have to work on more features than mpv as VLC is a media server too, and they probably don't have a larger team to compensate.

[aufkrawall]

They should concentrate on the server/streaming stuff and probably cease development of the player component in favor of mpv (either completely or build the UI on top of libmpv).
It's nice to have "competing" open source software, but bitter truth is that VLC as a player is technically not competitive anymore.

[starshipeleven]

They should concentrate on the server/streaming stuff and probably cease development of the player component in favor of mpv (either completely or build the UI on top of libmpv).
It's nice to have "competing" open source software, but bitter truth is that VLC as a player is technically not competitive anymore.

does mpv have any popularity on Windows? I never saw it here. Is it more common where you live?

Meanwhile VLC is very common on windows where I live, also on Android it's popularity is good.

[aufkrawall]

Most non-techy users who use VLC simply open videos file in their OS' file explorers and that's basically the whole featureset they use. It's just a habit that VLC is used, it could be replaced by anything else.

And the Android version isn't great either, I don't know anyone who uses it who also got mxplayer installed.

[starshipeleven]

Most non-techy users who use VLC simply open videos file in their OS' file explorers and that's basically the whole featureset they use. It's just a habit that VLC is used, it could be replaced by anything else.

And the Android version isn't great either, I don't know anyone who uses it who also got mxplayer installed.

I agree on that.

Main reason VLC got popular was because it bundled codecs, so it always "just worked" on any media, which is a BIG feature for non-techy users.

If Windows media player wasn't a total sissy that required manual installation for many codecs to play things (now there are one-click-installer codec packs like K-lite), most people would still use WMP.

Now it is still used because the media player on windows is still crap while VLC keeps working fine for basic usage, so people carry over using VLC.

And on Android it is again popular because of brand recognition from people using it on Windows too.

[nanonyme]

That's not an answer. Transcoding code is not related at all to the video output code.




And what on earth should that be? Buttons? Other Qt-based media players work just fine: https://imgur.com/qbWDk3q

They're doing some bizarre rendering of overlays for video by using multiple X windows. This is 1:1 impossible in Wayland because of window security and Qt API's weren't flexible enough to do this through one Qt Wayland window. There's a ticket on this if you're interested, I got the impression VLC devs were getting fairly frustrated still half a year ago at the situation

[aufkrawall]

Main reason VLC got popular was because it bundled codecs, so it always "just worked" on any media, which is a BIG feature for non-techy users.

I almost forgot that this was an issue in ancient times (and partially also recently).
However, I also know some cases where VLC failed miserably on Windows because it even was too shitty to convert YUV -> RGB on GPU, giving just a green screen with default settings.
Thus MPC HC became an alternative even to novice users, still having a good reputation for being stable (development unfortunately stalled).

Anyway, libmpv offers a good infrastructure to build an UI around a great featureset. D3D11 renderer of new version + D3D11VA should by far be most stable with any GPU on Windows. And it's also extremely light on GPU resources in "dumb-mode" while still can dither down 10 bit video to 8 bit without banding.

[Guest]

Meanwhile MPV has stable Wayland support since years. There even was a full rewrite two months ago: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/co...d9ae84460d5e19

Why is VLC so slow in that regard?

Stable Wayland support? Last I tried mpv about 2 weeks ago, it had no client-side decorations (no way to control the window), and I recall seeing some bug report that basically said too bad and wait for Wayland devs to "fix" it.

[tuuker]

Lets hope it is before Ubuntu 18.04 feature freeze or LTS will have a old VLC.

[xenopick]

I see it. It's here.

I just wish VLC would bring back the ability to play MIDI files. Now I need a separate player for that

I know MIDI might not be that popular, but the ability to have the entire 2h32m FFVII soundtrack take up only 1.44MB of space is amazing. Sure, you need a good soundfont, but once you have the soundfont, you can play all your midi files. You could stream your music all day and it would take maybe 10MB of consumed bandwidth.

Search the original FFVII PSF soundtrack and play with compatible player (Winamp or xmplay with psf plugin), is less than 1 MB and sounds better than MIDI.