Found this <https://www.protocol.com/vlc-history-open-source> linked from a report on the new version of VLC, describing the history of the project back to its beginnings. Once upon a time there was “VideoLAN Server” and “VideoLAN Client”, but today everything has been rolled into a single “VLC” program. Of course it’s been in the sights of Intellectual Property lawyers for a long time: VLC's success also put it on the radar of patent lawyers, who started to send the VideoLAN team a growing number of legal threats, looking to extract licensing fees. Over the years, the VLC team received hundreds such legal threats over alleged patent violations. Virtually all of them were without merit, according to Kempf. Many were based on U.S. software patents that weren't easily enforceable in Europe. Others were citing technology that VLC was using even before companies tried to patent it. "No one is checking whether these patents are valid," Kempf said. "It's a complete mafia; it's protection money." The open-source x264 codec implementation was also an offshoot of VLC. And Jean-Baptiste Kempf says he could have done those software-bundling deals where unwary users get all kinds of things installed on their PCs in addition to the package they thought they were installing, and thereby earned tens of millions of dollars, but he didn’t want to. The project gets money from donations, but also from companies employing developers to build custom implementations for their set-top boxes.
VLC<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player> is described as the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project provides many of VLC's codecs, but the player mainly uses its own muxers and demuxers. Then there is MPV<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpv_(media_player)> which is described as free and open-source media player software based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg. VLC seems to include a GIU. Apparently, it uses QT4 for Linux. While MPV is still primarily a command-line application and there are a number of GUI front-ends available. I notice that these days the Ubuntu Mate distro includes Celluloid<https://github.com/celluloid-player/celluloid> (formerly GNOME MPV) - for Linux - based on GTK, written in C. Its goal is to be a simple GTK-based graphical interface for MPV that meets the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Makes me wonder if MPV is now becoming more popular than VLC ??? cheers, Ian.
On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 09:19:52 +0000, Ian Stewart wrote:
Then there is MPV<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpv_(media_player)> which is described as free and open-source media player software based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg.
MPlayer was just a CLI tool, as I recall. There were a bunch of different GUI front ends, including KMplayer for KDE, also SMPlayer which I think was supposed to be simpler, and I don’t know what else.
Makes me wonder if MPV is now becoming more popular than VLC ???
Projects seem to spawn other offshoot projects, which then spawn even more offshoots. Me, I mainly stick to ffplay. Though I created my own simple wrapper script for that. ;)
I notice that... $ ffmpeg -h full lists over 11,600 lines of mostly options. $ ffplay -h lists over 7700 lines of mostly options. ...and... $ mpv --list-options has only a "mere" 883 options. Whichever you choose it seems like there's a bit of a learning curve ahead of you.
On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 04:52:56 +0000, Ian Stewart wrote:
I notice that...
$ ffmpeg -h full lists over 11,600 lines of mostly options.
$ ffplay -h lists over 7700 lines of mostly options.
You forgot ffprobe. ;) And don’t forget filter graphs. The explanation of those is in the ffmpeg man page, not the above help listings.
However VLC appears to have developed a major bug in the Mate (Mint 20x) desktop environment by failing to close. Just minimising to task bar and not playing any further media files. On 14/02/21 6:31 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 04:52:56 +0000, Ian Stewart wrote:
I notice that...
$ ffmpeg -h full lists over 11,600 lines of mostly options.
$ ffplay -h lists over 7700 lines of mostly options. You forgot ffprobe. ;)
And don’t forget filter graphs. The explanation of those is in the ffmpeg man page, not the above help listings. _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list -- wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz | To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/postorius/lists/wlug.list.waikato.ac.nz
-- Cheers John
You forgot ffprobe. ;)
Oh dear... $ ffprobe -h has about 2000 options. Hmmmm.. I guess I should be able to learn all those over a cup of tea 😉
And don’t forget filter graphs.
....Well actually I might give them a miss this week. In summary, I'd say you really need to be very keen and with a lot of time to spare, if you intend to get into the world of audio/video on computers.
On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 08:23:09 +0000, Ian Stewart wrote:
You forgot ffprobe. ;)
Oh dear...
$ ffprobe -h has about 2000 options.
Most of that is actually irrelevant to its main function. The man page is more helpful. It’s a very useful tool for analyzing a media file. First of all it breaks down the file into the individual tracks/streams, then it can tell you where all the packets for each stream are--their locations in the file, and their associated movie timestamps (“presentation timestamp” or PTS). Did you notice it can format its output in a number of handy ways, including XML and JSON?
Did you notice it can format its output in a number of handy ways, including XML and JSON?
Hmmm... Not yet. Might have dozed off during that part of the presentation 😉 Ahhh I see what you mean... ...for JSON: $ ffprobe -v quiet -print_format json -show_format -show_streams "my_movie.mp4" > "my_movie.json" $ cat my_movie.json ...or for XML: $ ffprobe -v quiet -print_format xml -show_format -show_streams "my_movie.mp4" > "my_movie.xml" $ cat my_movie.xml ...I figure the json is a little easier to read.
participants (3)
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Ian Stewart -
john -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro