Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac

plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."

Re:Could it be possible that noone cares?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

What is this walled garden that you speak of?

Re:Oh fuck no

[Moridineas]

I'm not at all a fan of iTunes, but your post is totally full of false information!

Hard to find something that would burn CDs--sounds like you're talking about an all-in-one program? because it's built into the operating system. It's built into iTunes. The most famous and longlived 3rd party program is Toast. Can install commandline tools as well.

The reason iTunes has a library interface is that...that's the entire point of itunes! If you just want to play a media file once, use Quicktime/vlc/mplayer/Audion/etc. Secondly on this note, iTunes by no means compels you to either consolidate your files under its library or rename your existing files. The directory names are hardly cryptic??

I do, however, agree that losing vlc would be too bad, because I fount it usually worked better than mplayer on the Mac.

Re:Oh fuck no

[Duradin]

Make a burn folder. Drop files in burn folder. Put in blank [CD|DVD]. Hit Burn.

I've had my mac since 2006 and it has always had the ability to burn discs built in.

I'm sorry the world has moved on from storing music in [artist]_[album]-[track#]-[trackname].mp3 but metadata is a wee bit more handy and convenient for sorting music collections and playlists.

Re:Oh fuck no

[Just Some Guy]

But these wiseguys don't realise that I'd much rather deal with files that I can recognise by their filename, copy and move them with the well known 'cp' and 'mv' commands rather than having their craptastic software try to manage it all.

Step 1: Tell iTunes not to manage my library.

Step 2: Drag the 30GB "music" folder from the fileserver onto iTunes and wait for it to index everything.

Step 3: Have easy access to all my music, with not a file moved or renamed.

There are plenty of reasons why you might not like iTunes, but if you're 'leet enough not to like the way it handles your files, then you're 'leet enough to tell it not to.

Re:OS X is UNIX

[GWBasic]

Actually I think that VLC has moved to QT for the interface so the GUI should port

I doubt that QT provides the video and audio abstraction needed. VLC does things like directly use the SPDIF, which is pretty low-level.

VLC is an amazing, gigantic success on OS X

[Ilgaz]

Are you really joking? VLC is the most successful open source project on Mac, forever. It even beats Firefox.

Here is a top sw downloads listing from absolutely general user focused download site: http://www.macupdate.com/popular/ [macupdate.com]

VLC has also become de-facto remote controlled Apple OS X software for iPhone/iPod users. Those are the true "walled garden" lovers/ignorers.

VLC should look at their community, IRC channel, developer public comments for why on earth their developer level dropped to zero with such amazing success. Imagine you are a multimedia developer, is there anything more visible and easy to contribute than VLC? Get a CVS pwd, start showing off with your coding capabilities... Really interesting... I suspect some bad treatment to Mac users/Developers going on. BTW, they should look at pure numbers, not some troll/idiot comments from some download sites or blogs. They are currently de facto standard multimedia player on OS X. They should figure this fact if not already.

PS: Not a big VLC fan really while it saves us all the time at TV. I personally use Coreplayer OS X which is really really unpopular and commercial application which does amazing things like playing 720P HD/H264 on G4 1.42 Ghz.

You miss my point

[Ilgaz]

For plugins like Flash and high end commercial games, engine conversion, FreeBSD is irrelevant. What I talk about is something which will run under MS Visual Studio based development environment, whatever game developers/plugin developers use.

Of course, FreeBSD will have GC just like they have launchd but it won't really matter to some game developer or a plugin developer like Adobe.

Re:Oh fuck no

[rlthomps-1]

Its like its authors decided the age-old concept of 'files' was not good enough anymore so their software (poorly) tries to portray the real-life concept of a dusty box filled with records while dumping every song into some random folder with a cryptic filename. But these wiseguys don't realise that I'd much rather deal with files that I can recognise by their filename, copy and move them with the well known 'cp' and 'mv' commands rather than having their craptastic software try to manage it all.

I'm sure you're just going to yell "FANBOI FANBOI FANBOI" at me, but seriously, if you want to use 'mv' and 'cp' to manage your files, why did you think a GUI music library program was going to be useful to you at all? Also, if you're so leet, how come you didn't figure out that you can turn off their file management features? Is it because they didn't give you a CLI tool to edit the pref file?

Re:OS X needs VLC

[ducomputergeek]

So, basically, you're mad that it won't play your pirated movies out of the box? I've got karma to burn, so time to feed the trolls.

Yeah, I'm going to assume that you really have no idea how the encoder/decoder market works or video production in general. Basically, there are companies that create codecs like DivX and then require payment to encode and distribute videos using their codec because of patents. In order for Apple to ship DivX, they would have to license DivX from DivX. Why should apple pay the licensing fee when they can direct users here: http://www.divx.com/en/mac [divx.com] and the user can download and install for free? I mean the last time I dealt with Windows I remember having to go and fetch the DivX Codec. And the last time I set up a new Mac, QuickTime popped up when it could find the Codec, knew what kind of file it was, and provided a link to the Divx site to go download it. All of this has to do with Licensing. It's really more of a legal issue than a technical one. So how is software licensing and patents preventing them from shipping every codec known to man Apple's fault again? Because unlike a lot of F/OSS projects, Apple can't be 100% based out of Hungry or France to circumvent these licensing restrictions. The do business in the United States and other countries that do recognize and enforce these copyright treaties. Technically, downloading and using VLC and FFMPEG in the United States constitutes infringement on various Codec patents, but that's a topic for another thread and another day. Also I would check on Windows. If it shipped with DivX, chances are that was added by the PC vender in a 3rd party deal, not by Microsoft. (Actually I don't pay attention to who is licensing what these days).

MKV isn't a format, it's a container. Just like .MOV is a container as is .AVI. The quality inside a .MKV, .AVI, or .MOV is all dependent upon the compression and codecs used not the container format. And the last time I tried playing MKV files, the program took up WAY too many system resources. The only place that I've seen MKV as a popular format is with Azurus/Vuze. In fact, I've never seen it used outside of Vuze. Occasionally you'll see it in a torrent, but they are mostly DivX/Avi.

The fact that macs can't play Blu-Ray or HD-DVD has to do with the fact that Apple doesn't ship any models with said player. MAC LACKS THE HARDWARE NEEDED IN ORDER TO READ EITHER FORMAT That has nothing to do with Quicktime and Codecs. When I worked in video production, nobody was adopting either optical format. It was clear to many of us that Optical Media was going the way of the floppy disk and this was in 2003. By the time HD-DVD or Blu-Ray won the format wars, it would be too late, we'd see everything delivered via a digital stream. The only question was, is it going to be an iTunes like store where you buy the item to a set top box/hard drive or whether it was going to be via streaming like Hulu or Netflix. So far it looks like there is a market for both. But time will tell.

And I see a lot of people electing to skip the Blu-Ray player in favor of a media PC/Mac hooked up to their TV and streaming Netflix or Hulu to their TV. I've been using a Mac MIni for this purpose since 2005. I know I have. To me, the extra quality for twice the price of a DVD plus the cost of the player isn't worth it to me. I'll put up with watching my TV shows from Hulu when I have extra time at my connivence, even if the quality isn't the same as on HD. It' good enough for me and plenty of other people too.

Now, I have to say that I'm generally happy with Quicktime X. Quicktime had been languishing for years and this was a much needed up date. It runs faster and smoother than the previous versions.

Re:VLC is the linsux of media players

[PopeRatzo]

Apple already owns the online music distribution and playing industry and the high end professional computing industry (programming, design, scientific computing, high performance computing, etc.. basically anyone who needs a computer for serious work)

Wow, what are you smoking?

Open Source toys like VLC really cannot compete at a professional level with stuff like Quicktime

Wait, Quicktime is your example of a successful "professional" Apple tool?

You're being sarcastic, right? C'mon, stop playing...

Not from what I've seen - iPhone more likely

[SuperKendall]

Because "true Apple lovers" are mostly either multimedia designers, artists, writers or just ordinary users with more money than sense, and not down-in-the-trenches C/C++ developers?

I guess you must not be a "down-in-the-trenches" developer either. Or else your head is so far down in the "trenches" you have not been to any kind of technical conference, where a large number of people have mac laptops (including many Windows technical conferences).

So where have all of the Mac developers gone? I wonder what massive upswing in calls for Mac capable developers might have happened in the last few years that might have drawn people off the project?

Basically, to my mind you need look no further than the iPhone to figure out what has taken the wind out of many small projects in regards to Mac development.

Re:VLC is the linsux of media players

[jedidiah]

> Open Source toys like VLC really cannot compete at a professional level with stuff
> like Quicktime because it has an order of magnitude superior design, usability,
> security and testing behind it.

Is that why people install VLC on MacOS so that they can deal with the formats and
codecs that Apple has chosen to ignore for one bullsh*t reason or another?

Without VLC and ffmpeg, it would be Mac users that are "left out in the cold".

The idea that Quicktime is something that the users of other platforms should covet
is a big fat joke.

Re:VLC is the linsux of media players

[Anonymous Coward]

IHBT, but not even Apple uses Macs exclusively for their computing infrastructure.