Has there been discussion with using
VLC as the default video
player?
I ask this for a few reasons:
1) VLC seems to be the best damn player out here
If you do a search for VLC in these forums, you will find a bunch of statements "Choppy scene in xbmc, but works fine in vlc..." or statements of the like. My personal experience with vlc has been great
2) Multi-platform support: Works in Linux,Mac,Win...perfectly
3) Wide range of supported video codecs
4) Chapter markers work in h.264 (mp4) works (DVDplayer doesn't)
5) Subtitles work in h.264 (DVDplayer doesn't)
6) Smooth handling of multi-audio tracks (i.e. Spanish,French)
In my opinion, XBMC should focus on the user experience and other features that make it wonderful to use. I'm not saying DVDplayer is bad, just that if someone else wrote a great video player, why not piggy back off of that great work? This may free up a lot of (dev) resources and troubling shooting time if a switch was made to VLC.
What are all your thoughts? In particular is this a difficult task to embed VLC into XBMC? What is the work effort involved? I may be able to get this started if we agree it is beneficial and it is within my technical capabilities
--Deathinator
p.s. For the record, I'm not in anyway associated with VLC
deathinator Wrote:Has there been discussion with using VLC as the default video player?
I ask this for a few reasons:
1) VLC seems to be the best damn player out here
If you do a search for VLC in these forums, you will find a bunch of statements "Choppy scene in xbmc, but works fine in vlc..." or statements of the like. My personal experience with vlc has been great
2) Multi-platform support: Works in Linux,Mac,Win...perfectly
3) Wide range of supported video codecs
4) Chapter markers work in h.264 (mp4) works (DVDplayer doesn't)
5) Subtitles work in h.264 (DVDplayer doesn't)
6) Smooth handling of multi-audio tracks (i.e. Spanish,French)
In my opinion, XBMC should focus on the user experience and other features that make it wonderful to use. I'm not saying DVDplayer is bad, just that if someone else wrote a great video player, why not piggy back off of that great work? This may free up a lot of (dev) resources and troubling shooting time if a switch was made to VLC.
What are all your thoughts? In particular is this a difficult task to embed VLC into XBMC? What is the work effort involved? I may be able to get this started if we agree it is beneficial and it is within my technical capabilities
--Deathinator
p.s. For the record, I'm not in anyway associated with VLC
If you want to run VCL, then run VCL and live with it's pros and cons and forget about XBMC. The purpose of XBMC is not a frontend to feed video to another app. If you want to do this, then fork and do your own version.
davilla Wrote:If you want to run VCL, then run VCL and live with it's pros and cons and forget about XBMC. The purpose of XBMC is not a frontend to feed video to another app. If you want to do this, then fork and do your own version.
What is the purpose of XBMC?
You already use a 3rd party lib for the xbox version, so how is using VLC any different from mplayer?
deathinator Wrote:What is the purpose of XBMC?
You already use a 3rd party lib for the xbox version, so how is using VLC any different from mplayer?
You see mplayer used in XBMC for Linux? How about XBMC for Windows or XBMC for OSX ? Not there right? Guess what, not going to see it there either.
If you really want to help, how about addressing those shortcomings that you listed and make DVDPlayer handle them rather than just picking what might seem to be an easy solution in your eyes. Pick one, fix DVDPlayer, patches are welcome.
All your listed "features" work perfectly fine for every single one of my videos.
Guess what: They'd work fine for every single one of your videos as well if you posted a sample where they don't work so that developers can reproduce and fix.
davilla Wrote:You see mplayer used in XBMC for Linux? How about XBMC for Windows or XBMC for OSX ? Not there right? Guess what, not going to see it there either.
If you really want to help, how about addressing those shortcomings that you listed and make DVDPlayer handle them rather than just picking what might seem to be an easy solution in your eyes. Pick one, fix DVDPlayer, patches are welcome.
So, what I gather from this statement, the answer to my original posting would be:
"It is too difficult to integrate the vlc libs into xbmc and time would be better spent fixing DVDPlayer (if need be)"
jmarshall Wrote:All your listed "features" work perfectly fine for every single one of my videos.
Guess what: They'd work fine for every single one of your videos as well if you posted a sample where they don't work so that developers can reproduce and fix.
jmarshall,
Thanks for response.
I will post a link for a sample mp4 file shortly. FYI, I'm using RC1 right now.
Here is the link. This file only has subtitles feature, which doesn't seem to work in windows. Thanks for looking into this.
On as side note, i really think xbmc is great and wonderful, and I want to contribute to it.
Thanks all for your effort.
http://208.139.202.135/lost_test.mp4
deathinator Wrote:So, what I gather from this statement, the answer to my original posting would be:
"It is too difficult to integrate the vlc libs into xbmc and time would be better spent fixing DVDPlayer (if need be)"
Close, more like we are not interested in integrating VCL into XBMC and time would be better spent improving DVDPlayer.
davilla Wrote:Close, more like we are not interested in integrating VCL into XBMC and time would be better spent improving DVDPlayer.
So you speak for all developers in xbmc community? I apologize for not knowing you in advance (who you are, your status within the community, etc)
deathinator Wrote:So you speak for all developers in xbmc community? I apologize for not knowing you in advance (who you are, your status within the community, etc)
I do talk with the other devs and none are interested in what you suggest. To the right, it says "Team-XBMC Developer" and 3K posts and you can always search for my posts to see who I am and what I do.
not there, the other right!
I can sense some aggression in the answers from Davilla and Jmarshall. Why is that? Deathinator wasn't aggressive in his questions.
Why not just explain to us readers why you (the XBMC developers) prefer DVDPlayer over VLC. Easier to modify? Easier to integrate? etc.
cewan Wrote:I can sense some aggression in the answers from Davilla and Jmarshall. Why is that? Deathinator wasn't aggressive in his questions.
Why not just explain to us readers why you (the XBMC developers) prefer DVDPlayer over VLC. Easier to modify? Easier to integrate? etc.
It's not aggression, it's frustration. It's pretty easy to say, X,Y,Z application works, why not use it. But most all those asking this don't really understand the inner working of XBMC nor do they understand why it's better in the long term to work on DVDPlayer rather than jumping to some unknown quick fix.
Has anyone ever even looked at the source code in question and thought about the amount of work it would take to combine? This work does not happen by magic and someone would have to do it.
And most important of all, this question has been asked over and over and over and we get pretty tired of hearing it.
Thanks for that answer, I'm satisfied :-)
Maybe there should be a FAQ of some sort for frequent questions like this, which we could just refer to when someone new is asking.