VLC Media Player 1.0.0-rc2

[DEAD_MAN_WALKING]

VLC Media Player 1.0.0-rc2


Changes between 1.0.0-rc2 and 1.1.0-git:
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Mac OS X Interface:
* Completely reworked user interface (based upon works from GSoC 2008)

Playlist:
* WPL playlist support
* ZPL playlist support


Changes between 0.9.9a and 1.0.0-rc2:
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Important notes:
----------------
* Alsa and OSS audio capture has been removed from the v4l and v4l2 accesses.
See 'Access:' for more info.
* Support for Mac OS X 10.4.x was dropped due to its technical limitations

Playback:
* Instantaneous pausing
* Frame-by-Frame playback
* Finer speed control
* On-the-fly recording for all medias
* Timeshift for most medias
* RTSP trickplay support
* Subtitles core improvements and fixes

Decoders:
* New AES3 (SMPTE 302M) decoder
* New Dolby Digital Plus - E-AC-3 (A/52b) decoder
* New True HD/MLP decoder and parser
* New Blu-Ray Linear PCM decoder
* New QCELP (Qualcomm PureVoice) decoder
* Improved Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 decoder
* New WMA v1/2 fixed point integer decoder
* Close Caption under SCTE-20 standard are now correctly decoded
* Improvement of WavPack decoder to support all integer modes and float mode
* Corrections on 5.1 and 7.1 channel decoding and ordering

Demuxers:
* Support for Dirac, MLP and RealVideo in Matroska files
* Major improvements in RealMedia files opening (.rm and .rmvb)
* Improvements of the TS demuxer for M2TS files from Blu-Ray and AVCHD
* Metadata for mod files are supported
* GSM codecs in Wav files are supported
* New raw audio demuxer supporting raw PCM streams
* New dirac demuxer for raw dirac streams

Encoders:
* Dirac encoding using libdirac (supported in Ogg and in TS)
* Shine mp3 fixed-point encoder

Access:
* RTSP authentication with Darwin Streaming Server
* On-the-fly gzip and bzip2 file decompression (except on Windows)
* Playback for video in uncompressed multi-RAR archives
* DVB-S and ATSC cards support on Windows
* New OSS and Alsa accesses. The v4l2 and v4l modules no longer support
OSS or Alsa audio input. Use --input-slave alsa:// or oss:// if needed.
* DVB scanning on linux
* EXPERIMENTAL Blu-Ray Disc and AVCHD Folders support
* On-the-fly zip file decompression and browsing (MRL of the form zip://file.zip!/file.avi to specify the file - the development form of zip://file.zip|file.avi is not supported anymore)
* Opening of any file descriptor using 'fd://'
* MTP device access on Unix
* CD-Text support on the cdda module (CD-Audio)
* :start-time and :stop-time can handle sub-second values

Inputs:
* Mouse cursor support in x11 and win32 screen modules
* Screen module now features partial screen capture and mouse following on
Windows.

Playlist:
* Export the playlist in HTML
* Lua script for BBC radio playback
* Better metadata handling and reading

Linux/Windows interface:
* Global Hotkeys on Windows and Linux
* Various fixes for skins2 interface
* Recently played items list
* Interface toolbar customizations
* Various Improvements on the Qt interface:
- More menus actions
- Finer speed slider
- Improvements on many dialogs
- New dialog for plugins listing
- Fixed-size mode for videos
- Better teletext, trickplay and encrypted streams control
* Better integration in GTK environments

Mac OS X Interface:
* Controllable by the Media Keys on modern Apple keyboards (brushed Aluminium)
* Reveal-in-Finder functionality for locally stored items.
* Easy addition of Subtitles through the Video menu
* Additional usability improvements

Stream output:
* Restored the old mpeg2 transrating module.
* Multiple bridge-in instances are now possible.
* bridge-in can be used to configure a placeholder stream.
* Remote Audio Output Protocol (AirTunes) module.
* Fixed mosaic memleak. Mosaics are now usable again.

Maemo Port:
* New Maemo port with:
- an interface based on Hildon framework.
- scaler based on the swscale_nokia770 library.

Windows CE Port:
EXPERIMENTAL work for the winCE port has been done.

Mac OS X Port:
* Speed improvements by using llvm-gcc
* New Document icons by Dominic Spitaler

Audio output:
* Removed obsolete Esound and aRts plugins
* Surround support for PulseAudio

Video output:
* Effects (cube, torus, etc.) removed from OpenGL video output
* Video is able to stay in original size and to zoom in fullscreen
(hotkey 'o') while keeping black borders
* Image video output has been rewritten into a video-filter named 'scene'.
The old image video output has been removed.
* Support for scaling and converting video chromas with FFMPEG imgresample was
withdrawn due to bugs. Please use the newer FFMPEG swscale instead.

Miscellanous:
* Invmem, a fake codec to display images from external applicationsDownload (http://www.videolan.org/mirror-geo.php?file=testing/vlc-1.0.0-rc2/win32/vlc-1.0.0-rc2-win32.exe)

[Tokar]

Considering that Microsoft has spent a s***load more work on Windows Media Encoder (and its daughter products) it is unbelievable to me that they still haven't figured out ATSC/DVB streaming while VLC has done it successfully.

[tom f]

Every time i click onto VLC it com up....

vlc.Entry Point Not Found

The procedure entry point aout FormatNbChannels could not be located in the dynamic link library libvlc.dll.

Any idea what i should do to stop it?
When i click ok it runs ok.
Also,should i stay on windows explorer 7 as ive got an update for 8?

[Tokar]

After much fooling around with VLC and ATSC/DVB streaming, I have become rather unimpressed by it. This of course stems from the fact that I was never a big fan of streaming with VLC to begin with.

1) Setting up a stream in VLC all the sudden has become extremely cumbersome. It doesn't remember your settings, there are so many extra clicks required, gotta futz with this and that. It is ridiculously annoying to set it up.
2) HDTV streaming requires you set the bitrate rather high, even when setting the resolution to a modest level (e.g. 640x360). If you don't set it high enough the viewers on the other end will see tons of artifacts...either what looks like a gray sheath over the image, or what looks like a loss of signal, or what looks like general blurriness. It is annoying. I was doing 640x360 at 1.3mbps and all I was watching was the news in HD, THE NEWS, and I was still getting appreciable artifacts. It was very annoying.
3) VLC does not put out a constant bitrate stream. This has always been and will always be a problem with VLC. You may set VLC to stream at a certain bitrate, but it doesn't necessarily mean it will stream at that rate. This is not specific to ATSC/DVB, but all of VLC. Just setup a stream and then get a bandwidth monitor. Whereas a stream produced by WME and FME will be a nice flat line of constant bitrate, VLC is all over the place. I setup a stream of 864kbps vid+aud, yet VLC was jumping all over the place, regularly jumping to 1.1-1.2mbps. This is not good if you intend to use this for P2P streaming. What people think they are getting they are actually not...doesn't help if you have limited bandwidth in the UP or DOWN direction.


I am still waiting for FME and WME to support ATSC streaming, but it will be a long time coming. Until then, its back to Screencapture with WME/FME.