In 2011, India emerged as top downloader of VLC player - slicker, faster, format-and operating system-independent and, of course, free.
It's the newest kid on the block, and it's code-named ‘TwoFlower.' In its freshest avatar, the popular media player, VLC, offers you a slice of the VideoLan way of life — slicker, faster, cross-platform, operating system-independent and, of course, free.
In a world where format incompatibilities, caught in proprietary tangles, have made user experiences tiresome, this third-party standalone software has been a testament to miracles that a Free and Open environment can work. Over the years, as companies looked inwards and got caught in digital rights management (DRM) and related tangles, this community project has, indeed, become a rage among users.
Yes, for the user, the magic lies in the fuss-free way, in which the software (with pre-installed codecs) plays just about any format thrown at it. And for the geek, VLC represents the best of the world of Free Software, where cutting-edge software is created and owned by communities — not corporations — and is released under the GNU public licence.
Indeed, VLC had its humble beginnings in an academic project started by students of École Centrale Paris in the late 1990s. Today, with a coder base of around 160 volunteers worldwide, working part-time on this project — including hackers, doctors, aerospace engineers and students — VLC has been downloaded by 485 million users before it hit version 2.0 last month. Incidentally, in 2011, India climbed atop the list of maximum downloads, surpassing the United States, France and Germany, the VLC team informed The Hindu in an email interaction.
However, contributions from here still leave a lot to be desired, both in terms of code and translators, to increase support for Indian languages.
So what's TwoFlower all about? The new release keeps the simple, minimalist VLC interface intact, except for the Mac OS Version, which presents a complete overhaul in the lay-out of features.
However, the more significant changes are all under the hood: starting with the ability to open a plethora of new video formats (notably, professional ones such as Apple's ProRes422 and 4444 and Panasonic's AVC/Intra) to new features that allow it to open many more picture formats.
VLC now provides experimental support to Blu-Ray discs, though menus for these are not fully active yet. There has also been a major upgrade in its ability to handle 10-bit codecs. Technically, a notable advancement here is TwoFlower's ability to perform faster, multi-threaded decoding in multi-core systems. This is critical today, given the increased pervasiveness of high-definition media.
What's next?
Even as reports of an unofficial release of a version for the Android platform (for mobiles) did the rounds on Saturday, the VLC team says an official Beta release for Android is “just a few weeks away.”
In an email interaction, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, chairman of the VideoLan board, said that besides mobile portability, the VideoLan team was focussing on improving video and audio quality and user interface.
Asked about competition, Mr. Kempf said: “I think the competition is behind us...because they focus on some niche. VLC plays everything, is simple and answers everyone's needs.” He conceded that DRM issues were a “huge problem” for a community initiative like VLC. “DRM is a huge problem. Playback of Blu-Ray in VLC is still very hard because of that. We will try to improve, but this is complex, technically and legally. There is not one DRM that has not been broken, and therefore DRM ares only hurting nice and legal people.”
This article has been corrected for clarity.
Keywords: VLC player, India online, online trends, media players
My biggest problem is I download music files but it does not play in my Windows media player. I tried installing this after reading this and many of the files are now playing. I would like to thank the Hindu for telling me about this player. Only complaint is that it took me a lot of time to find the player. in such cases if you add a web address with the writeup it would be useful for people like me.
Not bad at all for a college project !! Great going !! VLC has really been a saviour for those who know of pre-VLC days. Pleasantly surprised to see an episode of Sherlock as an illustration. Hope the Indian Govt doesn't sign the ACTA, SOPA, PIPA and BLAH or else both the authors and apparently The Hindu's readers would be deprived of such great content.
I downloaded it on my Mac and it works very well. The old VLC was too basic for my
taste. It is faster. I wish the newspaper would write more on such freely
downloadable stuff. Like this and Firefox and so on. Thank you
A valid point being made here, that India has a massive 'user' community, but only a marginal 'contributor' community... Maybe the populace is engaged more in just meeting the ends, and don't really have the 'surplus time' to contribute. One really needs to reach a certain minimum economic level before starting to think about others in the society.
By the way, the screenshot above shows the final episode (third episode of second season) of Sherlock being played, and Cumberbatch is just about to jump... Colour me surprised, but it seems to be a version downloaded from some P2P or file sharing website, most probably recorded digitally directly from television, and encoded using the 'open' XVID standard... You may wish to replace the image :)
Not DLM it is DRM. It is mentioned in the second paragrahp in full. It is digital rights
management.
"VLC is a slicker, faster, format-and operating system-independant and of course, free." - where have all the copy-editors gone?
Thank you developers !!.
showing the front image from a pirated copy of Sherlock Holmes from The
Hindu? Disappointed, any responsibility?
what is a DLM.kindly elaborate,for iam a geek.
Its a a very useful piece of software indeed !
VLC is not only a fantastic player but also an indication of the power of the open community. My only gripe with the software is it's inability to play Real Media files. That shortcoming makes it necessary to have another player installed.
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