OESF Portables Forum
Everything Else => General Support and Discussion => Zaurus General Forums => Archived Forums => Software => Topic started by: B_Lizzard on January 15, 2005, 07:26:21 am
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Hi,
Check this out: VLC Media Player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)
Check out the features!!
VLC Features (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html)
The VLC is a VERY powerfull crossplatform media player.It seems that it has been ported to the zaurus.
VLC Zaurus Page (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-zaurus.html)
BUT, It's still experimental.It seems the guys that ported VLC to the zaurus don't have one, and so, they can't test it.Mabye someone could download it, test it out and send his feedback (Or mabye even becoming the official VLC tester for zaurus).Even better, someone with programming skills could help them improve it.
All I have to say is that VLC is a good media player, but a bit on the "Power User" side.Not your everyday player (Or so I believe).
Go.Check it out.And give us and them your feedback.
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Ooops, I just found out that this has been discussed before.Typical newbie.Next time I'll first search, then post a new topic.
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Ooops, I just found out that this has been discussed before.Typical newbie.Next time I'll first search, then post a new topic.
Oh, I don't think this was too bad a fauxpas
IMHO the word about VLC can't be spread wide and often enough. I think its major problem is the lack of a decent Qtopia/QPE UI, which probably keeps it from gaining more popularity. You probably don't need all that many hands to count the number of people actually using VLC on the Z -- and I'm one of them. I keep tinkering with it, and occasionally do hang out on the #videolan IRC channel to pester the developers whenever I find something that I think is broken
There has also been some discussion about it in this thread (https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=8142) here in the forum.
I loosely follow the SVN versions, building an up-to-date SVN version for my Zaurus roughly once or twice a month to see if current development broke or improved something. So far I'm quite happy with it, since it does most of what I want it to do in a fairly decent way.
Best regards,
Chris.
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So, It works!!
I saw your performance log in the readme, and I guess it's quite good, for a 206 MHZ proccesor.I just have one question, do you use VLC as your main media player? How does it stand up against Mplayer (In terms of features, performance, possible power)?
If VLC is good enough, then mabye you could team up with other programmers (The original Videolan team?) to optimise the player and mabye even make a functional UI!
Anyways, I think you should post your project down in ELSIX (I don't know if this is yours (http://www.elsix.org/index.php?w=project&p=891)), you know, make it known.Mabye then, people might actually get interested.
B_Lizzard, out.Pffffffftttttt.......
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So, It works!!
Indeed it does!
I saw your performance log in the readme, and I guess it's quite good, for a 206 MHZ proccesor.
It's fairly impressive, but it probably could be even better. I suppose a lot more ARM optimizations could be done in some of the libraries that VLC uses for decoding audio and video -- possibly even by using routines from Intel's IPP for the SA1100 instead of existing routines (IDCT and the like).
I just have one question, do you use VLC as your main media player?
As a matter of fact, yes -- while I haven't gotten rid of the original player yet, I will eventually remove it from my ROMs' CRAMFS. So far, I've just been too plain lazy
How does it stand up against Mplayer (In terms of features, performance, possible power)?
Actually, I wouldn't know. I never got a fairly recent release of MPlayer up and running on the Z. The binaries available that I found wouldn't run for a variety of reasons (either containing XScale instructions or needing a non-SharpROM environment), and building it myself, well -- I tried, but ran into problems, looked at the code and decided it was just too plain ugly to lay hands on. Sorry if that offends some people, but that's the way I feel.
To make a long story short, the only version of MPlayer I ever got running was an ancient 0.6-something, and its performance was more or less a joke. So I can't give you any comparison that would stand up close scrutiny.
If VLC is good enough, then mabye you could team up with other programmers (The original Videolan team?) to optimise the player and mabye even make a functional UI!
It's good enough for me, and, as mentioned before, I am giving feedback to the VideoLAN developers to help improve VLC for the Z. As for an UI, well -- I'm probably not gonna do it, since, as I mentioned in the other thread already, I'm not a UI kinda guy
Anyways, I think you should post your project down in ELSIX (I don't know if this is yours (http://www.elsix.org/index.php?w=project&p=891)), you know, make it known.Mabye then, people might actually get interested.
Uhm, no, that's not 'mine'. That's the (by now way outdated) original port by the VideoLAN team. As for a project, well, there's not really one. All I do is take the sources needed and run them through the (old) compiler, make sure everything is statically linked so I won't end up in .so hell and that's more or less it.
Time- and effortwise I don't see myself able to do much more than that, especially not maintaining a binary release that makes everybody in the Z community happy and giving support for it as well. Anyone who wants to try my build (http://nsa.org/zaurus/vlc/) (thanks once again to porovaara for providing the space) is welcome to do so, and I will certainly try to help out as much as is feasible with my schedule, but other than that, people will be on their own.
So I won't do anything like you suggested, since I could never live up to the standards I expect from myself when handling such a project, simply due to the constraints I would have to operate within -- so I prefer not doing it at all rather than disappointing myself and, even worse, others.
Best regards,
Chris.
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Time- and effortwise I don't see myself able to do much more than that, especially not maintaining a binary release that makes everybody in the Z community happy and giving support for it as well. Anyone who wants to try my build (http://nsa.org/zaurus/vlc/) (thanks once again to porovaara for providing the space) is welcome to do so, and I will certainly try to help out as much as is feasible with my schedule, but other than that, people will be on their own.
I do UI design for a living. Is it the actual frontend coding you don't want to do?
The UI I can design if you write the handlers. Whatever you feel like. Also, take a look at kino2, it works pretty well (and surprisingly, it's built on mplayer).
Let me know what's what.
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I do UI design for a living. Is it the actual frontend coding you don't want to do?
The UI I can design if you write the handlers. Whatever you feel like. Also, take a look at kino2, it works pretty well (and surprisingly, it's built on mplayer).
Let me know what's what.
A seperate frontend most likely wouldn't sit well with the VLC design and thus the developers. UIs in VLC are implemented as modules within the VLC code (which is, I have to say once again, very clean and structured). There is a (by now outdated, since there is no maintainer for it) minimal QT GUI module in the code, which can be fixed easily to build (did that once just out of curiousity) with the current version.
Problem is that the way the code is right now, the QT GUI and the QT/E video output module can't really coexist cleanly, since they both create a QApplication from the same executable, which really is a no-no with QT(/E). On top of that real QPE integration would most likely need even more changes AFAIK. Maybe you could have a look at the code in the VLC SVN sometime. The modules in question are: QT UI (http://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/modules/gui/qt/), QT/E Video Output (http://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/modules/video_output/qte/) and QT/E GUI Helper (http://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/modules/misc/qte_main.cpp?rev=7471&view=log). Thanks for offering your help!
As for kino2 (and the MPlayer that goes with it), well, I can only repeat what I wrote before: never got it to run, always died with SIGILL (illegal instruction) in my environment. Maybe I wasn't patient enough or I'm just too plain dumb
Best regards,
Chris.