Thread: VLC Player Officially coming
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redenisc is offline redenisc
2009-11-02 , 09:25
Posts: 21 | Thanked: 29 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ Espoo, Finland
#62
Originally Posted by allnameswereout View Post
You can capture streams with UNIX pipes, MPlayer, and 101 dvb utilities.

You don't want 10 video players because fragmentation is a Bad Thing. Even _if_ you're OK with that, you don't want too much double/triple work. Which is why you want a modular design.

Which is precisely the problem with everything in one monolithic application: 1) bloat 2) others cannot reuse 3) when you don't want to use that application you're fscked.
This, and the rest of your long argumentation is based on the wrong assumption that VLC is a stand-alone media player.

VLC is a media playback and streaming library and a set of user interfaces (Qt4, Cocoa, HTTP, ncurses and CLI). Whether you use the built-in user interface or just the library with another front-end is up to you - VLC has some GTK front-ends by the way (I never tried them so don't ask me more).

Some years ago, gstreamer guys decided to invent a forth major OSS media framework (in addition to Xine-lib, ffmpeg and LibVLC) instead of improving any of the existing ones. I can see several reasons why they chose that path: First, it's always easier to start a new project with your own code than to learn to extend an existing one. Second, gstreamer is LGPL, which allows proprietary codecs Third, some people want to use glib and gobject. Forth, I guess gstreamer might be more generic, e.g. Farsight supports real-time communications, which is in fact quite different a thing than media playback.

That's all fine, but please don't blame VLC for being not modular. This only exhibits that you don't know what you're talking about. (By the way, over 80% of VLC is code is in modules, or if you count underlying libraries, probably well over 90%...)

Originally Posted by allnameswereout View Post
As for the set top boxes in France by Free: either its proprietary crap or it uses an open protocol which means other media players also can read (and hence capture) from it.
As far as I know, it's just MPEG-TS over RTP, which is perfectly standard.
 

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