VideoLAN Archives

May 02, 2007

DMCA takedowns have no merit to the world

Wow internet people of the world. I was surprised tonight. As slow as defending DeCSS took off all those years ago, so quick was the defending of the AACS key. Many people on the Internet spoke out tonight after AACS LA started sending out takedown notices to companies that hosted a key published by some of their users. The biggest thing as far as I'm concerned is that people seem to be willing to break the companies they love (digg and Google) just to prove the stupidity of the DMCA take down notices. These users are not against Digg and Google, they are it's most active supporters, and they will use their favourite tools to prove the governments in the world that the DMCA is giving the DRM companies too much power over other companies that are simply doing their work. They proved that the "secret" is to be protected by the DRM company, and not by all the other companies in the world. The secret is out, and Google and Digg can't stop it, just as little as the DRM companies could prevent the "secret" from getting out in the first place. To ask Google and Digg to stop it is unrealistic, costly and without merit to society as a whole. There are thousands of ways we can communicate those few digits, songs, videos, DNS records, different notations, weak "encoding" variants, barcodes, images, ascii art, etc etc.
It is my full conviction that not a judge in the world will judge Google or Digg as libel in this case. There was no stopping the world, without a full take-down of the companies involved. They couldn't have hired people fast enough to remove it, as others would be able to post it online. Let's HOPE it goes to court, that will stop this idiot-icy once and for all.

I'm proud to be part of the new Internet generation. Sure it has it's faults, the world always has had faults, but it's time people realize that there is no stopping to this. Information is shared now almost by definition, and the knowledge it has spread is far outweighing the "bad" knowledge it's spreading. Information is our drug, our virus. Change your business models, because I'm tired of not owning what I buy, and I'm not the only one.
These companies are forgetting that they serve society in their needs. We pay them and expect certain things back. More and more of our expectations are flatly ignored in order to "save the income" of these companies. If we don't give you money, then that means you are doing something wrong, and the company deserves to go broke. It should not get protected by governments and organizations that serve those same organizations. Many people have said: "If there was a better business-model, then that model would be more successful and win over the other companies". However this is no longer true. This industry as a whole has become so protected that any other business model is no longer viable. You want proof of that ? Well here is a model: I use work of others that I'm allowed to use for free. Let's say an Internet radio station and freely licensed music. Sounds like a viable model, albeit one where I have to do a lot of work. Any commoner would come to such a conclusion. Guess what; It's not viable. In the USA you will have to pay SoundExchange (a daughter of RIAA) regardless of what kind of music you broadcast on the Internet. If the artist doesn't join up with RIAA and collects it's fees, too bad for them, all the money goes to RIAA. (link) This is just anti-competitive and the US government should be thrown out over allowing RIAA to work in such a matter.

There is one big thing that people are often forgetting. There is a lot of talk about the movie and music industry. Their sales are indeed rapidly decreasing etc etc. But what we forget is that the Entertainment industry as a whole is still growing. Television, gaming, sports, events, internet entertainment, iPod, etc have all seen enormous growth over the past years. We are just busy with more stuff then ever before and that's the primary reason we consume less music and movies. You are not losing money over piracy, you are losing money because you are not correctly reading the market you are selling to. Hell some people are even turning to piracy now because of the trouble they have to go trough with their legally bought digital music. And knowing the average computer capabilities of the Internet user I'm not surprised, and neither should they be.

Finally more and more people start to see where all these guidelines are problematic and they start fighting it. This is not about not being willing to pay certain companies for their products. It's about the protection these companies enforce and the government's involvement with these companies. It's about owning a song once you bought it, regardless of the format. It's about being able to buy what you want, without having to wait 1,5 year before the product enters your geographic-market. It's about being able to decrypt your movies 30 years after official DVD players were taken out of production. It's about your right to publish a 16 hex number, regardless of what it means. It's about the bullying of the companies we love, by the companies we hate. And if one happens to go bankrupt in order to defend that, then we will gladly sacrifice such a company and create another one once the issue is settled.

So with saying: "09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0" to everyone I end this post.

Posted by The DJ at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
Posted in Technology , VideoLAN

September 14, 2006

IBC 2006

Jean Paul Saman and I visited IBC 2006 again this year, and I have put a small photo tour online. VLC was seen quite a few times again on the floor, this time some of the companies included were names like Cisco, Siemens, Thomsson and Fraunhofer. Our friends from Anevia were there as well of course. It was a busy IBC this year with great weather and we had a wonderful time. I was however a bit disappointed by not seeing much revolutionary technology. It was all basically a refinement of what we saw last year, but nothing really stood out.
Let's hope next year will show as some new things.

Posted by The DJ at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)
Posted in VideoLAN

August 11, 2006

The founding of VideoLAN

VideoLAN has been around far longer then most ppl realise. The project's sourcecode wasn't released till somewhere in 2001, but there was something working long before that. One of the 4 co-founders that started with the idea, intially known as 'network 2000', was Antoine Brenner.

Antoine was recentrly interviewed by a friend of him. The vidcast of this interview (in French) is now available on the Mobitrends weblog.

Posted by The DJ at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)
Posted in VideoLAN

January 30, 2006

The VideoLAN servers

For those who are interested, and just so that I remember the link. Here is a gallery and a description of the VideoLAN serverpark.

Posted by The DJ at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)
Posted in VideoLAN

January 29, 2006

VLC is just delicious

Have you seen Del.icio.us yet? It's an online community for sharing bookmarks basically. Now you know I always have to check what VLC brings up in tools like this. Well, the results are in.

Among the different interesting tidbits, I found this link to a website describing how to RIP Windows Media based Musicvideo's from Yahoo. The tutorial is pretty extensive, and applies to most other MMS streams as well. There is even a nice Flash video showing you the exact proces.

Posted by The DJ at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
Posted in Streaming , VideoLAN , Webbing

January 23, 2006

GPL violations

So after our recent issue with the Sony Rootkit, yet again several things have been reported to us. This time someone is selling our software for $29,99 without informing the user they will simply be getting VLC media player which is free for download. Read the full story on the blog of J_K9 Linux. The other report is about the possible violation of the Elanvision EV-8000S STB, which firmware includes VLC.

Posted by The DJ at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)
Posted in VideoLAN

January 17, 2006

Google and VLC

I have always liked crawling trough Google search results for websites and images that look at, use, review, list etc. VLC in one way of another.

I have now created a small webpage that presents you with 6 random images from the Image search result of Google. It's fun to see what users do with their VLC. Give the page a whirl and see what you run into.

Posted by The DJ at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)
Posted in VideoLAN , Webbing

VLC subtitles in Japanese or Chinese

People keep running into issues with this, even though it is described in the README.MacOSX.rtf file on the diskimage. I happened to run into a small HOWTO explaining it a bit more detailed, and with pictures. I hope that by listing it here, people will be able to find the solution faster.

Posted by The DJ at 10:43 PM | Comments (0)
Posted in VideoLAN

November 10, 2005

New Buildserver

We have asked for donations in the past in order to assist us in developing for the Mac OS X platform. Now all of a sudden we had to return our Xserve machine, which was doing the daily nightly builds and the buildbod commit checks. So we cut to the chase and bought ourselves a Powermac G5 1.8 Ghz Dual Processor machine.
It's standing at my apartment atm and I'm working on setting it up as the new buildserver. The G5 is lovely and really fast. HDTV is a breeze with this machine.
After we set it up as the new server, and as soon as I have a TOS cable etc, I will start working on improved Digital Audio support for VLC OSX, and then i made give Video Capture a try, since I know also own an iBot firewire webcam.
I'm not making any promises, but I think I should be able to get something usable soon.

Posted by The DJ at 05:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

November 04, 2005

VLC iPod Video Conversion

As reported on tuaw.com, Phil Windley has created a script to automatically convert Tivo (or other MPEG2 sources) into iPod G5 compatible MPEG4 video files.

Posted by The DJ at 04:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

October 17, 2005

DJ on Air

Hi all, it's been a long time since my last posting unfortunately. The latest news however is that I will be on the Radioshow Track21. This show is targeted at students in and around Enschede (where I live) and is broadcasted by a Local radiostation. It will be live and will begin around 19:50 CET. The subject is going to be VideoLAN and how it grew from a student pet-project into a full blown Open Source Community.
The interview is due to an article in the magazine SUM where my name was apparently mentioned in an article concerning VideoLAN.

Posted by The DJ at 03:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

September 09, 2005

Going to IBC and VLC on Dutch Television

I'm going to IBC tomorrow. Ticket was free, and there should be quite some interesting stuff to see there. Jean Paul and Sigmund will be attending as well, and the guys from our very own spinoff company anevia even have a stand (#1.444). Hopefully, I can spread the word on VLC a bit more (I'll be wearing my VideoLAN T-shirt).

So I was watching the news this evening, and on channel RTL4 there is this item about gadgets on IBC. And guess what? First gadget they show is a WinCE device running VLC media player for WinCE !!!! Now THAT is wicked stuff. You can see the clip here (MMS).

Posted by The DJ at 08:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

September 08, 2005

VideoLAN in the news

With a lot of popularity, comes more and more publicity it seems. Everything our friend Jon does get blown out of proportions of course. This is one of the reasons Jon only talks to a very limited set of journalists anymore.
Lets take the latest example of cracking the NSC encoding. Jon only talked to The Register about this. Unfortunatly they got a little bit too enthousiastic, and missed the point somewhat this time. Now it's funny how much such an article gets copied. Almost all other articles blindly copied this.

What is truly funny though is that friday late afternoon, I got a call on my cell...: "Good day, I'm looking for an interview with mr. Jon Lech Johansen". Right, how did this fellow get my number? Well, my website is named in Jon's Blog article on NSC. And my website is on my domain, which is registered on my name, and the registration has my phone number of course (Scary....). I explained that Jon is very difficult to reach, and that I would relay the message to Jon. We got talking a bit about the project, and he asked me some questions, and before I knew it I was giving an interview. The article is online now, and I specifically tried to correct some of the wild ideas that had grown in the online community about this NSC thing. It's a pretty decent article, with only a very few small errors.

Then there was carp.nl. A Dutch magazine that wanted an interview with us. They visited Antoine in Paris, and did a telephone interview with me. The article is now on page 22 of their latest issue (#13). It shows a bit about the culture of the VideoLAN project and makes for quite a nice read. Not always 100% accurate about the more technical things, but if you don't know a thing about Video or FOSS, you won't notice, care or be misinformed. Great publicity beyond our usual online attention. Let's hope it gets the word out even more.

It's nice that we are clearly making a stir beyond our own little circle. VLC is getting more popular. Lets hope we can all keep up, for we are not FireFox.

Posted by The DJ at 01:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

August 31, 2005

Multicast from Windows Media Server

Our good friend Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered the encoding used by NSC announcement files which contain the information to join Multicast Windows Media Streaming sessions. So i'm working on getting this into VLC right now and hopefully "Very Soon Now", VLC will support WMS multicast. Let's REJOICE.

Update:I now have a nsc file decoder for VLC. Next step is to get this information passed to a new connection so we can have decode the ASF in the UDP stream we receive.

Posted by The DJ at 08:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Posted in Streaming , VideoLAN

VLC 0.8.2 passes 6 million downloads

VLC media player is getting really popular now. The latest release (0.8.2) has been downloaded over 6 million times now. That truly is a lot of downloads and I think everyone in the team is really proud of that. Lets hope that we will grow and grow and one day can get close to the quality that a project like mozilla provides.
Also let us not forget that the 6 million downloads are almost all Windows and Mac OS X downloads. The linux distributions often distribute VLC themselves. And then there is the Freeplayer spin off, and the Google Video Viewer plugin, and Annodex plugins and Tryst and all those other applications that are based on the VLC source code. Lets keep going guys !

Posted by The DJ at 01:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

May 15, 2005

VLC needs your help

At the moment we have several critical issues in audio and video that HAVE to be fixed for a new release. If anyone would care to assist, then we would be very much obliged.

- There is a first attempt at an auhal renderer. We need this because our current coreaudio module is and always has been broken. Continuing OSX upgrades however made the effects of it worse and worse. Currently the auhal renderer callback is not functioning. If you have experience in this area it is probably easy to fix. http://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/changeset/11020 & https://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/12

When this is fixed we still need to rewrite the digital audio renderer in CoreAudio (since this cannot be handled in AUHAL).

- there is an issue with the opengl renderer that sometimes crashes on OS X systems with Nvidia boards. See crashlog 2 of https://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/45

- there is an issue with the quickdraw renderer in OSX Tiger 10.4 It crashes when drawing the window titlebar when you return from fullscreen to windowed mode. This crash may also occur with the opengl renderer, but this is currently uncertain.

If anyone is able to assist with any of these problems, please contact us on IRC (http://www.videolan.org/cgi-bin/irc/irc.cgi), the vlc-devel@videolan.org mailinglist, the fora (http://forum.videolan.org) or here.

It does not look like these issues will be solved in time before the Windows release is ready. Yet in it's current state even I prefer to use MplayerOSX. I have therefore made an important discission. I think we should no longer delay VLC as a whole due to problems with the OSX build. It's just not worth the waiting. If things are not fixed before the Windows build is ready, then the OSX port will just skip the 0.8.2 release. It seems the best solution for all parties, since the port just doesn't have the quality that people would expect and SHOULD expect from a release.

We can use much help on almost all audio, video and gui related areas for VLC OS X. There have been many complaints and annoyances ousted lately in the direction of VLC. Many new projects as GLPlayer, Xineplayer and other video players have been started. However not a single new (experienced) OS X developer has joined the VLC project for over 2,5 years now. Of that i'm rather disappointed. :(

It is annoying the hell out of me and it regurly makes me wanna think about pulling the OS X port alltogether. I have a feeling that my "limited" developer skills only keep the port alive and don't really benefit it. If the port was officially pulled, it might attract better people to work on it in a year or so.

However, not only is the program very dear to me, I am addicted to it. So I will keep committed to VLC OS X as I have been from the time it was the first MPEG-2 fileplayer for the Mac. "Keeping it running" is my goal. Would we have had more developers then we could focus on things like PVR functionality, DVR, in and output for QuickTime sources/devices, use of QT codecs, Webcam functionality, mozilla plugins, etc etc etc.

End Of Rant

Posted by The DJ at 04:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

April 06, 2005

Software Patents

I have just added a "anti software patents" banner to the VLC webpages. With this we join efforts from FFmpeg, Mplayer and many others. Please read this VideoLAN page.
It is really important that we all wake up and get this issue solved.

Posted by The DJ at 06:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

March 08, 2005

mozilla plugin for VLC

So I have been spending the entire afternoon trying to get the OS X mozilla plugin working again. The biggest problem here is that there simply is no gecko-sdk for Mac OS X atm. So instead I have been trying to build my own. It's not an easy task, I can tell you that. It would definetly help if mozilla could just distribute a valid Mac OS X 10.2 SDK.

This posting has helped a lot though.
http://www.iosart.com/firefox/gecko-sdk-macosx/

Anyways, this didn't seem to work at first. After much searching I realized that this SDK was incomplete of course. To build a plugin, you not only need xpcom, but also plugin support.
The folks in #mozilla@irc.mozilla.org pointed me at this module list: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/tools/module-deps/all.dot

So changing the line to --enable-standalone-modules=xpcom,plugin should do the trick hopefully, and generate a sleek install of the mozilla tree.

I will let the current complete mozilla build finish first and package the sdk though. Might never know if it will come in handy.

UPDATE:
OK, I tried 1.7 trough 1.8b1 of the mozilla releases with --enable-standalone-modules=xpcom,plugin, and all builds fail with
[4]: *** No rule to make target `../../dist/lib/libmozreg_s.a', needed by `libxpcom_compat.dylib'. Stop.

Ergo with this configure line, I apparently get a dependency on libreg. I tried adding libreg to the standalone modules, but apparently libreg starts compiling a slew of other stuff, including chrome, which i have no use for whatsoever.

1.6 ends with:
c++ -I/Volumes/Genitus/pjotr/Development/vlc/extras/contrib/include -no-cpp-precomp -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wconversion -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -Woverloaded-virtual -Wsynth -Wno-ctor-dtor-privacy -Wno-long-long -I/Volumes/Genitus/pjotr/Development/vlc/extras/contrib/include -no-cpp-precomp -fpascal-strings -no-cpp-precomp -fno-common -fshort-wchar -I/Developer/Headers/FlatCarbon -F/System/Library/Frameworks -pipe -DDEBUG -D_DEBUG -DDEBUG_pjotr -DTRACING -g -fPIC -arch ppc -o libembedcomponents.dylib nsModule.o nsPrompt.o nsWWJSUtils.o nsWindowWatcher.o nsDialogParamBlock.o nsPromptService.o nsAppStartupNotifier.o nsWebBrowserFind.o nsFind.o nsWebBrowserPersist.o nsBaseCommandController.o nsCommandGroup.o nsCommandManager.o nsCommandParams.o nsControllerCommandTable.o nsPrintingPromptService.o nsPrintProgressParams.o nsPrintProgress.o nsJSConsoleService.o nsProfileSharingSetup.o -L/Volumes/Genitus/pjotr/Development/vlc/extras/contrib/lib -L../../../dist/bin -L../../../dist/lib -lgkgfx ../../../dist/lib/libunicharutil_s.a -L../../../dist/bin -lxpcom -L../../../dist/bin -L/Volumes/Genitus/pjotr/Development/vlc/extras/contrib/src/mozilla/dist/lib -lplds4 -lplc4 -lnspr4 -L/Volumes/Genitus/pjotr/Development/vlc/extras/contrib/lib -lpthread -L../../../dist/bin -lmozjs -framework Carbon /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Carbon -bundle -lm
ld: can't locate file for: -lgkgfx
make[4]: *** [libembedcomponents.dylib] Error 1

Posted by The DJ at 08:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

August 30, 2004

VLC progress

It's been quite some time since the last release, but I can assure you that VLC is strong as ever. We have just been so busy over the summer that it was hard to get VLC back into a stable state again. However we are very close now, and you can expect a new test1 version of 0.7.3 any day now.
Some of the new functionality can be found here. You see? A lot of new stuff to play with. It will be quite some fun for everyone.

Posted by The DJ at 09:18 PM | Comments (163) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

August 15, 2004

New VLC artwork

Many people know, that the VideoLAN artwork hasn't been the best in the world.
Gradius is proposing the following

I really like it. I think it would even make a great new look for the website.

Posted by The DJ at 10:49 PM | Comments (150) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

August 12, 2004

Get VLC banner

As one of the developers of VLC media player I wanted a VLC banner on my website. Unfortunatly I didn't like the current 'banner' at all.
I decided to create one myself.

It is licensed under the same Creative Commons license as my website. It will be on the main VideoLAN site soon, along with the code for embedding it in your website. So help spread the word on the great Movie Player and Streamer that is VLC.

Posted by The DJ at 12:26 AM | Comments (68)
Posted in VideoLAN