Why VLC sucks at playing DVDs, or, A plea for reviving the ogle DVD player
I am not sure if this post belongs here; please move it if necessary.
Attention: This is a flame, but it's for a good cause. After spending some time trying to get VLC to correctly save bookmarks I discovered the very elementary ogle DVD player, which can still be installed in Arch Linux, though I don't know for how long. DEVELOPERS: Please take care of this excellent little program and don't let it die! Despite what the movie industry wants us to believe the DVD is not dead; many people still have DVD collections which they'll want to continue using. I just tried to rebuild ogle with abs, and it failed with a collect2 error (presumably because of libdvdread-4.2.0; the patch in the pkgbuild is for libdvdread-4.1.3), which is fatal for me because I am not a programmer. If anybody is interested I will post the errors. The current build in the community repo will run but crash a lot. The reason that VLC bookmarks suck is that the VLC developers have absolutely no clue about how DVD playback works. Here is a VLC playlist file (for a DVD --!!any DVD!!-- in the drive): Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> For comparison, here is the playlist file for the same DVD created by ogle, with two bookmarks, a user-created start position accessible by typing 1b, and the automatic resume bookmark: Code:
<?xml version="1.0"?> DEVELOPERS: These files are unencrypted which might be a privacy issue, but it should be possible to encrypt them using the dvdnav disc id as an encryption key, so they can't possibly be read when there is no DVD in the drive. I assume that is what the OS X DVD Player does (with whatever the closed-source equivalent of dvdnav is). It would be possible to write some shell scripts for DVD playback that use mplayer's shell script interface - I have posted some suggestions somewhere (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...on-4175463917/), but the mplayer interface is extremely baroque, and the scripts would be clumsy and brittle; ogle's approach is much neater, and seems to be the only technically correct one. |
Quote:
You'll probably get more help with your issue if you don't start right off the bat making ridiculous claims like this. Throwing down the gauntlet with a direct insult probably won't get you he help you need. I was reading your post trying to determine if there was something I knew about and could help you with. But when I saw you throw that insult, I abandoned my attempts to figure out your issue. Didn't even read the rest of your post. Just some friendly advice. You will get more help if you are nice to people. I am not a VLC developer, but they don't deserve to be insulted. |
Would the ideal solution to this really be to revive ogle, or would it be to fork VLC?
|
Man, I really like VLC, but I do remember ogle. I used to use that back in the ubuntu 6.10 days. It really was a nice little program. did one thing and did it well.
|
Thank you, haertig. I warned you this was a flame. And I still think VLC's way of handling DVD playback is highly nonoptimal (Of course, VLC is not primarily a DVD player; as a replacement for iTunes it does well enough, I suppose. And I am not exactly looking for help, I want to stimulate discussion).
I have added some stuff to the link mentioned above, to demonstrate what I mean. Resuming scripts CAN be done, after a fashion, but it's not something that I'd entrust my DVD collection to. I'll have a look at mpv, they mention lua support in the manpage (as a thing of the future; that's worth keeping an eye on). |
Edit: In fairness to the VLC developers I have to add that it seems to be possible (though undocumented) to control VLC via a fifo, mplayer-like (Personally I'd prefer to use mplayer, but that seems to be wishful thinking. It's no longer actively developed apparently, but my first impression of its successor mpv is hardly better). There is nothing much in the vlc docs which admit to being outdated, but I found an answer here:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/33746.../338046#338046 To start vlc with fifo input: Code:
mkdir $HOME/vlcmedia Code:
echo "add $HOME/Videos/test.iso" > $HOME/vlcmedia/fifo For a list of valid commands type "vlc -I lua" or "vlc -I cli" and then "help" at the vlc prompt. It would be nice if this were actually ***documented*** somewhere. |
Edit: I posted a work-in-progress solution for VLC here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...79#post5121479 |
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 12:12 PM. |