
The team that powers VLC - choppaface
https://increment.com/teams/the-team-that-powers-vlc/
======
jbk
(disclaimer: president of VideoLAN here and old VLC dev)

What's interesting in this article (quite accurate, for once) is the focus on
the size of the team, which is quite small; and on the development process.
And how the team are now friends more than co-developers...

In fact, VLC is ported - and maintained - in a very large number of platforms
(probably more than Firefox, Chrome, Office or Libreoffice) with Android
(+TV), ChromeOS, iOS/iPadOS, AppleTV, WinRT&Xbox, Windows (XP+), macOS
(10.7+), Linux, Unixes, BSD, OS/2\. While the core team has always been around
5 persons, and always less than 10. And most developers have been working on
their free time...

The VideoLAN non-profit needs also to maintain quite a bit of infra (updater,
crash reporter, bugtracker, forum, wiki, ml, gitlab, git) for a lot of
projects (not only VLC, but things like x264 and dav1d) and do support,
appstores, PR, translations and partnerships (the only way to get support from
MS, Google or Apple).

Sure, VLC is probably not always the best for your usecase, and there are
probably better solutions for each platform, but we are consistent, completely
open source and open process, therefore people can trust the project and the
brand: VLC will be around in 5 years, and we will do our best to port on all
platforms, in an open way. A lot of players come and go, but the project is
structured so it can last.

Since HN is a technical crowd, we're currently working on 2 fun projects:
VLC.js and integrating sandboxing inside VLC :)

~~~
tahdig
> Sure, VLC is probably not always the best for your usecase

VLC is both consistent and almost always the best media player for the
platform. I especially love your Android UI/UX.

It has been my go-to player for ~14 years now, installed it on my high school
desktop windows, my university linux and now work MBP and personal Android
never disappointed me. Thanks for keeping up the quality work, I give you as
example of good quality open-source project when the topic comes up.

Do you have any "need" for a fullstack/infra kind of person? Or any place we
can see what know-how needs you have at the moment?

Would love to get involved with my limited capacity.

Also thanks for staying open source and privacy conscious.

~~~
jbk
> Do you have any "need" for a fullstack/infra kind of person?

Yes, we do. Both web (JS for VLC and for our website), backend (Go) and infra
are needed.

And currently, people who are able to write Ruby to improve gitlab upstream.

~~~
f3ndot
> people who are able to write Ruby to improve gitlab upstream.

This I am able to do. How can I help?

I've contributed in very small ways previously (getting libdav1d into
Handbrake[1], designing the dav1d logo[2]). Would love to be able to offer my
time in a domain I'm skilled in.

[1]:
[https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/pull/1864](https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/pull/1864)

[2]:
[https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/merge_requests/681](https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/merge_requests/681)

------
newscracker
_Here are some reasons I donate money to videolan.org (the non-profit behind
VLC player)._ VLC is versatile and available on multiple platforms for free.
It’s probably the easiest to recommend to anyone who wants to play many
formats (including those that are not or won’t be supported natively by some
proprietary platforms). VLC may probably not be the most performant of players
(depending on the platform and one’s needs), but it’s feature rich to cover
most needs.

Software like this needs to exist and continue to exist even in the era of
YouTube and streaming services (which, honestly, are becoming more user
hostile with time even when you’re paying them with your information and
habits or directly with money).

------
Barrin92
I've got immense respect for VLC. Not only because it shows how a relatively
small core team can shoulder a large software project but also because they've
never compromised on doing any shady business to make a quick buck.

------
ignoramous
A fun trivia about an early VLC developer, Sam Hocevar [0]: Afaik, they were
the _first-ever_ to blog about the idea of blocking ads with DNS blackholes
back in _2002_ [1].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Hocevar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Hocevar)

[1]
[http://sam.zoy.org/writings/internet/doubleclick.html](http://sam.zoy.org/writings/internet/doubleclick.html)

------
ilrwbwrkhv
i wish new grads don't get attracted to the free lunches of faang and have
more of the pirate like ethos of the old hacker days. vlc reminds me of that
so much.

~~~
srcmap
Nothing wrong with getting play real $ from FAANG and still enjoy learning
diff deep tech stack and contributing to VLC in one's spare time.

------
Razengan
VLC has served me well for many years on many platforms. I can’t thank its
devs enough.

For Mac though I’ve moved to IINA:
[https://github.com/iina/iina](https://github.com/iina/iina)

It’s much more “idiomatic” on macOS.

~~~
universenz
Thanks for sharing this. I like VLC a lot, but the UX/UI always leaves a lot
to be desired on macOS. So, I'll try IINA out and hopefully it works as well
as VLC, with the added benefit of a beautiful UX/UI.

------
1_player
I have a ton of goodwill and appreciation for the VLC team.

That said, my experience with the VLC app has never been very positive. It
seems to be universally loved by everybody, yet every time I've used it in the
past 10 years I've some issues with it, including but not limited to:

\- Stuttering 720p video on Windows 10, 10 core CPU, GTX 1080

\- Opening network streams is a bit of a hit and miss

\- I could never make sense of the default "playlist" view when you start the
app

\- Settings menu is a nightmare of options and UI layout

I've always used SMPlayer on Windows and Linux and IINA/mpv on macOS instead
and always had a better experience.

Am I the only one that really doesn't grok VLC at all?

~~~
michaelmrose
Mpv previously did a lot better job using video acceleration particularly
nvidia at least on Linux.

I believe this has been improved a while back but I now use Mpv for all my
laptop/desktop needs.

Network steams provided as in a url for a video often is no such thing.

You might notice that Mpv uses YouTube-dl which has a variety of recipes that
are updated to actually figure out how to get at a video.

That this works a lot is pretty good work.

The web is a mess and developer are presumably disincentivized to ensure that
people can watch contents outside the officially sanctioned ad ladden
experience.

