Vlc For Mac Snow Leopard
MacNN has just published an regarding the future of the Mac OS X version of the VLC mdia player. According to VLC’s developers, the Mac version is at risk of being discontinued due to a lack of developers. Update: The VLC developers claim that: “Apple doesn’t want us on the Mac platform and is blocking us a lot, and refuses to explain why.” MacNN reports that development of the 64bit version of VLC for Mac OS X has already been halted. VLC being a volunteer project, you can already guess the problem: a lack of developers. If new developers do not come to the rescue, VLC 1.1.0 will be the last Mac OS X version of VLC. Apparently, the project no longer has any Mac developers at all. VLC is an important application on the Mac, as I don’t know any Mac user who does not have it installed.
VLC Media Player for Mac is a powerful and efficient app for playing all kinds of media in multiple formats right on your Mac. With this app in place, you can just download and watch what you want. So, Apple new operating system Mac OS X.6, named Snow Leopard is out, and it improves a lot the speed, and ports most of its application to 64bits, but doesn’t introduce any important new feature. Learn more about it! VLC and 64bits. Do you really need 64bits for a video application? I seriously doubt it.
QuickTime Player is relatively limited in its coded support, and despite the fact that ‘codec packs’ exist for QT, VLC is a very popular alternative. The project is, and as a Mac and VLC user myself, I felt it was important to use OSNews to possibly get people interested in helping out the VLC project.
I’d hate to see VLC for the Mac disappear due to a lack of developers. And yes, I just used the word developers 8 9 times. Incidentally, the Windows port is the most popular, and the Mac port is almost crucial for the Mac platform (those “codec packs” are crap). I use QT-X for almost all of my needs (particularly the quick look component), using perian as a one-size-fits-all codec pack. Well, that and flip4mac. So I would personally disagree with you on that perian is “crap”. However, VLC is a great project and i would be very sad to see it go though!
I think alot of the criticisms regarding Perian has to do with incompatibilities between Snow Leopard and Perian 1.1.4 (latest at time of this post). I understand, however, that Perian 1.2 has apparently addressed all those short comings which hopefully will mean that it’ll perform alot better. As for VLC, it is a great swiss army knife of media players, however, you’ll find that there just isn’t the focus by developers because from what I see in the Mac world people are more interested in extending functionality of existing applications – Perian plugins for Quicktime being the prime example of that. What I’d love to see is a greater push by Apple to create a large developer ecosystem around their products; extend MacOSForge to more than just Apple stuff but to also get third party projects listed on there as well – offer access to hardware, software etc. To lower the cost of entry. I think I agree; I ALWAYS had VLC when I had my Macs I even installed it on my wife and kid’s mac (they still have it).
Actually, I am a developer and I often wonder why I don’t do more to contribute back to the open software community. I’ve done little things with BeOS, contribute money on occasion, but never really contributed time to a major project. Worse, if there is a problem, I am right there reporting it (not in a mean or impatient manner, but I am adding work for the developers). 馃檨 Now I feel sad. VLC is/was a great tool.
VLC is still essential on linux, but OS X has moved on and it is no longer a must-have app. To each their own, of course. VLC is good but if you aren’t transcoding between video formats, there’s very little reason to use VLC on Linux. The UI is horrible, and the viewing experience not much better. Especially compared to keyboard navigation in Kaffeine or Codeine. If they ever fix the keyboard navigation in DragonPlayer, there’ll be even less reason to use VLC.
I’ve used pretty much every Unix multimedia app out there, and VLC is rarely near the top of the list of video players. (A/V transcoding, though, is a different matter.). Crop photos powerpoint for mac. Can someone please explain to me why developers should donate their time developing freeware for closed-source operating systems like Mac OSX and Windows? As you might guess, I use Linux. Practically the whole OS and its apps are open source. I’m very grateful to the developers who have devoted such time and effort to offer a great product that is essentially free. It’s a true case of altruism.
The only bummer is that it’s a pity that Linux (and BSD) users are still such a small minority of the total computing community. If Apple would like to see VLC on OSX, they can afford to pay the developers to work on it.