What vlc4iphone is all about...

June 23rd, 2008, 18:29 Posted By: wraggster

News from zodttd:

Hi everyone, ZodTTD here. Time to talk about the latest and greatest media player for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

As the developer of this port of the VLC media player to the iPhone, I have received a lot of misinformation and a few questions along the way. Here is where I will try to clear things up.


What is vlc4iphone? vlc4iphone is a port of VLC, a media player made by the team over at VideoLAN, to the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. VLC, and therefor vlc4iphone as well, includes many features. The biggest features include Internet Radio, Video On Demand (VoD) streaming, many popular media formats supported that are not available by default iPhone and iPod Touch installation, and no syncing is needed. You can drag and drop your media via SCP, a tool such as iPhoneBrowser, or even download via Safari and browse to the files with vlc4iphone!
What ISN'T vlc4iphone? vlc4iphone can not access the hardware decoder of the supported Apple hardware. While I will be talking about this more in the future, it's worth bringing up now. This is because all decoding of media must be done in software, with no hardware acceleration. Even with hardware acceleration, there is an imposed limit on the size of the synced video of which is just one format. Since vlc4iphone supports formats such as XviD, MP4, MOV, 3GP, FLV, and more all without re-encoding the file to a smaller resolution, it allows for a no hassle/wait playback. The downside of not re-encoding the video are some videos are in very high resolutions such as Hi-Def H264 movies. Since the current iPhone and iPod Touch's will only ever display at max 480 * 320 pixels, there is a chance that vlc4iphone may re-encode to 480x320 in the future when requested. This will allow for faster future playback on H264, XviD, and other intensive media formats. Until then, vlc4iphone is not meant for high resolution videos. The higher the resolution, the slower the playback.
Will vlc4iphone continue to improve? You bet! I am currently working on fixing a few remaining bugs, adding the mentioned re-encoding option, adding a portrait <--> landscape option, and cleaning up the interface.
What formats seem to play the best? For audio, you can play anything you throw at it! For video small resolution video formats such as the web friendly FLV (Flash Video) and camera 3GP work very well. So many video formats are supported, but it will depend on how it was encoded and to what resolution and bitrate.
You mentioned Internet Radio?! Yes! Shoutcast works. MMS protocol works. RTSP works. And a great feature is streaming media over HTTP. It all works!
Will performance continue to improve? Of course, as will the quality of code. When options such as re-encoding videos via the iPhone and iPod Touch are implemented, you will be less dependant on performance tweaks for Hi-Def videos as well.
Remember that this is still a beta. But it's progressing fast! The feature list grows with each release. I hope you find this application useful. I myself love the Shoutcast feature! I add a Shoutcast radio station and play it through my speaker docking station.

http://www.zodttd.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2283

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here