Open source VideoLAN media player asks why it's blocked in India Developers of the open source VideoLAN media player have started sniping at India's government over an apparent block on the project's website. VideoLAN, aka VLC, develops a media player and transcriber famed for playing and transcoding almost any media format, and doing so quickly through a pleasant interface. The project …
Oh my, you haven’t lived until you and your partner have tried “coning”!! Just make sure that the crème fraiche is properly chilled and the bunch of daffodils have been checked for caterpillars, is all I’ll say. Oh and DO NOT cheap out - you need a scissor-lift that will go to AT LEAST 15’.
VLC is dreadful. It's the only media player I have used on which it is constantly necessary to advance or delay the soundtrack to sync with the video. When it goes working under Linux it takes a kill -9 to bring it to heel. Under ChromeOS you have to nominate one media folder on the first run and can never change it (without reinstalling) or play videos located elsewhere. Its sole advantage is built in support for subtitles. Otherwise it's a classic example of FOSS feature bloat, doing too many things badly.
That's...more the kind of thing I've had to do on mobile, on occasion, the synching, but that stopped when I dumped that particular mobile, no more of that MediaTek crap for me. And I've never had to kill it with -9 fire in Linux. Works consistently and well for me. Chrome OS sounds like something I should avoid.
You have lived a charmed life.
Synchronized audio came to film in the 1920s, and lasted (for TV) until the early 21st century. It was there that I first noticed significant lack of sync, but not via a Digital TV. It was apparent;y a case of the networks using DTV to distribute programming, but still transmitting in traditional (NTSC in my case) analog form. I knew something was up when my old CRT-containing TV "got the bug", a year of more before DTV transmission (other than tests) for over-the-air. Synchronized audio/video is pretty rare these days.
I'm still not sure how the arcane art of audio/video sync as lost. Did the last person who had read a spec die?
If any of them get thawed and re-animated, I'd also love to have a phone conversation devoid of long-delayed (sometimes 10 seconds or more) echoes and twilight-zone worthy audio artifacts.
obviously don't go downloading something calling itself VLC from any dubious warez websites, regardless of what OS you are running.
What about from non-dubious warez websites?
In theory, it can be downloaded from any source, so long as the download is sha256summed and the sha256 sum has a signature that verifies against a public key controlled and published by VideoLAN. (Other checksum algorithms are available)
Well, chances are the dubious warez site will also have the fitting dubious checksums, and if the original website is blocked, you have to take their word for it...
No. No, you don't. That is the point of digital signatures. You need to verify the signature against a public key, and I doubt the Indian government are blocking all public keyservers.
The checksum is for data integrity, the signature is for authentication - please do not confuse the two.
If you download software from a random server, the checksum will tell you if the copy you have locally is the same (to a high degree of probability) as the copy on the server. It says nothing about the provenance of what you have downloaded, which, as you say, could have been modified to be malicious,
The digital signature can only be generated by VideoLan using their private key (assuming they have kept it secure), so a warez site cannot sign a checksum with VideoLan's key. By checking the signature against VideoLans public key, you can be assured that the software you have downloaded is an authentic copy of what VideoLan produced. Or not.
> That is the point of digital signatures. You need to verify the signature against a public key, and I doubt the Indian government are blocking all public keyservers.
While you're right, that goes way too far over the head of the average, normal user. Remember VLC isn't some IT specialist tool only computer-savvy people will download.
Already checking a checksum is quite involved in Windows (PowerShell, something most users don't even know it's there), now ask them to also install GPG, learn how a public/private key works, and use it to validate the checksum with! Not a chance, most peoples' heads would simply explode...
I rest my case, the dubious checksum would catch those rare 1% power users who know how to do a checksum in Windows. Linux users on the other hand already have VLC in their distribution's repositories, so they don't really need the website to get it.
> May I recommend HashCheck?
You may, but not matter if it is finding and installing that, or just using the already included command line tool ("certutil"), it remains way too complicated for the majority of Windows users.
Even if this was an already existing Explorer feature, most Windows users wouldn't be able to use it without help, even if they knew it existed and what it did.
"By checking the signature against VideoLans public key"
How do you know which key is theirs and not a different one, made to look identical in user-id and (truncated) key-id?
Keyservers are mostly useless for verifying signatures unless you know the full id of the authentic key in advance.
There are many positive things that can be said about VLC. It's the first port of call for handling media files.
However, having long experience of VLC silently doing something other than that which was asked of it, particularly when transcoding, I'd say that as far as the interface is concerned, pleasant is as pleasant does.
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