OMG, I just tried VideoLan

[hjackson]

I just installed VideoLAN (http://www.videolan.org/) and all I can say is wow! Why wasn't I using this sooner?!! The default settings blow away my Zoomplayer and WMP10 defaults. The colors, and especially the black levels, are outstanding on my 30 LCD. It skips those annoying FBI warnings and adverts and goes directly to the main menu. It can play ISO files directly without having to mount them first (bye bye Daemon tools!). It is controllable by command lines. And best of all it can stream media over a network. The main things that it can do are plain Real media files and play DTS audio. It can support multiple instances but I'm not sure it can do multisource/multizone (ie independent and party mode across multiple zones) the way winamp does, however, again it does have network streaming to multiple sources...
I think we should all give this great FREE ap a closer look.

hjackson

PS Did I mention that it is opensource ...

[ptrinchi]

I agree with you, VLC is actually the best viewer

[hjackson]

Does anyone know the send message commands for VideoLan?
Or how do you use Xlobby buttons to perform key presses? I can do IR key presses with my Imon remote, but I would like to get away from this...without using Girder.

hjackson

[dgemily]

Does anyone know the send message commands for VideoLan?
Or how do you use Xlobby buttons to perform key presses? I can do IR key presses with my Imon remote, but I would like to get away from this...without using Girder.

hjackson

you can catch sendmessage via girder (keyboard shortkeys or mouse clicks on VidepLan) then, use those sendmessages into xlobby:
there is a french doc with an example about it (use sendmessages for K!TV software), it's in french but there are a lot of screenshots, so you should understand it

here is it :
http://usuarios.lycos.es/theneweb/ktv/xlobby/howto_tv.htm

later,

[Chazotta]

I have been using VLC for quite a while but stopped using it for movies when I started to fully use Xlobby - due to Zoom Player integration.

It is an awesome application.

Sendmessage would be the way to go. Perhaps the guys on the VLAN forum could assist ?

[zewt]

What exactly is sendmessage? Sorry to be behind the curve.

[rika]

What exactly is sendmessage?

It’s when a program sends a message to another program to execute a task. Example: xlobby sends play to zoom player.
Press f2 in xlobby and click on events, look at zoom player and you will see allot of send messages. (if your skin is configured to control zoom player)

Rika

[hjackson]

So far my attempts to get the SendMessage paramaters with Girder have failed to produce workable codes. There are no Videolan plugins for Girder . While I can easily work around this with my iMon remote (or try to figure out the Hotkey plugin), I think it would be better if we could create SendMessage commands so everybody could use it. Again, IMHO the current codecs seem to give a picture superior to WMP10. Another negative thing that I noticed, however, is that there is no "rewind" button. Oh well, nobody's perfect...

hjackson

[Chazotta]

hj

Are you saying that (VLAN aside) the WMP10 video codec is considered to be the best ?

[hjackson]

"Are you saying that (VLAN aside) the WMP10 video codec is considered to be the best ?"

Huh? I said I liked the picture of VLAN better than WMP 10 on my 30 inch LCD. I can't test VLAN on my plasma because my plasma's htpc has suddenly screwed up when playing video. I can't test it on my Marantz projector because my recent Catalyst driver upgrade has killed the video output for that HTPC (Aren't HTPCs fun ? ) Prior to VLAN, I would not have said WMP10 was the best or 4'th best because I don't know what the best video codec is. For that can of worms, I would go to the AVSForum.

hjackson

[Chazotta]

indeed.... hence my querying your earlier post. I still struggle to see major differences between allot of the codecs and I think I have used them all.

Again VLAN is nice. What codec does it use ?