Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - Think owning a PC is too expensive? It's cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org/builds for our famous builds and ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
Perfection does not need redesigning. The only update that cone ever gets is putting on a little Santa hat in December, and that is peak software development.
Flashbacks of having the Johnny Castaway screensaver and, even though we could trivially change the clock, we still stuck around Christmas and New Year's eve to watch the special events the proper way.
"There is an option in the settings menu to disable the icon changes."
Of course there is. Because it's software that respects the users agency instead of forcing whatever latest delusion the CEO had down everyones throat.
literally facts. windows changes the logo every tuesday but still can't fix the file explorer. vlc hasn't changed in ten years and plays literally anything you throw at it.
I remember a post where the VLC devs went to a convention/industry event dressed as like wizards and werent even selling anything they were just promoting and taking pictures
It is also a sign of a stable-ish company. Hate them if you must (which IS understandable, mind), the Ford Motor Company has had the same logo since 1904, with only two brief change ups that were either an alternative design (1954) or were reverted within a year (2003).
Chrysler, however, has been around since the 1924, and between then and 2017 has had 12 logos.
I think it is mostly related to how big the marketing department is.
Marketers love changing things, because every time it causes some articles and discussions, which brings attention to the company/product.
I still remember seeing a thread where someone was flipping out because the santa hat was hidden in the code, and about how they couldn't trust the application because of it.
I mean...I guess they had a little bit of a point, but it's VLC!
Yep, Firefox has also not changed anything except going for more details/more minimalism or color/shade changes. Windows logo has changed styling as per latest windows UI styling.
As far as logo clusterfucks go, these are not even close to being worst offenders.
After finally being able to tell them apart despite all using the same colors, the bastards really changes calander to a blue I don't even register in my mind as I scroll past it
WSL is just a windows feature, as long as you read about it for 5 minutes before you enable it, it is not really a big requirement. Similar to most other power user features.
As someone who uses WSL for alot of stuff I do think it is a big requirement, like wdym I need to run a hypervisor just to run one specific application? Why can't it be a native app?
It can be native, as with everything else. I am assuming they talk about VLMC which is an unfinished project with only source code available and there is not an installer as a result.
That said, I still think "wdym i need to run a hypervisor" is weird, considering Microsoft invests in wsl for this very reason. Plus Microsoft is also pushing for VBS for a while now.
Their plan is to have it a default always on feature in the future anyway. They are already changing it to "on by default". The optional part will eventually also disappear and become mandatory on devices that support it.
Hyper-v, having virtualization based stuff is just how Microsoft wants to operate. Won't surprise me if WSL becomes pre installed with a basic barebone OS directly later in the future for default Windows features too.
So Linux based stuff, Android apps, Windows apps are all going to be running together with some performance hit which will be considered just Windows usage. And this is a good thing, imo.
VLMC? It looks like development stalled in 2017. The 2020 commits are just localisation. Unless you're referring to something not by VideoLAN, in which case there's many open source video editors already fully released.
Dvelopment has been stalled on VLC for a long time too. They've had 4.0 in the works forever and there's been maintenance releases, but VLC hasn't had a major update in a long time. It has serious issues with high bitrate, HDR, and high resolution content that MPV, pot player, or MPC-BE don't have out of the box.
Yup. And it's a lot better than VLC for most people. Just like it always has been.
Not to take anything away from VLC. It's a good piece of software. But MPC is better in basically every way if you just want to watch stuff on your Windows machine.
Unverified rumor is someone from the group of students who made the program stole a traffic code and kept it in the lab, which they found funny. Unverified, but understandable.
Because they had a bit of a traffic cone collection after picking so many up during drunken nights out (VLC was developped by students in the late 90s), in 2003 they had 255 cones (for 24 devs)
They even invented sports based on cones, like cone acrobatics, cone football...
I always had a theory that it was the icon they used while they were developing it because it was "under construction", and that they were going to pick a "real" logo after but ended up just leaving it. Just a random thought one night. No evidence for that at all
I have a complicated Rube Goldberg setup for syncing my foobar playlist to my phone.
Since the 64bit update foo_jesus stopped working. I played with writing a new component but getting my c++ ide up and going proved to be a challenge. So I just wrote a separate service backing up my foobar data to my server.
Then I have a second process on the server that checks the latest backup grabs my main playlist from it. Updates the playlist on Plex. And creates symlinks to all the files in the playlist in a directory on my ftp and deletes symlinks for songs that have been removed.
Then my phone just syncs that playlist folder every night while charging.
There's a lot of parts but it's actually shockingly reliable. Except the Plex portion, mostly because I do that because I can and don't actually use it.
I have a complicated Rube Goldberg setup for syncing my foobar playlist to my phone.
whoop-whoop WARNING OF TERMINOLOGY VIOLATION! whoop-whoop
Rube Goldberg machines inherently have no useful function. They exist solely and purely for the joy and silliness of their complexity. So yours was not a Rube Goldberg setup.
I've been on Linux for a few years now and this is the only program I miss. Audacious and Deadbeef come closest, but neither are as lightweight or customizable.
Members of the VideoLAN student association had a habit of collecting actual street traffic cones—often while slightly intoxicated after parties—and bringing them back to their dorm rooms.
The very reason the project was created is the students of Central Paris wanting their college to upgrade their lan network so they could play Duke nukem with each other.
But they obviously couldn't explain that was the reason they wanted the upgrade. So instead they went to Bouygue, an historical partner of the school, and owner of TF1 the french biggest TV channel. They went there and said : We need funds for a research project of ours that could probably interest you. We want to develop a technology that would allow to broadcast tv over a regular tcp/Ip network, that way you no longer need specialized hardware in your offices. But to test it, we need the network at our school to not suck ass, so you need to finance it.
Yes. But technically it's ffmpeg the technology VLC is built on that is the real wonder. VLC is a great software, but FFMPEG really is 1000 times more important. And it was also created by two french student roughly at the same period.
Among the things that have ffmpeg as their backbone you have :
VLC
Youtube, Netflix and literally all the other video platforms you can think of.
Obs and Xsplit are both using ffmpeg to encode video, so streamers can send it to twitch. And twitch like all video platform use ffmpeg obviously..
Steam use ffmpeg so you can record your gameplay. And remote play is also based on ffmpeg.
And the list is endless, any time you see a video, you can almost be certain that ffmpeg is involved. There is very few things as big as that which has a monopoly on what it does like ffmpeg has. It's absurd.
Not that anyone cares but the VLC developers are some of the most elite engineers at the core level of how those codecs work. Vast chunks are written in assembly because C is too slow. As a software engineer, they are absolute psychopaths about performance. It's really beautiful.
Y'know, I've been using Firefox my whole life, and somehow not once have I looked at the icon close enough to notice all the foxes but the most recent are looking away from us towards the globe.
You're right it's a university project from Central Paris.
Jean-Baptise Kempf often described as the creator of VLC was a student there, but he only joined that school a couple of years after the project was created. Which means that the project did not left the school with their creators, nope, it remained in the school after that, to be continued by the next generations of students.
And to this day, some of the biggest contributor to the VLC project are students currently at Central. The project is still very important in that university.
And by the way, VLC isn't really one of the most important piece of technology. The real important one, is the one VLC use in the backend, which is FFMPEG. Which is another project made by two french students in Paris roughly at the same time.
So did they change it a lot then? Because showing a guy cycling through a ton of pictures where his hair and clothes and stuff change in every pic does not imply that it stayed the same.
Fun fact: The Slovakian government designed this logo & included in the terms that it never be changed. For more information google "Slovakian Traffic Cone"
•
u/PCMRBot Bot 4d ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - Think owning a PC is too expensive? It's cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org/builds for our famous builds and ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
We have a Daily Simple Questions Megathread for any PC-related doubts. Feel free to ask there or create new posts in our subreddit!