VLC Android Update

[xaque]

Probably a long shot, or at the very least off the radar for development at the moment, but a new stable release of VLC for android is available. https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.v...-all/3.6.0

I know it was stated here, https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-and...1893143952, that using libvlc was not off the table just not the current focus. So just thought I throw it out there in hopes to see it once again in the official Android TV app some time.

Thanks for the stellar app and time you spend developing it. Cheers.

[akesh]

Disabling LibVLC and burying the external player settings still bites me. I understand minimizing the tech debt of having two playback implementations, but Exoplayer *still* has problems. Most glaring being the inability to show two .srt subtitle items at once (upstream issue), like when there is background music and dialogue at the same time, and the lack of ability to time offset subs and audio (Jellyfin client issue as I understand). Instead of having a good fallback player, the user has to dive 3-4 levels deep into the settings to switch to VLC or some other external player that doesn't support reporting progress.

Not saying LibVLC didn't have issues -- I never got DV to work with it and for some reason the audio was severely out-of-sync by default, but at that was configurable.

As a tangent, irks me that we don't have *one* good client that can support "everything." I would be happy to pay for a device other than my Shield if it meant I could play back everything and it would just work. The Shield can technically play back most any format local media would be stored in, sans AV1, yet the client is hamstrung by poor support. It went years with broken srt playback and it doesn't look like there's a fix on the horizon for Exoplayer's simultaneous subs. My users that don't have DV or HDR TVs still struggle with the client detecting when to transcode. DV Profile 5 doesn't detect it's not supported and transcode and tonemap. Jellyfin Media Player has great codec/DV/HDR handling, but HTPCs are expensive and AFAIK Windows doesn't support DV. I definitely can't recommend my users drop a few hundred on an HTPC. Roku devices have hardware limitations and literally can't playback high-bitrate content. Infuse is allegedly pretty good but I'm not a fan of a closed source player. In a world where you can buy a Firestick for $40 that can support everything it needs to, it sucks that the client on that device can't.

Maybe it's time to try to use Kodi again. God knows it's not something to recommend to users as something simple, but maybe it could fix my issues at least.

[niels]

Thanks @xaque, I haven't followed VLC development for a bit now so I wasn't aware of their new release. Great they managed to do that after 2 years without one, unfortunately the decision on our side (Jellyfin) has been made now and I won't add support for an alternative internal player again in the existing playback code. Perhaps in the revamp I'm working on but that would be a long-term thing (so don't expect it, I didn't promise anything).

@akesh your rant here doesn't provide anything useful. This is a development forum, not a "rant to volunteers" forum. If you want to try a different client, just do that. Don't complain to me about it.