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.

[akesh]

@niels I mean the important part of the comment is a critique on the development of the client. You made the decision to remove LibVLC. This is a feature used by many people and is asked for time and time again.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-and.../pull/3663
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-and...ssues/4261

You are continually dismissive of the people that actually use the app and have issues with Exoplayer. I have issues with Exoplayer. Exoplayer is not feature complete, users need a fallback and an easy way to access it. It is a massive pain to switch players after discovering something doesn't work on Exoplayer once you've started playing it.

> If you want to try a different client, just do that. Don't complain to me about it.

You are missing the forest for the trees. I'm not making some "ooh you're gonna lose a customer!" threat about switching to Kodi. I'm probably to continue to deal with the inadequacies of the Android TV client, because on my setup they're not that bad. The point is that there are problems with this client that are significant and seemingly unprioritized compared to other changes. Android TV *should* be the most accessible client that I can recommend to users, but instead it requires power-user usage to switch players depending on formats that I can't expect my users to understand. Users shouldn't have to install VLC or Kodi as a fallback player. The built in playback handling should "just work." The player should be abstracted from the user.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

You are continually dismissive of the people that actually use the app and have issues with Exoplayer. I have issues with Exoplayer. Exoplayer is not feature complete, users need a fallback and an easy way to access it. It is a massive pain to switch players after discovering something doesn't work on Exoplayer once you've started playing it.

You can see what is being worked on for the ATV app here: https://github.com/orgs/jellyfin/projects/47/views/1
The main ATV dev is doing their best with what time they got free.
They are not a machine that can afford to deal with the extra work that comes with maintaining extra players. There's already a roadmap of planned things.

I understand your issue with the playback support. The current player will get improvements over time.
You can see the current progress here: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-and...ssues/1057

And if you read the start of that playback rewrite post you see this:

The rewrite is a very long project because I'm just one person volunteering to work on Jellyfin in my spare time. There is no hard deadline or specific version goals. This issue contains a task list of the bigger features/changes.

 
A big complaint when libVLC was removed was about the direct playing of ASS subs.
As you can see, that has been addressed and will be slowly worked on in the future.
This wouldn't exactly happen if they were dismissive of the issue.

Android TV *should* be the most accessible client that I can recommend to users, but instead it requires power-user usage to switch players depending on formats that I can't expect my users to understand. Users shouldn't have to install VLC or Kodi as a fallback player. The built in playback handling should "just work." The player should be abstracted from the user.

Android TV having to be the most accessible client, but it not being so currently is entirely your opinion.

I have been using it too and Exoplayer has not given me any trouble. Anything it can't play gets taken care of by a transcode from the Jellyfin server.
So from my perspective, the playback handling does "just work".

And of course I'm not dismissing the other issues it has because my experience doesn't equate to it having no issues entirely.