Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC
lemmy.world
VLC for Unity integration

Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right? Game developers can agree on it too, since it is a great utility for playing multimedia in games, and/or have a video player included. However, disaster struck; Unity has now banned VLC from the Unity Store, seemingly due to it being under the LGPL license which is a “Violation of section 5.10.4 of the Provider agreement.” This is a contridiction however. According to Martin Finkel in the linked article, “Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies! Unity is built on libraries such as Lame, libiconv, libwebsockets and websockify.js (at least).” Unity is swiftly coming to it’s demise.

Edit: link to Videolan Blog Post: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html

  • CALIGVLAEnglish
    35•10 months ago

    Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right?

    cough mpv cough

    • snooggums
      20•10 months ago

      We already know mpv causes upper respiratory infection, cover your mouth already.

    • @[email protected]English
      8•10 months ago

      Yeah, VLC is great and has been great for a long time. But the MPV-based stuff is amazing too and just seems faster, cleaner, etc. Which I’m sure is due to being much more focused, just using ffmpeg, without decades of legacy code, etc.

      My biggest problem has been that I find nearly all of the MPV-based players I’ve used (mpv-player itself, or stuff like IINA or Celluloid) either have a massive lack of configuration options, overly minimal UI, or both. On Windows, Mac, or Linux

      I don’t need integration with some obscure external timing system by default like VLC offers, and that kind of thing. But it’s weird that so many players don’t offer you the ability to enable basic plugins. Or change playback speed. Or configure keybinds. Or continue playing the next file in a directory automatically. Or even offer the ability to display the most basic info about the file being played, like codecs. Etc etc.

      Or in a couple of cases they seem like more of a mess than VLC.

      • CALIGVLAEnglish
        6•10 months ago

        My biggest problem has been that I find nearly all of the MPV-based players I’ve used (mpv-player itself, or stuff like IINA or Celluloid) either have a massive lack of configuration options, overly minimal UI, or both. On Windows, Mac, or Linux

        Have you checked the manual? The amount of options is staggering, bordering on esoteric. The only catch is most of them need to be setup either through CLI or .ini files.

        But it’s weird that so many players don’t offer you the ability to enable basic plugins. Or change playback speed. Or configure keybinds. Or continue playing the next file in a directory automatically. Or even offer the ability to display the most basic info about the file being played, like codecs. Etc etc.

        I can’t say anything for the frontends, but you can use plugins for basically anything in mpv itself, including the issues you’ve listed. Again, you need to setup the whole thing and read the manual, but it’s there. And yes, I see the irony in all the effort needed to do basic stuff like this when something like VLC just works™, but to me that’s the beauty of mpv, it’s basic and minimalistic yet you can make it work however you like given time and patience.

        Btw you can check the file info by pressing i on the keyboard while playing something.

    • ChewyEnglish
      4•10 months ago

      Off topic: ff2mpv is awesome. It supports many video sites (I believe everything youtube-dl does) and opens the video on a page/link in an external mpv window.

      This helped me mirror a video without downloading to read the embedded subtitles (why uploads a mirrored video with subtitles?). Also playback speed and all other advanced features mpv supports are really useful