Hacker News

141 points by martz 13 hours ago | 39 comments

tmtvl 10 hours ago

On a similar note: Godot VLC (<https://github.com/xiSage/godot-vlc>), because let's not pretend we don't remember the Unity terms change controversy.

thih9 9 hours ago

Context about the Unity terms change controversy: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/unity-is-killing-its-...

> Initially, the Runtime Fee sought to charge developers a per install tariff once projects had passed certain milestones. It was a decision that left many users reeling, resulting in a colossal backlash (…)

How users reacted: https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/16h9lnw/whats...

> Any install, any reinstall, any installation on a second device, each and every one slap the dev with a fee. It gets dumber, because that cracked copy of your game on the high seas still incurs a fee when the pirate installs it. You might think we're at peak stupidity. You might think anyone who makes anything with Unity is a "fucking idiot" (the CEO certainly does), but we're not done yet. It's retroactive. (…)

arijun 6 hours ago

Side note--is there any way to access reddit now for people who refuse to log in or get the app? Old reddit asks tells me I have to use new reddit for "security" and new reddit says "Get the app to keep using Reddit".

nolok 5 hours ago

On mobile ? Not really. Their website is mobile cancer, and their app is barely better. I'm impressed at how bad it is, and it's not even about "pushing more ads" but "controlling what people see". That's also why they've removed r/all.

andai 21 minutes ago

Maybe try the "use desktop site" option in your phone's browser? Old reddit works on my phone either way.

rob-lag 6 hours ago

I just used UBlock Origin to block the "Get the app..." message.

tweetle_beetle 6 hours ago

On Android https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader - no account required

netniuq 5 hours ago

There is Redlib[0], an open source alternative Reddit frontend, with many public instances[1], e.g. https://redlib.catsarch.com/

There is also LibRedirect[2] (or PrivacyRedirect, although I for one have no experience with that), a browser extension that automatically redirects reddit.com URLs to your Redlib instance of choice (it also does the same for other platforms, configurable).

[0] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

[1] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...

[2] https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

benoau 8 hours ago

Sounds similar to Apple's "Core Technology Fee", literally a mechanism for sabotaging third party app distribution in the EU.

Elfener 6 hours ago

This is a very big oversight in that EU law.

Allowing third-party "app stores" is completely useless when all apps must be approved by the operating system company.

It's also being abused by google (technically, will be, very soon), I guess they saw that since the legal framework for this kind of thing has now been written, they can do it too.

lukeschlather 4 hours ago

There was no oversight. The EU told Apple the CTC did not comply with the law. Apple's new scheme still seems bad but I don't think this is the end of it.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...

benoau 4 hours ago

Google just got fined €430 million for a very similar fee scheme, practically copied from Apple, so it's highly unlikely that Apple will get away with it forever. Theoretically Apple should have a monster fine brewing since they're a repeat offender and it should be retroactively applied.

gumby271 7 hours ago

Except at least there are alternatives to Unity without replacing your entire OS and hardware.

martz 10 hours ago

yes this is good too, actually started contributing to this :)

martz 13 hours ago

Recently added support for Linux to VLC for Unity, with full hardware decoding.

It uses OpenGL rendering through GLX and EGL, with DMA-BUF texture sharing to pass video frames efficiently to Unity’s renderer.

Only x86_64 is supported at this time. In the future, I will add ARM64 support as well as Vulkan.

torginus 6 hours ago

Would it not be more efficient to create the decoder in-process, then you could feed it the bitstream via a compute buffer, and the video would be rendered to a texture.

sylware 11 hours ago

Don't forget to build 'correct' ELF64 binaries for broad elf(glibc)/linux distro support (-static-libgcc -static-libstdc++, and tight glibc ABI version control with binutils VERSION scripts).

At least those build options should be default.

martz 10 hours ago

thanks for your comment, will look into it!

SurajMishra 11 hours ago

Thank you very much.

Hendrikto 9 hours ago

To everybody else being confused: This is about Unity the game engine, not Unity the desktop environment.

tokai 8 hours ago

Unity (the DE) was discontinued 9 years ago..

extraduder_ire 4 hours ago

It's still being developed outside of Canonical. The latest release of an Ubuntu version is 26.04.

https://unityd.org/

fusslo 10 hours ago

Can a unity dev/game dev help elucidate why you'd use vlc in unity?

For cutscene playback?

harrisoned 10 hours ago

For a sandbox game this is very useful, where you can spawn video players in-game. For social games (like VRChat) this is also great since synced video playback is a very popular feature for people to watch content together in VR.

csande17 10 hours ago

Unity includes its own video player implementation ( https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Video.html ), so presumably you'd mainly want to use VLC for wider range of supported codecs?

kjjohnsen 9 hours ago

Basically. Unity video player is fine if you control the content. The other very reasonable option is to funnel shared content through a synced web browser interface. I've developed a few collaborative XR applications, and have used a blend of things to support sharing.

ComputerGuru 7 hours ago

It’s not hard to use libavcodec to transcode, though.

martz 10 hours ago

RTSP support, twitch-style in-game visio, any kind of non-game Unity apps (there are many), 360 video playback, mediaplayer in VR headset, simulators of all kinds, etc..

jokoon 4 hours ago

I don't know why, but on windows, the first time I start VLC after a windows boot, it takes about 5s to 8s to open a video file, any sort of video file

I suspect it's a graphics driver issue, or something else

krono 3 hours ago

It's caused by a stale plugin cache, which somehow triggers a blocking windows defender scan on application launch.

I only managed to figure that out thanks to this[1] reddit comment, which also includes a solution:

  Noticed this a while back with 3.0.23. Managed to troubleshoot via debug logs.
  
  Basically the plugin cache goes stale and has to rebuild itself every first launch. No clue why.
  
  To fix: go to C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC (or wherever you installed) with a terminal in administrator mode.
  run the command: ./vlc-cache-gen.exe "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\plugins"
  
  That will rebuild the plugins.dat file which should fix it.

No windows defender exclusion required.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/1skofwx/vlc_3023_windo...

hparadiz 6 hours ago

VRChat folks will love this. Videoplayers are embedded into Unity scenes aka "maps" as a regular imported lib. The videoplayer is a drawn surface where users can see video playback. Most commonly used for streaming live music from a stream like Twitch.

torginus 6 hours ago

Forgive me for my ignorance - but my understanding is that VLC is a frontend for ffmpeg, and even ffmpeg is 'just' a wrapper for hardware video decoders such as NVDEC when viewing supported codecs, like h264/5.

happyPersonR 6 hours ago

Sidenote:

Video game programming with unity was an absolute nightmare to try and get working with any kind of gitops and or with multiple people working on the same code base a couple of years ago

Wonder if that changed ?

1bpp 21 minutes ago

They acquired Plastic SCM around 2020 and I believe they integrated it into the engine, but that was shortly after I stopped using Unity

maxlin 35 minutes ago

I wish Unity's built-in videoplayer wasn't such a disappointment. The performance on Windows is god awful. Have had to write a mass video reference recompressor/in-scene replacer that just attempts to pick the best compression flags and reduces resolution just avoid dropping frames playing ~1080p videos on multi-core PC's with discrete GPU's. Mac was fine playing even the overly high res original footage, high 2000+ pixel portrait tutorial videos.

Wrote a proper double-buffering video/audio player in Unity using parts of an ffmpeg wrapper over ten years ago. Seems silly they never did anything similar officially, just used lackluster platform API's.

redsocksfan45 4 hours ago

[dead]

ekjhgkejhgk 11 hours ago

Blocked because I don't use cookies. Ok, I've always preferred mpv anyway.

nisiddharth 10 hours ago

I've 3rd party cookies blocked and it works just fine. Have you disabled all cookies?!

xena 9 hours ago

Why do you do this to yourself?

TiredOfLife 6 hours ago

Yeah, why use software that works instead of software that doesn't