7 Jan 2022

VLC — The Most Versatile Media Player Available

If you watch DVDs or MP4 videos on your computer, you may already be familiar with the VLC Media Player, but it can to much more than just play videos.

No matter what kind of media file you want to play, there's a good chance that VLC will be able to play it, even if it's damaged. VLC supports H.264 and MPEG-4 video files as well as FLV and MXF file formats using codecs that are part of VLC. Modules can be downloaded for other codecs. VLC even ignores DVD region coding, which means it will play DVDs that are not coded for use in specific regions if the DVD drive you have has regional playback control version 1 firmware. Unfortunately, this isn't the case if RPC-2 firmware is installed on the optical player you use. In all, VLC supports more than two dozen video formats, including some that are rarely used. It also supports transcoding from one format to another for about half of the video formats it can play.

 Click any small image for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.

VLC supports all popular audio files such as MP3, AAC, Ogg-Vorbis, WMA, FLAC, and several that you may never have heard of. It's also capable of transcoding audio files from one format to another.

Have I mentioned that it can be downloaded and used for free in versions that run on Windows, MacOS, many Linux variants, Android, Chrome, and several versions of Unix?

VLC's interface is exceedingly plain, but users can switch the application to skinned mode except on MacOS computers. Dozens of skins can be downloaded for free from VLC's website, but the skins will probably be disappointing. How much of a problem is that, though? You probably won't be paying much attention to the interface if you're watching a video, listening to a podcast, playing an audio or video disc, or listening to an online radio station.

The important tools are present. Take audio files, for example. The playback function includes a 10-band audio equalizer, a compressor, a spatializer function, a stereo widener, and even a pitch-adjustment function.

When watching a video, the user can adjust hue, brightness, contrast, saturation, and the image gamma. It's also possible to crop a video during playback, make advanced color modifications, change the geometry, add an overlay, and reduce noise.

The geometry adjustment is helpful if you have a video clip that's rotated. The user can change the playback orientation by rotating 90, 180, or 270 degrees. It's also possible to flip a video.

If these audio and video functions are unfamiliar or you don't feel like using them, just leave them disabled as they are by default. This makes VLC the ideal player for audio and video experts and for those who don't know an aspect radio from a gamma setting.

VLC can be extended with a variety of plug-ins. If you'd like the application to do something it doesn't do by default, there's a good chance that there's an extension that will add the feature.

When VLC starts, it can be full screen on minimal view mode. The application is fully resizable and can display an icon in the Notification area (Tray). Users can set a default audio level that VLC always uses at startup. Setting VLC to always be on top is helpful if you want to view a video file while working on another project. Videos can also display subtitles if they're present in the video file and the user has full control over the typeface size used for subtitles.

Converting Files And Finding Media

Sometimes the file you have is not the file you need. Video files suitable for playback on a desktop computer may be too large to load onto a phone or other mobile device. Or perhaps you have a lot of high-quality FLAC or AAC audio files, but the player in your car works only with MP3 files. VLC can quickly convert a batch of large high-quality audio files to much smaller MP3 files.

If the video file you're converting is an interlaced format such as 720i or 1080i, VLC can deinterlace the file for use on a computer, tablet, or phone. Interlaced video writes odd lines to the screen in one pass and even lines in another pass. This worked fine on old televisions, but interlaced files are ugly when viewed on devices that don't expect the old format. VLC can convert these files to 720p and 1080p formats. Most modern displays work only in progressive mode. When interlaced files are viewed on these screens, the two interlaced frames must be combined and this creates noticeable ghosting on high-performance screens.

There's no shortage of applications that can convert video and audio files from one format to another, but why take the time to search for another option, possibly one you'll need to pay for, when VLC can already handle the task?

VLC is also a handy application for playing streaming audio such as podcasts or live streams from radio stations. By default, VLC offers audio streams from Icelist, which has a shrinking number of users. I like Smooth Jazz Mix New York and there are a few dozen other options to choose from. Check the Extensions page for additional streaming options that can be added to the program.

 VLC plays music CDs and files, DVDs, videos, photos, podcasts, and more.

Download VLC and you won't need separate players because VideoLAN has built everything into a single player. Because it's an open-source application, anyone can download the source code, modify it, and submit it for possible inclusion. It may have an uncommonly plain interface, but users are probably more interested in the media they're watching than what the program looks like.

The VLC Media Player is free, but donations are appreciated. Additional details are available on the VideoLAN website.
The cat rating scale ranges from 0 cats (worst) to 5 cats (best).

Short Circuits

Adobe Illustrator's 2022 Updates Might Surprise You

Applying and rendering 3D effects and substance coverings are surprising advances in Adobe Illustrator 2022's technology previews. Although the new version has a lot of other useful new or improved features, 3D options are getting the most attention.

Adobe applies the technology preview indicator on new features that are being introduced "with limited capabilities" according to the company. When the program component has advanced to being able to provide all its intended basic features, the technology preview indicator will be removed. Adobe recommends being cautious with these components because they're not yet "production ready". This may sound a lot like beta testing, but Adobe sees a distinction in that beta features are included only in beta releases, not in production releases. "A feature is moved to technology preview from beta only after improving its quality and functionality through user feedback," Adobe says.

So with that warning out of the way, I can say that I've looked at 3D functionality in Illustrator in many previous releases only to be disappointed. That disappointment ends here, with the 2022 release.

3D effects like rotate, revolve, extrude, lighting, and shadows can be added to text and vector items to create realistic 3D graphics. The addition of substance materials and rendering options to the 3D panel makes this year's Illustrator even more surprising. Substance materials add textures and colors to the surface of 3D graphics using thousands of assets provided by Adobe or you can create your own.

 Click any small image for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.

Using the Extrude function, I added depth to some text without having to convert the text to paths. This can be a huge time saver if the need arises to change text once it has been converted to a 3D shape with a texture. The text has a sand step dunes material applied with the default options for the sand color, roughness, pebble density, pebble color, pebble roughness, wave amount on the X axis and Y axis, wave roundness, offset position on the X axis and Y axis, luminosity, hue, saturation, intensity, height range, height position, and ambient occlusion intensity.

In other words, the variability is such that a nearly infinite number of possibilities exist, and that's without even looking at the lighting tab. Graphic illustrators will doubtless be excited about these new possibilities.

As with several other Adobe applications, the 2022 version of Illustrator can automatically activate typefaces when a typeface isn't loaded on the computer at the time a project is opened. In the past, Illustrator would detect a missing typeface and display a message, but it was up to the user to locate and activate the typeface.

Users can also place linked Photoshop documents instead of embedding them. As a result, the Photoshop document will be updated in Illustrator automatically if it has been updated in Photoshop.

Illustrator has been available for IPad users for a while and the 2022 version adds the ability to convert raster images such as JPEG and PNG files to vector images that can then be filled with color, have strokes added, and have their paths edited. Once converted to vector images, they can also be resized without loss of quality. This is a feature that's intended for use with objects such as text and geometric objects, not photographs.

Overall, there's a lot to like in the new version of Illustrator.

Related To Nothing In Particular

I found a photo the other day that reminded me just how much change we've seen in just a few years. The photo shows the desk beside my main computer in 2007. There's a cat on the desk along with some historically significant objects.

Except for the cat, you may remember some of these things from your home or office: Fifteen years ago I was owned by (1) an orange cat, we had a (2) landline phone and a (3) huge printer, (4) dictionaries were close at hand, (5) computer backups were on tapes that were stored offsite, (6) software was delivered on CDs in boxes, some of which even contained instruction manuals; and (7) DVDs were the highest of high tech. (8) Duck Tape was essential, and it's one of the few things that remains today. Not seen it the photo is the single-screen monitor, small by today's standards, and the huge desktop computer box.

The cat died in 2010; there's no longer a landline phone in the house; the printer is smaller, but it's also a copier and a scanner (and if I had a landline, it could be a fax machine); dictionaries remain, but they're out of easy reach because Merriam-Webster is on the internet; backups are cloud based or stored on other disk drives instead of tapes; even complex applications such as Adobe Creative Cloud are delivered online; and DVDs are common, but they're now the lowest-tech method of watching motion pictures and television shows. The single screen has been replaced by two large monitors in addition to the notebook computer's built-in monitor and the single large desktop system has been replaced by two notebook computers, one running Windows and the other running MacOS.

Times change.

Faster Updates For Windows 11 Users

If your computer has the Developer version of Windows 11, updates will continue to be huge, but other users will see much smaller and faster updates.

This is a process Microsoft has been working on for a while, partly to reduce bandwidth costs for big downloads and partly to reduce the annoyance of large downloads for users who have slow connections or metered connections.

Windows 11 updates (except for the Developer channel) are only about 60% of the update sizes for Windows 10. It's a packaging trick. Updates have been somewhat smaller because Microsoft stopped sending full installation files and limited the contents to differences between the new files and the original file. These are delta or differential updates.

Prior to 2018, the differential files contained all changes made since the original installation files were released. The objective was to ensure that users would always obtain the latest updates even if they had skipped a few months. The differential files (also known as "cumulative updates") became larger on every Patch Tuesday until a new semi-annual update was pushed out.

Microsoft used a "reverse differential" process in which one file removed all updates installed since the last major update and the full differential file brought the system completely up to date. That process has been discontinued for Windows 11.

The operating system itself keeps track of what has already been installed. At this point, you may be thinking that's the way it should have been done all along because it's simpler. But it isn't. It's important to understand that changes made are to machine-level code where specific memory addresses are referenced. A single change can have unexpected results if a dependency is missed.

Windows 11 downloads only the new files it needs, so if you keep the computer up to date, the system won't repeatedly download files that you already have. As a result, update downloads don't get larger every month.

Because Microsoft will continue support for Windows 10 until late 2025, these update changes might be added to that version. Microsoft hasn't committed publicly to that.

Twenty Years Ago

Wait ... What Happened To Spare Parts ?

For the past several years, this section has been called Short Circuits, and it was the place where two brief articles and a historical post from 20 years in the past appeared. The two brief articles have not been as useful or as popular as I thought they might be so, effective with the first program of 2022, they have been dropped and the section has been renamed Twenty Years Ago.

It's Time To Upgrade Your Windows Computer To XP (Maybe)

The question in early 2002 was whether Windows computers should be upgraded to Windows XP or not. As usual, I said it depends: People ask me if they should upgrade to Windows XP or wait to buy a new computer that already has Windows XP. My answer is an unequivocal YES. YES, you should install the upgrade. And YES, you should wait. If you're wondering whether it's painful coming down on all sides of an issue, the answer to that is also YES.

Allow me to clarify a bit.

IF YOU HAVE WINDOWS 95: You are probably running a computer that Moses would have rejected. You should not try to upgrade to Windows XP, but you should buy a new computer.

IF YOU HAVE WINDOWS 98 (particularly if you have Windows 98SE): There is no pressing need to upgrade an existing computer, but your next computer will have Windows XP. If you need to upgrade to a more robust operating system, then you should upgrade to XP, but strongly consider formatting the hard drive and starting fresh.

IF YOU HAVE WINDOWS NT4 WORKSTATION: Maybe. If everything is working, it might be better to leave things alone until you buy a new computer.

IF YOU HAVE WINDOWS 2000: There is absolutely no good reason to upgrade the computer to Windows XP, but the upgrade will probably go fairly smooth if you decide to do it (unless you have a computer like mine).

IF YOU HAVE WINDOWS Me: It's probably a good idea to upgrade to XP, unless your Me installation is trouble-free. If it is, leave it alone.

In re-reading my experiences from 20 years ago (this was a much longer article) I was reminded how much better the update process is today. Yes, some updates still go wrong. Yes, some people are still needlessly afraid of updates. But they are no longer a cause for dread.