Overview Of Video Players: VLC, K-Multimedia Player And MPlayer

Introduction

Video player is a multimedia program where it can play various types of multimedia files such as music, videos and movies. These commonly show standard files on things such as tape recorders and CD players. We will be discussing the different types of open source video streaming players such as the following:

1. VLC
2. K-Multimedia Player
3. MPlayer.

From these open source video players certain formats must be used in order to allow the multimedia programs to play on the video players these include:

1. Flash Video Format: Flash Video format is a type of container file format for Audio, Video and Text; it delivers digital video content using Adobe Flash Player Version 6. There are two types of FVF, they are FLV and F4V.
2. AVI format: This format can be played on a VLC, it stands for audio video interleave. Files with this format can store data that can be encoded in various codecs and is able to contain video and audio data.
3. FLV format: FLV stands for Flash Video Files. It is also a type of video format that uses Adobe Flash Media Player or Adobe air to transmit Audio/Video over the internet. Websites such as YouTube uses FLV and is commonly used in VLC media players.

To define video players, it is a software that can be used to play video, audio or animated files. Examples of video players are VLC’s, Real Time Players, MPV, etc. Operating systems such as windows tend to have a built in media player, such as Windows Media Player, whereas the OS X comes with the Quick Time Player. Different media players can also have different functionalities. Examples of these are Windows DVD players, which only plays DVD video discs and Media Player Classic which plays individual audio and visual files.

VLC

This media platform is an open source media player that was developed by the VideoLan project which was released on July 7, 2009. It became available for android in the year 2010 and now it is available to download and to use for streaming videos, movies and music on various technological platforms such as Android, iOS and Windows. Formats such as the AVI format can be played on the VLC video player. It is also able to stream multimedia files on several computer networks and transcode multimedia files. Because of its large number of free decoding and encoding libraries it can calibrate protected plugins without any hassle. An example of this library is the “libavcodec” library which provides a common encoding/decoding framework and have many decoders and encoders to play audio, video and several bitstream filters. Apart from this library, this player also uses multiplexing and demultiplexing. This method allows several signals, analog and digital to be combined into one signal using one shared medium.

1.History

VLC stands for Video Lan Client, this was during the time that it was a client for the Video Lan project. The VLC was initially intended for a server to be able to stream videos from a satellite dish. Over time as it has been developed, it is no longer a client of the Video Lan project which therefore as a result was renamed VLC media player. The famous cone icon of the VLC is to symbolize the “traffic cones” that the École Centrale's Networking Students' collected whom developed this media player. This logo was once hand drawn and in 2006 was later developed and changed to a higher resolution. When the VLC was released in 2009, it was developed and was later available to android devices in 2010 and was later available to download on “Google play” in 2011. The new version of this media player was released in 2016 and contains new features such as “chromecast output support” hardware accelerated decoding, 4k, 8k and 10 bit HDR playback.

2.Design

This multimedia player has a very portable design which allows it to include plugins for new file formats, interfaces and streaming methods. It has over 300 modules which as a result can create its own graph of modules such as controls, codecs and audio. As it is a packet-based media player, it is able to play many video contents whether they are damaged or unfinished. It supports various skins that can be highly customizable such as the “the skins2 interface”, “Winamp2” and “XXMS skins”. It also supports various video formats such as “libeavformat” for example. Because of this the VLC can play back videos in MPEG-4.This media player also includes filters that can customize the video such as distorting, splitting and rotating. To install this multimedia player, one can run it directly from a USB flash drive or any other external drives.

3.Operating System Compatibility

This multimedia platform can be compatible with different versions of OS such as androids, iOS and MacOS.

MPlayer

MPlayer, one of the most powerful open source players, is a free media player than runs on many systems and CPU architectures. It is based on FFMPEG codec library. This media players originated from Linux but also supports other platforms. It is a command-line application. MPlayer has a number of graphical front-ends, for example, SMPlayer. As it is a powerful application, a wide range of audio and video formats along with capturing video and audio output, saving streamed content to a file, decoding subtitles, and transcoding between formats are also supported by this player. MPlayer was previously upgraded into MPlayer2 with new features but it’s no longer actively developed. Luckily, a new fork emerged. This new player is called MPV. It is a free, open source and cross-platform media player. Configuration options, optimizing and cleaned-up code, and the ability to convert multimedia files directly in the player are available in this application.

1. History

The original creator of the Mplayer, Hungarian Árpád Gereöffy, started developing this media player in 2000 when he was unable to find a player for Linux that satisfied him. This developer noticed that most of the Linux media players have the same problem with special files or audio and video snyc. Árpád Gereöffy decided to modify a player after XAnim stopped developing in 1999. The first player was named mpg12play v0.1. Gereöffy was later joined by many programmers, not only from Hungary but also worldwide. When Gereöffy left MPlayer Development in 2003, Alex Beregszászi has maintained MPlayer. This player that was previously named as “MPlayer - The Movie Player for Linux”, was later called “MPlayer – The Movie Player” after it was also being used on other operation systems.

2. Features

MPlayer is supported by many native codecs and plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files. Another great feature of this application is the ability to play Video CD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia, Sorenson, Theora, and MPEG-4 (DivX) movies. It also works with a wide range of output drivers such as X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, libcaca, DirectFB, GGI and SDL and some low level card-specific drivers. The option to watch movies in fullscreen is also available to the user since most of them support software or hardware scaling. An onscreen display or OSD for status informations, big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls is also supported as well as European/ISO 8859-1, 2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc.), Cyrillic and Korean fonts together with 12 different subtitle formats such MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS etc.

MEncoder is also included in the MPlayer releases. MEncoder is a simple movie encoder made to encode MPlayer playable movies to other MPlayer-playable formats. It also has the ability to stream copy and more.

K-multimedia Player

1. History of “The KMPlayer”

The K-multimedia Player, formerly known as “The KMPlayer” was first developed by Kang Young Hee and was released in the 1st of October, 2002; which was soon then acquired by Pandora TV which is a local Korean streaming video company in August 2007. This video player is written in Delphi, C++Builder, Netwide Assembler and Visual C++. Its multimedia framework is DirectShow, which is developed by Microsoft. The K-multimedia Player is available in 24 languages nationwide such as English, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, etc. but, is only compatible in Windows, IOS, Android and the alpha version of the MAC OSX. It has a diverse format support which includes RTS, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AAC, WMA7, WMA8 and OGG.

2. Features of the K-Multimedia Player

The K-multimedia Player splitters, decoders and audio/video transformers are connected to internal and external filters, allowing it to be controlled without seizing the DirectShow’s merit system. The merit system is a term used for selecting and prioritising codecs along the operating system. The internal filters are not registered into the system; therefore, the K-multimedia player’s systems will not be confused with the operating system. It also has a feature where audio and video effects can be altered and the playback speed can be slowed down as well as be increased. It has a 3-D feature which was released in the 15th of March, 2014 which is valid for Android and IOS users. The 3-D formats videos provides an optimized and stable playback feature through the use of graphics processing units. On the 14th of May, 2014 a KMP connect was released which allows the user to connect the PC version of the video to mobile devices.

3. Files and Devices Supported by KM-Player

The K-multimedia Player supports a range of files and devices. This video player even supports incomplete or damaged AVI (Audio Video Interleave). Examples of files which the K-multimedia player supports are:

• Incomplete/Damaged AVI which include skipped or damaged frames
• Locked Media Files while downloading or sharing
• Incoming stream which are delivered via HTTP which only works alongside the KM splitter.
• DirectShow playback which includes almost every audio format such as MP4 and MPEG-1/2.
• Async File Source for memory caching It also manages to support devices such as:
• Shoutcast/Icecast
• Google video/Flashvideo/Nullsoft Streaming Video/PMP
• Real Engine and DierectShow which involves Real Player, an alternative or its decoders.
• Most MP4’s are also supported which are mainly DirectShow.

Conclusion

In conclusion, different types of format of files can be played using multiple kinds of video players such as VLC, Osmo4, MPV, etc. This is due to the fact that various types of video file format such as MP3, MP4, AVI is compatible with certain video players. Video Players can also be built into the PC, such examples are windows media player, which is built onto Windows 10 and Quick Time Player which is built onto OSX. Although, advancements on the internet allows us to download video players available online such as VLC, DIVX player and MPVs.