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VLC Streamer: Why does it need to encode videos?

N

NewbAndroidUser

 
VIP Member
Hi all, I just wanted to know why the app VLC Streamer needs to encode videos before I'm able to watch them. Another app called 'Air PlayIt' is able to play videos and audio files straight away without encoding it at all.

What's the purpose of encoding the videos?
 
All videos are encoded - that's what a codec (enCOde-DECode) is for. Video programs normally do this transparently - behind your back without any notice. VLC tells you it's doing it.

VLC is open source - if you don't trust it, download the source, make sure there's nothing sneaky in it and compile it yourself. (Trust me, if there was one line of code in there that was the least bit questionable, it would be all over the web in minutes. That's one of the good points of open source software - no one can be reading your emails while you're watching a video. Or grabbing your passwords. An open source program that tried that would be dead in minutes. There are people who download source code just to see how others do it, or to learn nre techniques. If they saw something sneaky in such a popular program they'd be posting on every forum they could connect to.)
 
Rukbat said:
All videos are encoded - that's what a codec (enCOde-DECode) is for. Video programs normally do this transparently - behind your back without any notice. VLC tells you it's doing it.

VLC is open source - if you don't trust it, download the source, make sure there's nothing sneaky in it and compile it yourself. (Trust me, if there was one line of code in there that was the least bit questionable, it would be all over the web in minutes. That's one of the good points of open source software - no one can be reading your emails while you're watching a video. Or grabbing your passwords. An open source program that tried that would be dead in minutes. There are people who download source code just to see how others do it, or to learn nre techniques. If they saw something sneaky in such a popular program they'd be posting on every forum they could connect to.)
Click to expand...

Awesome, brother!

So even when I'm on my PC and I'm watching a movie, whichever player I use it's 'encoding' the video no matter what?
 
Well, when you are watching a movie on your PC it is already encoded (because by definition all digital media are encoded). The video player has to decode it, but in practice that means converting from one encoding to another (from the format it's stored in to ones that your graphics & sound cards can accept as input).

All of the media formats you are familiar with, mp3, aac, mp4, wma, wmv, ogg, flac, gif, png, jpeg, are all ways of encoding sound or graphical data. Encoding and decoding are everywhere ;)
 
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