Some open source projects are these days spreading rapidly among the "common folks" - such folks that couldn't give a rats ass 'bout the meaning of "GPL" or "BSD" and soforth - successes like Open Office, Firefox and VLC. I now regulary meet very much not-computer-savvy people who are happy to have found VLC as it "just plays" everything that's thrown at it.

However, support for WavPack are missing. And looking at this thread at the VLC forum it seems the devs over there are happy to implement it... only if somebody else write the code. However, if somebody is able I think that it could be worth it, as beeing supported by VLC might help the widespread of the format...

Could help and I could be wrong but I think Winamp is more widespread as far as audio playback is concerned, so I'd prefer capable coding hands devoted to this first.

Thanks for the heads-up on this. I wasn't aware that there was an open-source video player that would work on both Windows and Ubuntu (the two OS's I use) and I agree that WavPack on there would be great. I looked at their documentation and it seems like the hardest part would be getting the thing to build!

It's kind of funny that I have pretty much the same response as their developers: I don't have time, but would be willing to help anyone who wanted to try. If this is in the same state when I finish up the 4.40 release, maybe I'll try to get it to build here and see if I can make some progress on it.

If the Ubuntu devs are doing their work properly, all you would need to do is sudo apt-get build-dep insert VLC package name here && sudo apt-get -b install insert VLC package name here for it to build.

The source files will probably be left where you ran that command.

PS. You'd need to have a "deb-src" line in /etc/apt/sources.list as well.

I wouldn't say you're wrong but I do meet people (and I'm not talking 'bout the HA crowd here...) who likes to just have one player that plays back all (and don't care so much 'bout the finer features). And Winamp are after all supported, even if the plugin lacks tagging capabilities.

And then there's the points that unlike Winamp:

• it's open source
• it's available for MS Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, The BSD's, Solaris etc. etc.

I also got the impression that their Cygwin build setup is pretty reasonable, and I'm pretty used to that. If either of those work without too much trouble then I'd be set...

Good points, hope either David or some other skilled coder(s) can find the time to take care of both.
Allow me to add that I usually prefer players which use external codecs for obvious rerasons like being able to use the latest version without having to wait for the app to integrate it and being abel to chose the decoder myself when there are choices, that said VLC is a very good program.

I'm not saying that I don't think VLC are lacking in several departments, especially as an audio player (it's interface are not very audio oriented). However, my intial response was due to noting that lots of "ordinary" people are using this program now, and telling others stuff like: "Do you have problems playing that [video or audio] file? Try VLC. It plays everything!" Thus, due to the nature of this program, an integration of WavPack will automatically imply a spread to a larger user community, and ensure support on several platforms simultanously.

As to the external codecs I do agree with you, but I think this is more a point with us audio geeks than with the crowd I was referring to here. And we are mostly going to use other programs for audio playback anyway.... However, that point would be more important regarding encoders than decoders, as most codecs try to remain backwards compatible with older decoders for as many years as possible....

Again good points, I was merely trying to point out that WV devlopment within VLC is unfortunately something different from "stand-alone" WV development and therefore the former eats away at the time dedicated to the latter, had VLC supported external codecs it wouldn't have been the case, but I clearly understand VLC's purpose it to be a multimedia swiss army knife out of the box.

Anyway, if proper WV support in VLC helps broaden the WV user base then let's go devs!

EDIT: I'm in a hurry and was a tad less clear than necessary in the first go at it...

Why not porting WavPack to FFMpeg instead of VLC?
If supported under ffmpeg, it will automatically be supported under VLC, but also under other applications using ffmpeg (like ffdshow).

However, the biggest problem, as usual, is to find someone with enough time willing to do it.

Gabriel's suggestion is brilliant IMO!

As always!

That could spread WavPack in the video community...

As I said in the other thread (merge the two?), I'd love to have cuesheet support (a la fb2k...) in the WinAmp plugin too...

Sergio

Edit: typo

Ffmpeg dev just added wavpack audio decoder sources to ffmpeg 12 hours ago
http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk/libav...mp;pathrev=6336

Yes and it's starting to become really annoying, because they don't understand the difference between different licenses and that other open source projects exist. There is a huge difference between BSD and GPL. It can also be a pain in the ass to make Win32 builds.

I noticed today that a new test build for Windows is available that supports WavPack.

0.8.6 test 1 doesn't contain wavpack decoder.....or I missed someting.

VLC changelog:

Wavpack is in 0.9 svn - not 0.8.6

changelog:
http://www.filehippo.com/download_vlc/changelog/


you might even notice the TTA support there, too ;0


later

can anyone confirm that it has support for lossy WavPack files? i tried an svn version of ffdshow-tryouts which has recently implemented a WavPack decoder and i could not get lossy files to play. lossless ones are fine though.

Indeed...grab a svn build here (the last trunk folder).

I also discovered that the ffmpeg implementation of WavPack does not support the lossy mode, but I think that was just because of limited time / too many projects and they essentially rewrite everything in their own minimalist style. If they don't get around to adding lossy before I have some free time, I'll probably put it in there myself (assuming they have no philosophical objection.) I notice that seeking doesn't work either yet.

If VLC uses this for WavPack decoding then it will obviously have the same limitation, but I'm not sure if that's true.

Anyone in the know about any progress @ VLC or FFM please? Thanks.

ffmpeg recently implemented seeking in their wavpack decoder. i think that's about it though...

Just a note, the ffmpeg wavpack decoder is not very good. It completely ignores floating point stuff, anything with more than 2 channels. Bitrates other than 16 bits are not doing well either (some give very loud distorted noise others are just opened). Basicly 16 bits stereo works, probably mono and maybe 8 bits, other than that it seems to be bad.

not really surprising since it's not based on libwavpack or anything of the sort. i don't think WavPack hyrbid is supported yet but i will have to check...

I know it's bad and not based on libwavpack. It doesn't do hybrid modes iirc. Just wanted to tell that.

This is unique though because (as Mangix says) it's the first independently written WavPack decoder (and it was certainly a lot of work). As soon as I get a little free time I am going to try to update it myself with more functionality (handling --optimize-mono files should be a pretty easy first step). I almost fixed a reported bug a couple weeks ago, but the author beat me to it!