Waveform

[Crystal]

Hello VLC-Team,

I'm using now your VLC player for 3 years and I'm still satisified with it.

My feature request for VLC media player are waveforms for audio files. Let's explain this more detailed: Some softwares like Audacity or the commercial program Soundbooth from Adobe displays waveform. This gives the user a good overview what is happening in his audiofile he works with. So why not adding waveform to VLC player, too? When I open an audio file I can still see the window where usually the video is playing, but in this case there is the VLC logo shown. A waveform window could replace that video window. A vertical line in front of the waveform shows the current playing position.

Of course this is just my opinion how it should look like in VLC media player. You could even integrate the wavform into the panel itself, but for cost of the compact interface.

All in all I hope to see in some way waveform implemented in the next VLC player.

Here's an example:

Copyright belongs to F'loom, floom.com

Thanks for reading and have a good day.

PS: I searched for waveform implementation into vlc player and looked at addons.videoland.org without success.

[VLC_help]

Currently whole file/stream Waveform isn't easy to implement since completely parsing something before playback is something that should be avoided with VLC.

[JayShoe2]

Completely parsing something before playback is something that should be avoided with VLC.

We are using libvlc inside of a media player app we are working on. We need to first parse the file and generate it's waveform so we can determine the file's start time (silence detection) and fade out point (for proper crossfades). So, why should parsing something before playback be so bad? Assuming we had the resources to do so, why do you recommend we not play the file through, gather it's data, and display it's waveform?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

VLC has had audio visualizations for years and years. Of course, it can't show the entire wave form ahead of time, since VLC is essentially a multimedia streaming engine (similar to DirectShow or Gstreamer).

[JayShoe2]

Using stmem, play the file into memory, creating it's waveform for purposes of a analysis, and then save the data you want, dump the rest.

The reason it's appealing is that it could scan any file openable via libvlc which is many... It's not something that would happen live. It would be a background task.