Why not directshow?

[Starbearer]

About VideoLAN two things are clear:
1. it is fast (which is good)
2. the player simply isn't good enough (which is bad)

My question is why don't you make a directshow version of VLC (like ffdshow, but faster), so users will be able to enjoy the extremely fast h264 decoding of VLC with the features of whatever player they like?

[Guest]

VLC is a crossplatform player, not a Windows only.
You can hack your own version, but it won't be easy.
Also VLC is missing Windows Devs ATM.

[Starbearer]

yeah, but i bet Windows users are more than all the other platform's users together

And the h264 decoder of VLC is about 3 times faster than the one in ffdshow, other decoders are alot faster too ... i think it's worth the effort to make a directshow version ... and i bet millions of new users will begin to use VLC then

[Sigmund]

VLC uses ffmpeg for h264 decoding. ffdshow uses ffmpeg for h264 decoding. If vlc is faster than ffdshow then the reason for vlc being faster is just because vlc is not dshow based.

[havarill]

Or maybe vlc is based on a newer version of ffmpeg than ffdshow? It's been like 2 years or something since the prev. official ffdshow release.

And VLC is a great player for windows because it does not use directshow.

As with all players though, there are some things you would like to change, as a user. For VLC it's fortunately mostly GUI related -> requesting skins

[dionoea]

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-skins2.html

[themagician]

More recent ffdshow builds are being done independantly. Builds seem to surface every couple of weeks.

http://kurosu.free.fr/ffdshow.htm

Cheers!