The VideoLAN Forums

I just discovered and downloaded the VLC media player (v 0.8.4a for Windows). It's the best player I've seen, esepcially for the visual quality and video tweaking ability. The one feature I miss though, and want to ask about is "frame advance" aka "stepping" meaning a click-setting (and/or a key-combo) to advance the clip in tiny increments from "pause". This is very useful when taking screencaps (and also just to fine tine where you pause to see a particular image in the clip.)

Play/pause is clunky and moves the clip too far - it's very difficult to get small advances. (This is with MOV files, at least). Also, I notice there 's not a reverse function.


(I would strongly suggest it for future versions, if possible for the player [some players have it] - it would be an excellent addition). (A reverse play function would be nice, too).

Thanks.

VLC core doesn't have any notion of what frames are. This is thus impossible to do (without rewriting most of VLC). The reason is that VLC is a packet/network based player, not like most other players which are frame based. (complete explanations are available here: search.php )

Other threads on implementing a frame advance feature referred to this thread, so I think this it the right place to post this.

I'm not a programmer in any way, but it seems to me that there should be a simple solution to implementing a frame advance feature. For instance, VLC has the ability to take snapshots of each frame, so why not have an "enable frame skip on pause" option that snapshots the frames surrounding your current location to a few individual image files in a temp folder, then just display the still image from the snapshot in the video window and let the arrow keys cycle through displaying each successive image file. To this non-programmer it sounds like that should work perfectly and should be reasonably easy to implement.

Whadda ya think? Is it a good workable idea?

It might be little hard with network streams that you can't seek freely because VLC wouldn't know how many images to capture (raw images fill up the memory very fast so you can just stand in and save all frames while user browses few images).

Other threads on implementing a frame advance feature referred to this thread, so I think this it the right place to post this.

I'm not a programmer in any way, but it seems to me that there should be a simple solution to implementing a frame advance feature. For instance, VLC has the ability to take snapshots of each frame, so why not have an "enable frame skip on pause" option that snapshots the frames surrounding your current location to a few individual image files in a temp folder, then just display the still image from the snapshot in the video window and let the arrow keys cycle through displaying each successive image file. To this non-programmer it sounds like that should work perfectly and should be reasonably easy to implement.

Whadda ya think? Is it a good workable idea?

Sounds pretty good.

Hey, breakneckridge thinks much like the CloudStalker, more of an idea person then a programming wiz. Keep it up.

Sounds pretty good.

Hey, breakneckridge thinks much like the CloudStalker, more of an idea person then a programming wiz. Keep it up.

Awesome, glad you like my idea! So, do I need to do something to bring this idea to any particular developer? Or should I just assume that all the developers read this forum and that if my idea has merit then one of the developers will respond to this post and tell me they're implementing it?

Put a feature request to trac.
http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/