[HN Gopher] VLC media player banned in India
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VLC media player banned in India
Author : saikatsg
Score : 145 points
Date : 2022-08-12 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.indiatoday.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.indiatoday.in)
| IronWolve wrote:
| Maybe its VLCs built in streaming services like shoutcast
| directory, maybe a stream on shoutcast is blacklisted in India,
| so they blacklisted the app. (Icecast actually)
|
| https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-stream-radio-stations-in-vlc...
| b215826 wrote:
| The Indian government (and Indian courts) is infamous for these
| random harebrained stunts. In the past, it has banned archive.org
| [1], continues to block the French ISP free.fr, etc. VLC was
| likely banned because people use it to watch pirated films (the
| same reason free.fr continues to be banned [2]). And it's plain
| f*cking stupid to just ban videolan.org, because it can be
| downloaded from numerous other websites [3], not to mention the
| repositories of every major Linux distribution.
|
| [1] http://blog.archive.org/2017/08/09/statement-and-
| questions-r...
|
| [2]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/74lqug/why_is_free_a...
|
| [3] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=download+vlc+-site:videolan.org
| game-of-throws wrote:
| I can't wait until the Indian government tries to ban
| debian.org
|
| https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/vlc
| 28194608 wrote:
| Most likely a blanket Blacklist of url containing the keyword
| video along with unverified source.
| 28194608 wrote:
| https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetail.aspx?PRID=1637701
|
| They have listed VLC as an alternative to Chinese apps but then
| they banned the website. I think its a mistake and someone needs
| to report this.
| saikatsg wrote:
| Maybe they changed their mind :)
|
| https://www.techradar.com/news/everyones-favorite-media-play...
| 28194608 wrote:
| A friend of mine got a new laptop so I was installing some
| important apps and the VLC site wouldn't load. So I checked it on
| my phone and this came up.
| culi wrote:
| Seems like just an oversight or mistake given nobody's given any
| details
| 28194608 wrote:
| Yeah, I had also faced this problem a few days back. After that I
| used a VPN to download it.
| 28194608 wrote:
| Seems to be at ISP level or my local ISP isn't adhering to govt
| rules. Oh well.
| chasil wrote:
| The last time I downloaded it in Windows 11, a popup suggested
| that I use the store instead, so I wonder if India also banned
| that installation path.
|
| F-Droid also carries VLC, and I doubt they will ever take
| direction from the Indian government. On the rare occasion that
| VLC will not play some file, F-Droid also has the Nova Video
| Player, but the Nova listing carries a warning that it will
| track and report your activity.
| unixbane wrote:
| They are doing the user a favor. Get a decent player like mpv.
| fzfaa wrote:
| Or MPC-HC if you are on Windows.
| birksherty wrote:
| How is mpv better than vlc?
| cercatrova wrote:
| I can add upscalers like Anime4k and Nvidia Image Scaling and
| FSR in mpv
| graftak wrote:
| Mpv is touted for its better video and audio playback
| quality, it also opens just about any video without artefacts
| (a grey picture in vlc anyone). Other than that it's
| definately more responsive when seeking through a file, and
| it supports shaders to improve the perceived low res video
| playback quality.
|
| The cherry on the cake really is IINA, a MacOS video player
| that has a super responsive native UI and is basically what
| QuickTime should have been.
| gruez wrote:
| >video and audio playback quality
|
| How is this done? Without additional information the claim
| sounds like hdmi cable advertising to me.
|
| >without artefacts (a grey picture in vlc anyone).
|
| What videos are you playing that gets this issue?
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| >How is this done? Without additional information the
| claim sounds like hdmi cable advertising to me.
|
| Differences in the video/audio decoding process. VLC
| optimizes for playing media over a network connection
| (hence its name Video LAN Client), where temporary
| dropouts and data loss are common and might cause other
| players to choke. The cost of this is sometimes less
| accurate playback.
|
| mpv is optimized primarily for accurate playback of media
| from local storage, and so while it might not fare as
| well for network/streaming media it's generally
| measurably better for local media.
| gruez wrote:
| Can you give specifics? When it comes to decoding media
| formats, I'd expect of the "happy path" decoding behavior
| of media players to follow the specification exactly,
| which should result in the same result. Is VLC simply
| throwing out certain packets rather than properly
| decoding them?
| Jach wrote:
| Just laughing to myself at this. A friend and I started
| copying long movies from the NAS to the media PC's local
| storage, since if I use my preferred smplayer (mpv)
| sometimes some hiccup will cause it to crash, but his
| preferred vlc will limp along and happily put out
| corrupted playback. Neither is a good experience. (Anyway
| the problem is likely the media PC itself since the issue
| doesn't happen on either of our personal PCs streaming
| from the NAS, using whichever player.)
| samtheprogram wrote:
| I've downloaded VODs from Twitch that gave the grey
| screen. I thought it was a dumb glitch in the actual
| video file (maybe still is) but it works with MPV.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Never ever had a problem with VLC but for Linux there's a
| nice GTK front end for mpv called Celluloid :
| https://celluloid-player.github.io/
| babypuncher wrote:
| Celluloid's seekbar drives me insane, and it doesn't seem
| to offer an option to fix it. In every other media player
| since the dawn of time, clicking a point on the seek bar
| seeks to that point. In Celluloid, it only seeks
| back/forward 15 seconds depending on which side of the
| progress indicator you are on.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Wow that's weird, I just tested that on latest Linux Mint
| and the seekbar had the expected behaviour.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Interesting, maybe there is something different about the
| builds being provided by Mint and Arch?
| npteljes wrote:
| I had an old laptop, on which VLC struggled with a video, but
| MPV worked fine.
|
| I like keep multiple of these critical applications around.
| Sometimes, for a use case, one works better than the other.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| With old hardware, better use ffplay, to play a video
| direct from the command line with no overhead.
| unixbane wrote:
| it starts up in less than a year and seeks decently fast
| happytoexplain wrote:
| In my (and apparently other people's) experience, multiple
| popular options, of which mpv is one, are more responsive and
| produces fewer visual artifacts. Also, subjectively, I think
| VLC's UI can be surprising and confusing.
| kobalsky wrote:
| > and produces fewer visual artifacts
|
| what are you watching that produces video artifacts on
| something like VLC or mpv?
| redox99 wrote:
| Somewhat cheeky but you're right. mpv is much better than VLC.
| CyanBird wrote:
| Clearly, we all need to retvrn to the Gom player era
| upupandup wrote:
| Please refrain from making cynical comments like this. It
| goes against HN guidelines:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Seems like a mistake, otherwise they would have banned the
| Android version too
| walrus01 wrote:
| The Indian government has a long and well documented track record
| of trying to arbitrarily ban or block things they don't like:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India
| [deleted]
| nigerian1981 wrote:
| Including journalists
| maxloh wrote:
| Aren't India a democratic country?
| Koshkin wrote:
| _Democracy is the dictatorship of the democrats._
| butterNaN wrote:
| Representative "democracy" with so much hierarchy that you
| don't have any say over anything after the vote has been
| cast.
| bjustin wrote:
| This is the way representative democracies work, including
| the US. Some places have tools such as recall elections
| that people can use in extreme cases, but usually, it is a
| matter of voting for someone else next time.
| ska wrote:
| Democratic countries ban things all the time. A more
| interesting question is if it is principled, and to whose
| benefit or cost.
| bergenty wrote:
| But why wouldn't they like VLC?
| walrus01 wrote:
| ignorance, these laws are being applied by politicians who
| have no clue of the actual internet or gpl/bsd licensed
| software
|
| it would be like trying to ban GIMP because somebody used it
| to photo retouch some porno images.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Whatever the Indian state doesn't understand is either banned or
| taxed to death.
|
| Shame that a country with such a young and technically literate
| population is governed by an army of one-finger-typing tech
| illiterate boomer bureaucrats.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I wonder if using a Ninite.com installer bypasses this?
| theknocker wrote:
| jbk wrote:
| It does
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Just rehost it / mirror it elsewhere..?
| bongoman37 wrote:
| butterNaN wrote:
| It is cute to see non-indians trying to guess the reason. We were
| like you once.
|
| It is an exercise in futility. Our government is run by monkeys.
| They are stubbornly uneducated about science and technology, at
| the same time pretending to know everything about it. How does
| our government take decisions? My best guess is they consult a
| successful team of astrologers.
| UberFly wrote:
| Funny and painfully ubiquitous. Probably really well-paid
| monkey astrologers too.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| If they are succesfull, then they must be good!
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| governments write their own checks and set their own pay
| rate. You can bet they are quite rich.
| walrus01 wrote:
| It is indeed funny to see nerds attempt to ascribe some
| _factual, logical_ reasoning to why such actions are taken by
| certain politicians.
|
| When you learn first hand how grossly ignorant of the internet
| many politicians really are, in almost any country, it can be
| quite the wake up call.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| It's fascinating that attempts at censorship often seem to
| quickly founder in incompetence of all things.
|
| It turns out that actually banning the right things and not the
| wrong things seems simple on the surface and then turns out to be
| problem of nearly unsolvable scale and complexity, to the point
| where the system often falls down through the utter humiliation
| of how badly it is working.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Banning quickly, then unbanning slowly, usually by special
| request, works just fine for authoritarians. If it matters to
| enough people, you'll hear about it, and if it matters to
| important or wealthy people it will create an opportunity for
| graft/partnership. So, now that VLC (for example) has called
| you to get you to unban their software, you can call them later
| to get a feature removed or put in, or just free/discounted
| consulting on how to block objectionable streams (for example),
| with a vague threat of rebanning hanging over the discussion.
|
| Indonesia just banned the entire foreign internet (without the
| west caring), and is requiring sites that want to operate
| within the country to apply for whitelisting.
| nottorp wrote:
| On a slight tangent, mplayer is dead right?
| MikusR wrote:
| It was superseded by MPV https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv.
| Prolixium wrote:
| They had a release earlier so, no?
|
| https://mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
|
| I don't think it's under as much active development as it was
| 10-15 years ago, though.
| nottorp wrote:
| Whoa, must try. Thanks.
| jbk wrote:
| President of VideoLAN here: we got banned since a few months, and
| we don't know why. _(According to my stats, it is since the 13
| February 2022)_.
|
| We've asked the Indian government and we got no answer. We
| probably did not ask the right place though. I wish I knew how to
| ask properly.
|
| The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are not.
| So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the
| government?
|
| VLC and VideoLAN are quite apolitical (we only fight against DRM
| and for open source) and VLC is a pure tool that can read
| anything.
| sammy2244 wrote:
| xNeil wrote:
| >The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are
| not. So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the
| government?
|
| Pretty much. My ISP doesn't block half the stuff the Indian
| government has banned, while my mobile data provider has - it's
| genuinely very weird.
|
| Regarding contacting the government - maybe
| https://pgportal.gov.in should help? File your grievance with
| the section of the government you want to complain to - in this
| case, I'd guess that's the Ministry of Electronics and
| Information Technology.
| jbk wrote:
| > maybe https://pgportal.gov.in should help? File your
| grievance with the section of the government you want to
| complain to - in this case, I'd guess that's the Ministry of
| Electronics and Information Technology.
|
| I will do that again then.
| nindalf wrote:
| This is unfortunate, sorry you had to go through that.
|
| The article made a claim that VLC is owned by a Chinese entity.
| That surprised me because I thought VideoLAN was and is French.
| Is that the case?
| p49k wrote:
| Maybe they corrected it, but for me it says the opposite.
|
| > Notably, VLC Media Player is not backed by a Chinese
| company. It is developed by VideoLAN, a Paris-based firm.
| jbk wrote:
| > It is developed by VideoLAN, a Paris-based firm.
|
| Non-profit, not firm.
| xNeil wrote:
| The article basically states that the reason the government
| banned it was because Chinese actors were using VideoLAN
| products (VLC) to deploy malware loaders onto citizens'
| devices.
|
| I don't understand why they banned videolan.org though.
| It's a French website, and I'd assume the Chinese actors
| were bundling malware when VLC was installed from another
| website and not videolan.org.
|
| Videolan.org is EXACTLY where VLC should be downloaded from
| to ensure the software you download is malware free -
| ironically, I'd expect banning the VLC website to increase
| VLC downloads from alternative sources, and thus increasing
| the possibility of the user downloading malware.
| jbk wrote:
| > That surprised me because I thought VideoLAN was and is
| French.
|
| It is a French non-profit whose address is my parents place
| :)
| gerdesj wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jbk "JBK VLC"
| (search) ... French.
| kubatyszko wrote:
| It must be because VLC allows people to watch pirated content.
| Which would be the most ridiculous reason to get banned for.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Sssshh! Please keep that opinion to yourself... we dont want
| thr Australian Government to get any ideas!
| watdeduck wrote:
| Some reports suggest that VLC Media Player has been blocked in
| the country because the platform was China-backed hacking group
| Cicada was using it for cyber attacks. Just a few months ago,
| security experts discovered that Cicada was using VLC Media
| Player to deploy a malicious malware loader as part of a long-
| running cyber attack campaign.
| jbk wrote:
| Incorrect, Cicada deployed a custom version of VLC which was
| hacked.
|
| Use VLC from our website and you'll be safe.
| CompuHacker wrote:
| Unrelated, do you have a stance on Ninite as a distribution
| method?
| jbk wrote:
| No, should we?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| But maybe the indian government did not care to
| differentiate?
| hprotagonist wrote:
| $5 it's about a version name or something stupid and political.
| formvoltron wrote:
| Open source might consider banning Linux in India in response.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| That wouldn't even make sense even remotely like on several
| levels.
|
| Your realize there is no Open Source committee that sits around
| deciding these things, in fact Open Source at it's heart is
| designed to ensure the exact opposite of what you suggested.
|
| Anyone anywhere can get the code compile and run it.
| tossl568 wrote:
| I think they were joking
| askafriend wrote:
| You missed the joke. Chill, it's a Friday.
| gruez wrote:
| It's really not that obvious considering a few months ago
| people were seriously proposing banning russians and/or the
| russian government from using open source software.
| [deleted]
| elisharobinson wrote:
| the real problem which plague's India is over zealous "babu's"
| aka bureaucrats. It is very difficult to do actual good things
| with regards to policy so they settle for the most hype thing
| "ban X" and label it as patriotism and feed the narrative to the
| media machine which takes and runs with it . Now the government
| gets to pat itself on the back and the "babu" gains notoriety as
| a patriot its a very "notice me senpai" thing. They will continue
| to do this cause they are looked up to by everyone in the country
| as a educated elite . In reality they are a bunch of cockroaches
| who collectively share 3 brain cells to make what i like to call
| "dad joke style policy". If every there is a gaping flaw in
| modern democracies it is the unaccountable and ever powerful
| bureaucrat.
| darkhorn wrote:
| It reminds me how Turkey banned imbd.com. A musician/movie artist
| submitted some links to a court that the following links were
| streaming his movies. In fact IMDB did not stream his movies but
| because it was up in the search results they have banned
| imbd.com. And to this day imbd.com is still banned. Back in those
| days imbd.com had only one page without any content. Yeah, it was
| typo!
| walrus01 wrote:
| Or like how Turkey periodically freaks out when some european
| or north american sources publish something about the Armenian
| genocide.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide
| rubenbe wrote:
| The list of other apps included contains an interesting app:
| Camscanner
|
| The app is apparently Chinese (also mentioned on the wikipedia
| page [0])
|
| IMHO making an app like this is really smart to try to gain
| access confidential documents when they are scanned.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamScanner
| balentio wrote:
| Maybe try banning windows?
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| Finally, year of the Linux desktop!
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(page generated 2022-08-12 23:00 UTC)