VLC Player - Jean-Baptiste Kempf, 20 Years of Open Source Innovation - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)
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Tom Ray: Hi, and welcome to another Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. I’m Tom Ray, and this is a show where I talk with musicians and people who create things for musicians and projects and people who work in the open source realm, like Creative Commons or open source in general. And today is someone who, I mean, I personally want to say helped shape a lot of music and video over the years, and that’s why I’m really excited to talk to them about it. So why don’t you introduce yourself and tell the people who you are and what it is you do.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: hi, my name is Jean Baptiste Kempf I’ve been, leading the VideoLAN, VLC open source project for almost 20 years now. and I’ve been doing quite a few things around open source multimedia. but I’ve also created companies, raised money. I’m an entrepreneur. I’m French, obviously. I think that’s pretty much it.
Tom Ray: And so are you located in France right now?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah, I’m in Paris.
Tom Ray: Okay. All right. It’s funny, when I was, when we were waiting to get ready and we were emailing each other, I actually was getting another email from a, live coding band that I know in France. I just said, France, France. And they’re called, Crash Server. And they did some music for the Ubuntu Summit that I helped to do a music project for. So I was like, oh, I’m getting two emails from, from France right now. But that’s neither here nor. I just thought it was neat. So, now getting back to videoLAN and vlc. Now, I guess some history would be great because I know that most people discover vlc, when specifically probably when they’re trying to figure out, like, say, getting video to work or trying to play video that they’ve encoded from something or something that maybe they put on their laptop or movies or whatever, and somebody. And they’ll say, I can’t play it. And the first thing people will do is go, have you tried using vlc? Now, I know you said you’ve been working on it for 20 years, and there was a time when you had specific players you had to have for specific proprietary players, or movies and formats. And VLC set out to go, why can’t we just play all of them at once instead of downloading separate players? Is that how it started? Am I just making that up? Am I close?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Not at all.
Tom Ray: Tell me how that got started.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: So the VideoLAN project, right, which was larger than vlc Is actually a student project that was starting at the university called Ecole Central Paris, which was at the time south of Paris. And it was like something a bit specific and a bit weird for. It’s a public university, right? some things that we call Grand decol, right? Those are basically university specialized in engineering. and this one is a public one. But it was mostly managed by students, right? So everything on the campus was managed by students. Whether it was tv, radio, supermarket, library, and so on. And including What happened in the late 90s was a big network, in late 80s, sorry, based on token ring. And so there was like around 1,200 people on the campus and they were all connected to this token ring network which was extremely slow. but in the 80s it was easy and it was also managed by students. And at some point, in the early 90s, 93, 94 they wanted to have something faster mostly to play video games actually on the network and they wanted to have something else and they went to see university administration to get something and the administration said well you know what, like m. The campus is not ours, right? Because it’s a non profit managed by students. So you know what, like no, go and get the partners of the university or some industry players and get them to actually found your project, right? Which was a way to hey, get away, right? But they actually did that, right? So they went, right? And they met, right? And. And one of the partner industry partner was a TV station. and they said well you know what? the future of video is satellite. Well no it’s not, but like 1995, that’s not stupid. And if you instead of buying those 1200 satellite dishes and those huge decoders at that time, right? Which costed several hundreds of dollars per student, right? Just buy a big one and stream that and play that on normal computers, right? And we are in at the time like the fastest computers at 100 MHz, right? So decoding video real time is probably not possible. But they say well you know, we’ll find a solution, right? And that was the Network 2000 project that was started, right? And the project went away and they did it for two years. It worked. It should have stopped there. but a bunch of other students arrived and said well you know what, maybe there are other people who want that. So in 1998 they restarted the project to stream video on a local network and it was called Video lan.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: And one of the parts, right, because there was a server, there was a lot of networking and there was a client called videoLAN Client, which became vlc. And they fought the university to get that open Source. And in 2001 they managed to get that open source. And the day they became open source a lot of people started using that. And people added the support for new codecs, right? Because of course it was done to do video streams and they added codecs and codecs and codecs and codecs. And in the end it supported so many other things, right? But like people don’t understand that. No one thought, oh, I’m going to do a new player that is going to play everything by default, right? It was like continuity of a project and that became another project that became another project that became vlt. and the reason why it played everything is that it was mostly a Linux project. But when they ported to Windows, instead of using the Windows codec, it was easier to rebundle the Linux codecs on Windows and on Mac than doing that. And by doing that they took all the codecs with them. And so VLC played everything because you had nothing to install and at that time was a nightmare, right? You had to install things. Well, it’s still a nightmare, right? Like I think HP or other remove HVC support from Windows not long ago, right. And so you need to come back and play again and so on. Right. And this doesn’t exist in VLC land.
Tom Ray: Yeah, no, I was realizing, I was looking back just to see how many codecs it had. I was looking in the, it still uses you, it still can play real player videos, which was a thing that’s come and gone. I remember when everybody thought real player was going to take over the world. Actually it wasn’t real player, it was called something else and then switched to real player. And then it got bought by a company, then bought by a company, then bought by a company and then eventually died. But it was going to be like it was the easiest way to stream video from your website and the easiest way to. Or you can make the smallest amount of video, all that kind of stuff. Everybody was trying to make their own. Like we’re going to be the only player. But they all, except for real players, seem to be specific to the operating system. Like you were saying, it was built on Linux, but then when you guys brought it over to Windows, it was like, oh, well, we don’t have to follow any of that. And then it opened it up. Now the other thing too is this was the only one that was open, source. And you explained the story of how it became open source. But do you think that is one of the reasons that it grew such a following? Or was it just that it was so much easier to go, oh, I need to make this work with it, so I’ll just use VLC and build this into it because it’s open source. I mean, how did it grow? How did it continue to expand to the fact that it’s outlived many players even today? So how did that work?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: The thing is, like, more people like starting using it. Right. And because more people start using it, the then it becomes something bigger. Right. Like, and other people arrive and added something on it. Right. So the thing is because it was open source, but also because one of the things that was done very early was a type of plugin systems. Right. So you could add other plugins and it was easy for someone else to come and add a plugin. Right. And so in the end it became bigger and bigger and bigger by having a ton of people adding new features without having to tangled with a core, which is still complex.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And I want to tell you the origin of how I seem to recall that I came about discovering vlc, myself. And it is the whole like, just, you know, when you try to play things with it or you. Or play stuff on your laptop or whatever. But I was at a time when I was making VCDs, where they were instead of. Nobody had video DVD burners yet, but you could burn a movie onto a CD player and you would have to use. What was it? It was like Tsunami, MPEG encoder or something like that to actually make it work on a player. And VLC was the only thing that would actually let me play it on my, on my desktop. So that’s how I discovered that. And then I’d be on like the DVD help forum, site and everything. And essentially everything. Every answer to everything was always try using VLC player. That you guys kind of became a behemoth.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah. And it became a joke. But it’s a bit m of a problem, right. Because like VLC has bugs. Right. Also. Right. And doesn’t support everything perfectly. Right. And so some people start like, just like, oh, yeah, but if it doesn’t work in vlc, the file is broken. Well, maybe not. Right. Maybe vlc. And so that’s a problem because people don’t report bugs because they consider the file is broken. And sometimes it’s just like, well, you know. No, it’s not Broken. It’s just VLC is broken.
Tom Ray: Yeah, it’s true. And it does still get built to this day. I didn’t even, you guys just recently did a release for an Android player and I didn’t realize there wasn’t one. That’s it’s. Or maybe there was one, but there’s an update to one, I guess. I don’t know the history of it, but I saw that the recent release was an Android specific one. But it’s interesting in the fact that VLC just, just being part of what I use, I don’t even really consider like what can be played, where or what format it should be on. So how do you guys decide what you’re going to work on? Especially if bugs aren’t getting reported? Or just like the fact that there’s still to this day stuff that needs to be improved or new formats or just ways to play video or stream video. Like how do you decide what to do? I know you’re running as an open source. we don’t.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Right, okay.
Tom Ray: All right.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Things happen because someone cares about it, right? So I have my things I want to work on and I want other people to work on. Right? But like there is no, like it happens, if it happens, right? And sometimes the VLC development accelerates, sometimes it slows down. we have a player on Android for now 10 years, right? So since almost the beginning of Android, right? 15 years. Yeah. But you know, like it’s a different use cases because you use it in a different way than you use on desktop, same on iPhones or Apple TVs and. Right. And we believe it’s very important to have something that works in all the platforms and on all the platforms. And the reason is because the fact that we believe that media, like you need to be able to read and play medias in the future, right? And it’s not a given, right? It’s just like, like, like on Mac, right? For a long time, right, There was this QuickTime thingy, right? And they had ton of plugins and, and at some point Max said, you know what, like m, we don’t support the old plugins, right? Was it Quicktime 7, something like that? Yeah. And then you had a ton of files which you couldn’t play anymore, right? And there was no way. And if people updated, right, they couldn’t do anything, right? And now like fast forward 50 years or 100 years, what are you going to do? So it’s important to have people who spend their time to make sure that you can play anything and make it work. And so, last summer I worked, on DVD audio playback, right? and DVD audio is a problem, right? Because DVD audio is a dead format. like never worked, right? But it’s a custom encryption, right? And of course, well, the company who did the encryption, are all gone, right? And no one knows how to offer DVD audios anymore, right? So you have to. And we had to work around the DRM protection, right? Because else all those devices, in a few years, no one can read them and then you have a custom codec and custom things in it, right? And so it’s just like, people are just like, yeah, it’s a, like, why do you do that? It’s useless. But everything is on Spotify.
Tom Ray: Sure.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Until it’s not, right? Or until Spotify. And like, how do you know Spotify included correctly? How do you know the quality is correct? And like, like, do you want to, to own all the future of recordings and video to, to a few companies? And also like, I, I believe, and I strongly believe that, that we kept those people honest. Honest, right? And, and we kept them check, right? By having something that is free that actually works. It’s just like, you cannot just like, well, you know, you have to suck it up, right? No, we’re here, right? And so you cannot say, well, you need to pay more, right? So I think it’s important what’s happening on FFmpeg and VLC and. But all the other products that people don’t know of. VideoLAN x264av1 because those are the things that are going to be important if you want to keep like fast forward 10 years, 20, 50, right?
Tom Ray: Or even right now, SWFs are gone. Like there was a bunch of people who made, animations and short videos in SWF and now nothing plays them. Or the Internet as a whole decided we don’t want to use this anymore. I don’t know. I can’t remember if it was insecure or if there was a reason behind it or it was just too much processor power, I don’t know. But yeah, all of a sudden SWFs were gone. But, I believe I can play those in VLC still.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah, there are a few, flv, SWF that you can play in VLC and nothing else can. the issue is that it was part of the Flash plugin, right? And basically Steve Jobs said, well, you know what, like we don’t want that on iPhones. which is a bit ridiculous, right? Because when you looked at what he was able to do on very old machine and you do now in HTML5 with animations often not as good as it was. but like at that time it was Adobe mismanagement and they never managed to optimize for mobile and didn’t want to do anything so well too bad. Right? But yeah, that’s exactly a good point. Right? Like DVD audios or, and, and in the days of streaming everything, right, like we realize that everyone is, has almost given up on Blu Rays, right? But like look at the quality, the video and audio quality of the Blu Ray and compare that to any streaming service. Like it’s impossible to compare it Blu Ray this almost movie quality and never you have that on, on Netflix, right? And same for audio, right? You can have like 7.1 close to master lossless 96 kilohertz. You’re never going to have that on on Spotify or, or others. Right. So it’s important for, for the long terms to, to, to have that because. Well, companies are companies, right. They care about short term.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And also speaking of Spotify and are they encoding it the right way and everything? the other thing too is now there’s even as far as audio quality, they have lufs targeting that they do which is just they, they will actually compress it if it’s too loud or too quiet. But again none of the companies can agree on what that should be. Every single one has a different requirement for what the luffs are. So even again like you said, when Spotify, when that’s gone or if you are able to get it back, that’s the thing, you give it to Spotify and however you get that back or if they go then it disappears. But yes, that in that audio that was put there is going to be incorrect to what it originally was regardless. Even though you try to get it as close as you can, you kind of have to decide which which platform am m I going to set the lufts levels for. But and that’s a good point. And then back to what VLC and the video LAN project did you guys were set up for the satellite. But then you’ve also got formats in where you can do Icecast streaming, do Internet radio streaming. That actually gets built into using that for. I’m actually going to be using VLC for this pretty soon to connect an Icecast server to a live video stream for the next upcoming Ubuntu summit. And you, I mean it’s built into so many things Are you involved in those projects? Do people just fork it and then put it in there? Like working with obs? Have you ever worked with them specifically or do they just use vlc?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Okay, yeah, of course. Right. And this is like important use case. Right. And the thing is you need people like VLC and OBS and so on. Right? Because well companies have short terms memory, right. And the chaos their thing. Right. And what do you know with AI like maybe Spotify is going just to be AI video. Right? Well why not? Right, that’s a possibility. Right. And so this is things that are important and like one of the things that we’re getting now in one of the next version of VLC is a list of radio stations. Right? Because like if you now want to listen to radios while you either block to Apple Music or Spotify or you go to things like Tunein. Right. But they now are ah, removing the radios, pushing podcasts because there is more money for them and monetization and just like oh, how do I listen to radios? Like classic radios? How do you do that? Right. It’s not right. Depending on the countries. Right. And maybe it’s easy in the U.S. right. But it’s not obvious. Right. And so you were just like hey you know what, we’re going to do an open source directory or use an open source directory of radio stations. Right.
Tom Ray: And now I know in the past too you guys have. Or no you still can have the Jamendo library that you can search in there now. It’s interesting because I feel like. And I mean I still use Jamendo. I still put our music. Yeah, it’s really different now. I feel like it’s kind of a ghost town there. specifically like even their, their licensing that they do offer for musicians, it’s like randomly updated maybe once or twice a year. I feel like they don’t accept any new music as far as as the stuff that they put in royalty free music. So I don’t know if you still talk with them at all. I just find that I know you still have that in the VLC player there is the JDO thing. But yeah, that was. I’m amazed you’re even still able to connect to it is I guess what I’m getting at. No shade on Jendo. But what’s going on over that Blaze?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah, yeah, it’s a good question. It used to work and I’ve not tested for a long time. Right, but exactly right. this is important to, to have.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Those type of things. Right. And Because like, when you have like two or three companies in the world who are basically controlling music streaming, like, is that okay? Right. And. And how can they be like kept in checked.
Tom Ray: Have you ever looked into other sort of music players or libraries that do that? I know I’ve spoken on this show with different people who are creating things that are supposed to be kind of alternatives. Bandcamp, they’re not necessarily Creative Commons the way that Jamendo is, but they’re people that put it there for. At least for now because they are into federated and open source things. like, one of them is called Bandwagon, which is run by Ben Pate, who he has a language that he’s using to. That’s why he built this. It’s called Emissary. And so it’s kind of a band camp alternative. It’s geared more towards that. And it’s connected to an online streaming radio which is called the Indie Beat Radio. And they’ve. It’s a nice little network of people that are putting together stuff. They even have a live streaming video channel that now uses Own Player or owncastle, which is a open source live streaming thing. So I don’t know if these are things that might be, you know, that VLC might be interested in using for, like what Jamendo used to do. So. But those are some good sources that that can be used in there at least in one place kind of for. And they definitely could help with finding more people to use those formats. So right now it is very much in the open source federated community, but it is growing. I’ve actually met some bands or, I’m going to talk to some bands, were told about it and then joined it because they were looking for something else.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah. So. So for us, like, because there is a way to have plugins in VLC and add new sources. Right. It’s really something that. Well, that. That’s fine. Right. And yeah, and we actually want people to be doing that around vlc, right. Because ultimately I believe that like that this is key. Right. And culture is important and cannot be only commercial. Right. And I know that like, it’s not something people say, right? And. And people are very happy to spend their days on TikTok. Right. But that’s. That’s a bit like a sad way. I think it’s. Right. And so there is lots of things interesting in Fediver, right. And But like at some point we cannot integrate everything, right. It also means that people need to do it. Yeah.
Tom Ray: And that’s the beauty of it being open source. And it is like, it’s true. I shouldn’t be going, can you do that? It should be like, hey, people listening to this, maybe see what you can do with it. And that’s a good point. And another thing too. This is going to be. I thought this would be a flawless transition into this other subject. But speaking of open source, I noticed and I was actually surprised that this hasn’t been done before. I see a new project that’s being worked on called Video LAN Movie creator.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah, it’s dead.
Tom Ray: Is it dead?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yes.
Tom Ray: What happened?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Well, the thing is like it needs a lot of projects, need to have people actually working on it, right. And it never it never get got somewhere right. And okay, there are a few open source and mostly because there are a few open source movie editor like Shortcut which are quite good, right? Or another one called KDEN Live. And those actually work, right. So there is no need for alternatives. And that’s basically what happens. The video editing is also like some things that completely got disrupted by phones, right? Like there is so many like very simple video editors which are on mobile to do cuts, very stupid filters and so on. But there are so many of them, right. And so this is what came out of, out of it, right? So yeah, we never finished that project.
Tom Ray: Okay, all right. I was curious because I saw that there and I was like, I have not heard anything about this.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: And yeah, because it’s okay, right? Like we try things, right? If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Right, Exactly.
Tom Ray: Yeah. It is an interesting point though. It’s true. In this day and age it’s surprising more to find people who don’t know how to edit video than find people that do it. Seems like everybody, it’s a requirement to be able to edit video in this day and age.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Actually I found that’s still quite difficult to edit videos, right? Yeah, like do it correctly is difficult but
Tom Ray: Oh, I didn’t say correctly. I just, just being able to edit video, it used to be something where you thought you had to sit down and just like have a, you know, a degree just to figure out how to get a video editor to work. But yeah, now it’s like, oh, here’s something. Just you know, sit through a few ads and you can, it has it all preset up for you. I mean, ye. It comes and goes. now also you have Did I see that you guys are involved in the Google Summer of code? This Year?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah, like every year for.
Tom Ray: That’s what I thought. I wanted to say. I always thought that you guys were involved.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: I think there were a few years we didn’t because like, we didn’t have time or so around. But like mostly I think my first GSOC summit must have been in 2007. So I think we’ve been on and off mostly from 2007. Right. And GSOC is an interesting thing. Right. Because it’s students who have no clue and start off a project and. It’s a Russian roulette. Right. Sometimes you have the most impressive people that you’ve ever seen, which are absolutely amazing and sometimes completely incompetent people. Right. But that’s okay, right? It’s just like we don’t have to accept everything, all the contributions. Right. We just keep the good ones or the ones that we like.
Tom Ray: Yeah, that’s true. And I mean that makes sense obviously. And now when you’re involved in this and just because I’m thinking about the progression of vlc, having a bunch of codecs and being able to grow with technologies as it has been and the other thing too, which I know you mentioned briefly, but the other up and comer that now has become kind of a go to for it is FFmpeg. Are you involved with that project at all or.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Sure, it’s a sister project. Right. Because there is a lot of people who are working on both of the projects. Right. So like it’s a collection of codecs and filters that we use with vlc.
Tom Ray: Right? Okay. Yeah. And it’s just the fact that FFMPEG at its core is something that’s really meant to be used more in like a cli, format. It’s not necessarily a GUI interface or.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: No, it’s not.
Tom Ray: That’s why I know of it. I know when it’s being used, but I rarely use it directly.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Most of these things you can do on FFmpeg, you can do them in VLC. but the thing is, it’s not something that we spend too much time on. The UI for VLC to convert video is not great. and this is something we need to fix. But again, it depends on people having time for that or not.
Tom Ray: Well, and even then, and I kind of like this, I don’t know if it was by design, but the fact that the thing you’re talking about where you can encode video or you can encode it into a different format or just export the audio, all those options are there, but when you go to find them in the settings, they’re in the advanced settings. So when you get to the settings, it’s just, here are the player settings, and then you get to the advanced, and then here’s all the. Oh, you can really break some stuff. Settings that are in there. Is that by design?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah. Ah, for me, it’s like what I dislike. You have to fill out the feed, you have the one where you have everything that you can customize, and then you have the options where you say, well, simple is better, and you remove everything. and I disagree with both. Right. The right way is to have structured options. The easy stuff and the stuff you need often needs to be at one click. Right. Things that are more complex, two clicks and things that are very complex, three clicks. Right. You need to have, And most of the people are never going to change the preferences, and that’s okay. Right. You need just to have the right default. And sometimes it’s difficult.
Tom Ray: Yeah. Now, the other thing, too, and I thought of this while we were talking about settings. I realized the other competitor, the up and comer, another one that’s come and gone, but still kind of a nostalgic favorite. Now, there was, for MP3s and music in general back in the day when people just shared and downloaded music. it was the winamp player and then that used lame a lot of the time. sometimes people would use lame for the encoding, which is just an MP3 encoder, or to play MP3s, et cetera. But Winamp, what people loved about it was the, skinning. Now, I know that you guys do have a special thing you do every year around the holidays where there’s a little Santa Claus hat on the icon. But, are there skins or has anybody built skins for vlc? Is there.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: They are skins in vlc.
Tom Ray: Really?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: You can even use the winamp skins
Tom Ray: on vlc that I did not know.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Okay. No one knows about it. Right. But you can use, You can use that. Yes.
Tom Ray: Now I’m trying to figure out where I could even find winamp skins. I know that, the Internet Archive has a. The option to use winamp as the player on audio files on their site. Which is fun, but.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah.
Tom Ray: Where would one even get winamp skins these days? There’s got to be somewhere to get them. I mean, it’s the Internet. People post all that kind of nostalgic stuff all the time. Anyway, now I’m just thinking out loud. Sorry. so how do you fund the. How does. How does VLC Stay afloat. Is it strictly through contributions?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Zero.
Tom Ray: Really. Okay. It’s really just a, passion of love from college.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yep. Yes.
Tom Ray: That’s, that’s downright commendable. I like that. I appreciate that. And also a little saddened by that. How is it not, how does it not receive any, backing? Or do you choose not to do that so that you can do what you want? I guess.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: How would you put money on vlc? And how do you would get money on vlc?
Tom Ray: Yeah, no, that’s basically what I’m asking. You’re like, yeah, how would you do that? That’s why I was curious. If you do it all, how do
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: you do that without being. Starting to do the wrong things? Right.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Okay, so that’s a problem. Right. So we are nonprofit. We have a functioning budget that is lower than an engineer. A cost of engineer per year. And that’s okay. Right. we use that money to, to buy hardware, to to fly people to conferences to, to meet up to and legal costs which arise. but that’s it. Right. And the rest is like, it’s mostly volunteers. And you have several companies around, around the project, the community who are doing stuff around vlc. Right. And have a few companies who are doing basically consulting. But for us it’s, it’s an okay, It’s a. Okay version.
Tom Ray: Yeah. Okay. And I know that you.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: And it makes sure that we long term not doing stuff that Winamp is doing. Right. Because now you go to Winamp, um.com. right. You could do it. Right. It’s a right. It’s now something that is for creators.
Tom Ray: I don’t know what it is. I know I saw that they relaunched that too. And it’s like what is this? What are they trying to do? I don’t get it.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: I don’t know. Right. And I think they basically try to be a Spotify competitor in a way or different. Right. And maybe something. I don’t know exactly.
Tom Ray: Well, I’m even. It even kind of looked like they were trying to be like a lander where they were trying to just do, you know, here we’ll master your audio for you in some mysterious way that makes no sense. But then give. It kind of looked like that at first. But then it also, I mean at least go the Napster way where you make it look like here’s a music site where you might get a virus from downloading one of the songs. You know, it’s could go that way looking at it.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Right. But it Seems that they, they basically give you ways to monetize your own music. Right? And then they’re probably going to republish that on other places. Have your fan zone, right? Which is a type of band camp, I guess.
Tom Ray: so they’re trying to monetize kind of like the way where you do YouTube claims, but they’re trying to do it across the Internet like going, hey, this person’s playing your music. And then send them like, because fans love nothing more than hey, I’m supporting this band and talking about them posting their music on my site and then getting a takedown notice because they love that. Nothing makes a fan more intrigued about your music than getting a takedown notice. sorry, Creative Commons musician here.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: But yeah, so it seems that this is what they’re doing, right? And merchandising its own. Right. And so maybe it works, right. But I don’t know anyone using.
Tom Ray: I don’t know if it does. I heard about the launch and then I’ve really heard nobody mentioned Winamp again. I know that they do have a button inside of the the Jamendo Artist account, like where you upload your music. They have that on there as well. So I don’t know. now here’s a question. Going forward, what are some of the things that VLC has coming up? Or do you really just kind of go. I mean are there times where you visit it? Do you work on it actively throughout the year? Do you have plans of where you want it to go in the future? Like how do you think about where VLC is going?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: So vividolan in general, so videoline is easier, right? Because there are so many projects. Right? VLC is one, but we have like one for the last four games. For five years we’ve worked on this open source implementation of the AV1 format called David. Right. And we now have. Which was like most of the big focus for Videoan in 2020-2023. Right. And now we’re working on the next generation before the AV2 format. Right. I’ve been spending a bit of time on Lip Special audio, right. Which is an open source renderer so that you can have like object based audio, what we call next generation audio, Atmos or MPEG H and stuff like that. Right. so that we have a correct open source renderer that is not tied to Google or Meta or whoever. Right. And so that’s one of the things that I’ve been trying to do. Right. there is a few libraries around Libplacebo, which is video filters etc. Etc. On VLC I know what I would like to do, but DIT requires more money than I have. I think there is a big question, question about like feathering various content, right? Whether they are from Jamendo, from Bandcamp and Bandwagon and radio stations and podcasts, right. Like where is the open source, podcast directory. Right. And stuff like that, right. I think this is important, right? Because you have too many, too many things that are basically try to a few companies and, and, and that’s cool until they are not cool anymore, right? And 20 years ago we were always cool, right? Now it’s like probably the worst company you want to avoid, right? And yeah, and Spotify was amazing at the beginning and now like last time I used Spotify I was horrified about this ui. Like I couldn’t like you can’t find a, you can find a song, right? You need. Every time you look for something on the mobile version, it gives you an album or a playlist, right? And you swamp with playlists from whoever, right? Just like I want to uncue a song, right? You can get that. Then like stuff like that, right. So I think there is a need for open more opening and people have content and it’s easier to create content and distribute content. And I think this is something that is important.
Tom Ray: Yeah, very much so. And you’re right with the the way that like podcasting used to be something that you one listen to or you downloaded on your desktop, then put it on whatever your mobile device was and now that they’re streaming bandwidth, these are all great things. I’m all for them. But yes, you’re right, it’s. Then it became all of a sudden Apple was the only thing to play on and it still was the main runner. And now that is what Spotify is going towards because they have to pay less royalties on it and they just pay advertising, etc. And it does get shifted that way. But having those libraries in VLC and I mean I still always switch over to that sometimes and just see like what pops up and you know, try out a few channels just to go well, what’s this one do? That’s having all of that option available all in one player. That also is just something that will open up a file that’s on my desktop in general and then have that right next to it. That’s pretty cool and I enjoy that and it’s really one of the reasons why I Wanted to talk with you today because it’s just something I’ve been very, very intrigued with. So,
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah, it’s even worse, right. Like we’re talking about audio, but video. Right. Like there is YouTube and nothing, else.
Tom Ray: Very true.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: It’s incredible, right? There is nothing else.
Tom Ray: Yeah, no. Unless you want to go streaming and even that is like. What’s the other alternative? It’s mainly Twitch, you know.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Yeah. And Twitch is Amazon.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: And. But it’s also focused on one specific use case, right?
Tom Ray: Very much so, yeah. It’s specifically for that. Yeah. It’s not. They don’t even let you. They used to at least let you upload broadcasts and now you can’t even do that. You can literally only do live streaming on it. So. Yeah, no. And, also I wanted to ask you one more thing before we go. So I know that they’re on your website, you mentioned that you’re currently interested in Kyber or Kyber, I believe it’s pronounced. Tell me about that a bit. I was curious, I looked at it a little. I’d never heard of it before, but since it’s something that it says you’re currently involved in, I’d really like to.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: It’s my new project, right. It’s an open source, software, stack to control any type of machine remotely. Right. That means computers, drones, robots, vehicles and stuff like that. Right. And it’s all the use cases where you are going to be moving or you need to have access to power or data that is far away. Right. So it’s either like Citrix or TeamViewer replacement, open source, but it’s also a cloud gaming replacement. Or, or it can be used to control a fleet of 10 drones that are around your house. Or basically being sure that the humanoids, robots, you can still get a control of them when they are not working correctly or just to check that everything is happening. And so it’s a big topic and it’s about having the lowest latency possible because when you do remote desktop or something, when you click and it takes half a second to display your menu or so on, this is really painful. And so you have things, we have clients using that for, remote surgery or stuff like that. So that’s also quite interesting. but yeah, this is basically what we’re doing.
Tom Ray: Wow. Okay. And that’s kind of what I thought it looked like it. But yeah, no, that’s. How did you.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: It’s a bit more difficult for people to see. Right. Because it’s really? Like for large companies, right. Who are building robots and so on. Right.
Tom Ray: No, I mean, I don’t have a robot sitting around here that I’d be able to test that with, so I assumed it was for bigger purposes. And the fact that you said 10 drones, I’m like, I don’t even have one drone, so. No, but that’s really interesting. That’s just got to be, I mean, how do you even. Is it just you involved in it right now, or are there other people involved?
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: We have quite a few on. It’s a very complex topic and.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: And actually raise money from VCs, right. So quite different from what I’ve been doing on dlc.
Tom Ray: Wow, cool. Okay. I’m glad I asked that. That’s awesome.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: But I think it’s key, right? Because in the next 10 years, we’ll have hundreds of millions of robots around. Right? And maybe you don’t call them robots, right. But like automatic cars. They’re robots. Right. Or drones. Right. They’re robots. Right. Just flying and rolling and. But then you have, like, so many things in your house which are automatic, like vacuum cleaners and so on. Right. And we’ll see more and more of those. Right. And so in that case, then it’s important to do to be able to be sure that it works fine and you can see what is happening.
Tom Ray: Yeah, no, that’s cool. And I’ll just have to keep an eye on that. I just discovered that when I was setting up today, so that’s all new to me. And, I want to thank you so much for talking with me today. This has been really great.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Thank you. Thank you for having me.