I think people will understand, if they read the article, that VLC is not a one-person project. You make it pretty clear in the interview.

VLC is one of the biggest open source projects _ever_. For it to maintain its quality over 18 years(!), it needs a leader with a vision and integrity. If it wasn't for an interview like this, people wouldn't know about the collective work that's happening behind the scenes. It's kind of a "necessary evil" to have a single person exposed to the media. And I'm pretty sure that VLC would have either died, been sold, or turned into adware if it wasn't for you.

So I think it's a benefit overall to have you as the sole focus.

Thank you.

> ... or to include adware/spyware in the Windows installer.

Thank you a lot.

Thank you for your integrity. You walked away from enough money to retire on, out of a principled commitment to free quality software. That deserves a lot of respect.

Sure, more money would be fun, but most of the people I know who have more money are annoying.

Also thanks for the work on VLC, it's one of those things that's always been installed on my PC since the early 2000s. :)

Also, if you know Vue.js, we need help on the new web interface of VLC. :D

Out of curiosity, could you give ball-park numbers?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/736ghk/ama_je_suis_...

Well mpv can play full-range videos with correct colors... ;) But for everything that isn't a full-range video, I usually prefer VLC. So thanks!

VLC can too, if compiled correctly with the libplacebo dependency. It shares most of the shaders with mpv.

I have a collection of subtitled videos from several years ago. When I obtained them, I watched them in VLC with no problems.

A year or two ago, I had the urge to watch them again, and I wasn't able to use VLC, because it could no longer display the subtitles correctly. This prompted me to start using mpv instead of VLC, for pretty much everything. But I'm still confused at how VLC could have lost the ability to play files it once handled perfectly.

I'm sure that if you still have those videos, the devs at videolan would be very happy to test them to repro that bug.

Pass my sentiments along to the collective. You all did great work.

I donate every few downloads. It is not much, but maybe enough people do it to matter.

Everything is mostly accurate, it is just the technical details that are not.

> Are there any interviews / documents where you elaborate on those topics?

No. Mail me :)

Thank you and the other VideoLAN people

For example, he said he doesn't want to work on it full time because then he would burn out. His solution is to get a job not working on VLC and then just work on VLC full time.

But that just shifts the burn out to his official employer.

The main challenge is that most OSS companies don't have healthy revenue models for building B2C apps like VLC.

Customers refuse to pay which is why you see companies like Facebook that make the consumer the product.

If you have two products that do the same thing. A and B.

A respects your privacy and charges you $1.99 per month.

B sells your data and is free.

... the customers will all block to B and A will stagnate or just outright die.

I'm my own employer...

> (inb4 mpv, mpc-hc, potplayer is better...)

We can all enjoy libavcodec in our own special way, VLC is the masochist's lavc frontend, no kink-shaming. :- )