[linux-minidisc] New VLC version with ATRAC-1 support

[Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Hi,

I just read that there is a pre-release of VideoLAN's VLC player
available which brings decoding support for ATRAC-1 files. This is
interesting for all the users who use our PythonNetMD scripts to
transfer their old MD recordings to their PC. The uploaded files can
be played back in VLC directly without any additional codecs. More on
this can be read here:

<http://www.ghacks.net/2010/04/15/test-vlc-1-1-with-gpu-acceleration/>

The new version of VLC is available here:

<http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/testing/vlc-1.1.0-pre1/>

I installed VLC on my old Mac Mini G4 and successfully played some
ATRAC-1 previously recorded with our scripts. Unfortunately, VLC does
not play back ATRAC-3(+) yet (both WAV and OMA container formats) as
opposed to ffmpeg. The VideoLAN developers were allegedly a bit
reserved with integrating ffmpeg's ATRAC decoders due to the fact that
these decoders were developed by means of reverse engineering. But
since ATRAC-1 was developed exactly with this technique, I don't see a
reason not to have ATRAC-3 support as well.

Adrian