VideoLAN Client (VLC) version 0.3
Mac OS X-specific information

Welcome to the VideoLAN Client ! VLC is a multi-purpose mutimedia tool : it can play DVDs and VCDs, or read a stream from the network. VLC has originally been developed for GNU/Linux systems, but has been ported to numerous operating systems, including Mac OS X and Win32. The Mac OS X port is a bit young and immature, as you will notice, and there are many caveats. We are working hard to improve it, and if you think you can help us in any way, please drop us a line.

You may find the following frequentely asked questions useful :

1. How do I read a DVD ? The menu item is disabled !
The menu item hasn't been implemented yet, but you can access all features of VLC using the command line. First open a terminal window (Terminal.app in your Applications folder) and change to the directory where you copied VLC - for instance if you copied it to your Applications folder, type :
cd /Applications

Then type :
./vlc.app/Contents/MacOS/vlc dvd:/dev/rdisk1

VLC should play your DVD. On some configurations, /dev/rdisk1 isn't the DVD drive, and you will find it as /dev/rdisk2, /dev/rdisk3, etc. YMMV

You can access all the capabilities of VLC through the command line (since the native interface support is still very poor), such as choosing audio channel, subtitles, and titles/chapters. To view all the options available, please type :
./vlc.app/Contents/MacOS/vlc --help

For instance, if you want the audio channel #2 :
./vlc.app/Contents/MacOS/vlc --input_audio 2 dvd:/dev/rdisk1

You can view all available channels and subtitles with :
./vlc.app/Contents/MacOS/vlc --stats dvd:/dev/rdisk1

2. How do I read a VCD ?
The same way you read a DVD, except you replace dvd by vcd. Eg. :
./vlc.app/Contents/MacOS/vlc vcd:/dev/rdisk1

3. How do I read an SVCD ?
SVCDs contain plain MPEG-2 files and do not require any specific plug-in. just copy the .vob files in the SVCD onto your hard drive, and use the "Open File" menu item in VLC (drag and drop doesn't work yet).

4. Audio and video are out of sync by 300 ms !
This is a known issue, and we're working on it. In the meantime, launch the application with --desync 300 (the exact number depends on your machine), eg. :
./vlc.app/Contents/MacOS/vlc --desync 300 dvd:/dev/rdisk1

5. The video is choppy ! It's like we're dropping frames
That's the normal behavior when the CPU isn't fast enough to decode all frames. Though there is some room for improvement, do never expect VLC to be able to decode MPEG-2 streams on a low-end G3 machine. Apple DVD player uses specific hardware accelerations from the video board of those systems, and we currently lack documentation to do the same. If you think you have information which might help us, please contact us, otherwise please don't complain about this.

If VLC is slow on your G4 system, try and quit or hide all running applications. See with top in a terminal window which applications take the CPU. Minimizing the VLC controller window might help, too.

6. How do I play a DivX file ?
VLC doesn't support DivX or OpenDivX or MPEG-4 files at present. We are working on it too, but this isn't expected to happen in the near future.

Thanks for reading this file. For additional information, subscribe to the vlc mailing list on http://www.videolan.org/.
-- 
Christophe Massiot <massiot@via.ecp.fr>, 6 Apr 2002, for the VideoLAN team.