gHacks technology news » video players http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:18:30 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 VLC Player Vulnerability http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/19/vlc-player-vulnerability/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/19/vlc-player-vulnerability/#comments Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:22:13 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/19/vlc-player-vulnerability/ Torrentfreak are reporting that two vulnerabilities have been discovered in VLC Player which allow execution of arbitrary code. The second vulnerability has already been fixed in the newest version of VLC which is available for download on the developers homepage. The first vulnerability however can be exploited to cause stack-based buffer overflows when loading subtitles in VLC.

The solution given by the security company that discovered the vulnerability is to load only subtitles from trusted source or no subtitles at all until an official fix has been posted by the developers ov VLC.

Another option would be to switch to another player for the time being. SMPlayer, my favorite player, is another good choice which does not have this vulnerability.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/19/vlc-player-vulnerability/feed/ 2 How many video players do we need ? http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/23/how-many-video-players-do-we-need/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/23/how-many-video-players-do-we-need/#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:35:12 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/01/23/how-many-video-players-do-we-need/ My initial answer was one – of course – but then I realized that it is not that easy to answer. One video player is enough to play most videos on my computer, I use SMPlayer for this purpose. But what about all those video portals from tv companies or other companies that rent or distribute videos online ? It is beginning to get a little messy now.

Each tv company that sets up a video portal with the option to download videos is building their own video player. We got NBC Direct and HBO on Broadband for instance, Netflix and Apple of course. That’s four different video players each with its own restrictions. If you want to use all four services you have to install four different clients that basically do the same, they restrict usage.

The messy part begins when you take a look at expiration dates and the like. Do you know when videos that you have downloaded expire in all of these services ? Is there a way to keep track of the dates without having to open all the applications to take a look at all downloaded videos ?

What I mean is that it does not make much sense from a consumer point of view to create one video client per service. The companies on the other hand want full control of the player and their content which is probably the main reason why they do not create cooperations with other companies that basically do the same thing.

I can’t give an answer to the question above, a universal answer I mean. I still say we only need one player but we probably will end up with one player for each company that is entering the market which could be quite a few.

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