What do you look for in Online TV?
Whether you have a cable subscription, Tivo, or other means of getting your daily dose of TV shows, most of you will have tried viewing shows online at least once. If you have a broadband connection, it’s a breeze. Still, what do you look for in selecting a service?
If you live in the United States, most of the networks offer their TV streams for free. Most of the content is in High-definition format. As long as your connection is fast enough to handle the content, you should have no problems whatsoever.
If you happen to live anywhere else, you will have to look for other routes to get your TV fix. Luckily, there are plenty of people who post shows on different video sharing sites. This is where a lot of the dilemmas come in. Do you just watch the first link that’s posted and get it over with?
The second concern is regarding quality. If a file is available in both ‘flv’ and ‘divx’ format, which one would you prefer. For me, it depends. I don’t have a fast connection so I avoid ‘divx’ links as far as possible. However, this also depends on the quality of the other file. I can deal with minor sync issues by adjusting my media player but bad color and picture quality drives me crazy. On the other hand, a problem with divx files is that most of the sites hosting them do not support resuming downloads.
I spoke to some people about their preferences and realized it’s a matter of personal choice. Those people with limited time and slower connections preferred lower quality files. But I’d like to know what you think about it. Do you think the current choices are good enough to convince you to stop paying for cable?
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Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?