Who can I contact to get VLC updated in the Cydia Store?

[dragon499]

I can find it, but I think I posted the exact issue on this forum a few years ago, but didn't get a response:

My iPad (iPad 4 wifi + AT&T 4G 64 GIG IOS 7.0.4) is jailbroken. I use the free VLC player that is a available in the Cydia store. The problem is that when playing movies with VLC (usually VOB files) the iPad doesn't know that VLC is running. My auto-lock is set to 5 minutes. When playing movies with VLC, after 5 minutes, the movie stops playing and the screen locks. The only way to avoid this is to either move something on the screen every few minutes or to set the auto-lock to never. The first solution is annoying and the second one can kill battery life, if I forget to revert back to a 5 minute auto-lock after watching the movie.

I've had this same issue with older (iPad 2 and iPad 3) iPads.

I just posed the question to the VLC folks - please see:

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=116406

They tell me that the Cydia version is 3 years old and have implied that an update may fix the issue. They also told me that they do not support jailbroken devices and do not collaborate with Cydia. Who can I contact to request an updated VLC version in the Cydia store?

 

[willerz2]

The VLC from the AppStore works a lot better than the Cydia one. All upnp transfer, iFile management, etc, are all the same between the AppStore and the Cydia ones


Sent from my iPhone via Tapa

 

[dragon499]

OK - since I am jailbroken, can I simply copy a video file into a directory and have the App store VLC recognize and play it? If so, what directory?

 

[willerz2]

Yes. They should go into /var/mobile/media/


Sent from my iPhone via Tapa

 

[dragon499]

No, this does not work. I already have a video in /var/mobile/media and the Cydia VLC player finds and plays it. When I launch the App, Store VLC, it reports, "Empty Media Library For Playback, use iTunes to synchronize files, check the VLC menu for available options or ask another application to open a file in VLC for IOS. So, I installed iFile and browsed to /var/mobile/media and chose the VOB movie file and saw and "Open with..." menu, however, unfortunately, neither VLC player was an option. I tried the "Video Player." but this was unable to open the file.

 

[dragon499]

Some "Googling" tells me that when you sync via iTunes, videos go here:

/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control.

I'm off to Dinner. I'll try this later and report back.

If this doesn't work, there is a Cydia Paid app called Bridge which is suppossed to do the trick, but there must be a simple hack.

 

[dragon499]

Getting the file here (/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control.) did not work either.

 

[dragon499]

From the advice of the VLC forum folks, I figured it out:

I was able to get to VOB file over to /var/mobile/Applications/5C503167-C0F1-478F-9CFF-9BF1F13EABB1/Documents

Now, when I open the "official" Apple App Store VLC player, it recognizes the movie and it plays it. The problem is that when I play the movie, it looks like CRAP. The video is horribly pixelated. Some parts of the screen often show as large white boxes instead of the intended display. The old VLC version plays the same movie perfectly. I'll just have to take the time to set the iPad's auto-lock feature to "never" when watching movies and to set it back to five minutes when finished.

This has been a fun exercise in communications and hacking but I'll stick with the three year old version of VLC. The new version (VLC for IOS Version 2.1.3 Based on 2.1.1) is a major downgrade!

Regards