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VideoLAN

VLC media player development and general info on VideoLAN.

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Sunday, January 31 2010

VLC and GPU decoding on linux aka Re: Welcome to the Thicket

Mike Melanson from FFmpeg and Adobe made a great post on hardware decoding APIs, named Welcome to the Thicket.

Once again, it is quite well written, and features an awesome graph:

Path chosen in VLC.

As you might know, VLC 1.1 is quite closer and we have worked quite a bit on the various GPU accelerations.

Windows

On Windows, everything is simple, we use DxVA2.

Linux

On Linux, as you can see the mess on the graph.

VLC has had patches for VDPAU and VAAPI.

We have now decided to only support VAAPI in the upstream source of VLC, and allow VDPAU through the VDPAU-VAAPI wrapper.

So far, it works fine with nVidia cards and some Intel ones.

Saturday, January 30 2010

VLC 1.0.5 et 1.1

Disclaimer: Vous retrouverez cet article co-écrit par moi, sur le site de PCinpact.

VLC 1.0.5

Estampillée 1.0.5, la nouvelle version de VLC est presque prête, puisque les sources sont déjà publiées. Les binaires vont suivre.

Cette nouvelle version est principalement intéressante pour les utilisateurs de Windows, puisqu’elle change de compilateur et met à jour les codecs embarqués.

En effet, toutes les versions depuis la 0.9.0, et notamment l’actuelle 1.0.3 (50 millions de téléchargements), ont été compilées avec la version 4.2 du compilateur gcc. L’introduction de la compilation avec gcc 4.4.2 devrait améliorer les performances générales, sans modifier de façon importante le code.

La mise à jour des librairies de codecs devrait apporter un gain supplémentaire de performance, notamment pour le décodage H.264. Enfin, de nombreuses corrections mineures ont été ajoutées durant le développement des versions 1.0.4 et 1.0.5 ainsi que de nombreuses traductions.

La dernière version avant la 1.1.0 ?

La prochaine version majeure après la 1.0.x sera la 1.1.0, nommée "The Luggage".

Le gel des ajouts de fonctionnalités pour la 1.1 devrait arriver vendredi prochain (5 février) et sera suivi par une « Technology Preview » très rapidement.

Que peut-on attendre de cette version ?

  • Réécriture du cœur vidéo

Probablement la partie la moins visible et la partie la plus importante de cette version, la réécriture de la partie qui gère les sorties vidéos et de la plupart des sorties vidéos permettra de partir sur de meilleures bases et d’ajouter des fonctionnalités essentielles pour la suite (1.2). Il faut noter que les sorties vidéos sous linux ont été réécrites à partir de zéro pour utiliser XCB à la place de xlib.

  • Support du décodage en GPU sous Windows

Sous Windows Vista et 7, comme nous en avons déjà parlé, les cartes graphiques supportant le décodage matériel devraient être utilisables depuis VLC, en utilisant DxVA2, pour H.264 et VC-1 (le mpeg-2 attendra probablement la version suivante). Toutes les cartes graphiques ne seront pas équivalentes et certains fabricants devraient être favorisés.

  • Nouveaux codecs, formats et protocoles

En vrac, les sous-titres des Blu-Ray et DVB HD, l’Atrac1, les playlists .zpl et .wpl, les fichiers des DVD-Audios (.aob) sont les principaux nouveaux formats supportés pour cette version. Des améliorations pour les fichiers m2ts et les formats des sous-titres sont aussi au rendez-vous.

  • Extensions

Une plate-forme d’extensions à base de scripts en lua sera disponible. Elle permettra, par exemple, de chercher des infos sur imdb, last.fm ou wikipedia, de télécharger les paroles, les tablatures ou des sous-titres sans quitter VLC. Ces scripts utilisateurs permettront d’aller chercher des données sur le net et/ou de contrôler VLC. Cette plate-forme est amenée à évoluer par la suite.

  • Amaigrissement

VLC 1.1 a vu de nombreux modules se faire supprimer (25 au dernier total) afin de réduire la quantité de code. Mais VLC a aussi vu sa consommation de mémoire diminuer ainsi que le nombre de threads dormants. Enfin, les versions pour appareils embarqués (ARM) ont vu d’importants gains de performances, mais il manque encore des interfaces pour ces architectures, notamment Windows Mobile.

La version Windows verra aussi le support Midi et le support CDDB rejoindre le catalogue 1.1, comme les autres architectures.

Merci à PCINpact

Thursday, January 7 2010

videolan.org stats for 2009: 90 million visits

2009, a transition year for VideoLAN

As I was saying in my presentation at the VideoLAN Dev Days 2009, 2009 was an important year for VideoLAN:

  • VideoLAN has become an non-profit organization
  • VideoLAN Dev Days (end of ‘08) helped to structure and take decisions
  • VLC 1.0.0 was tagged and released
  • DVBlast and VLMC were started
  • Acceleration of development, and communication around VLC and VideoLAN
  • Lots of ideas for the future were discussed.

Statistics and Website

One of the question we have the most is: How many users VLC has?. The answer is quite difficult to get, and we’ll rediscuss about it later.

However, there are trends that are easy to measure, and Google Trends is not the only option here. :)

videolan.org

One of the important way to measure the VLC popularity is to check the audience of videolan.org Website and its increase.

videolan.org numbers for 2009

In 2009:

  1. VideoLAN has seen over 90 million visits on its website,
  2. from 68million different IPs.
  3. Pages view are around 480million pages.
  4. Best month was december, with 9,25 million visits.
  5. 0 advertisement.
  6. and is hosted on a single machine :)

Compared to 2008, this is an increase of 50%, since we had 60 million visits in 2008!

Operating Systems changes

Comparing December 2009 to 2008, our traffic is split like this:

  • Windows: 79,3% (from 81,4%)
    • Windows 7: 17%
    • Windows Vista: 16.6% (from 21%)
    • Windows XP: 43,6% (from 57,2%)
    • Windows 2000: 0,5% (from 1.1%)
    • Windows 9x/Me: 0.3% (from 0.8%)
  • Mac OS X: 12,4% (from 10.8%)
  • Linux: 4.1% from 5.2%

And the rest…

Conclusion: nothing surprising here, and we see that 7 is already ahead of Vista… We were right to drop Win9x support :D

Browsers changes

Comparing December 2009 to 2008, our traffic is split like this:

  • Firefox: 42,8% (from 45,3%)
  • Internet Explorer: 33,9% (from 39%)
    • IE6: 7.8% (from 14%)
    • IE7: 7.8% (from 23,4%)
    • IE8: 17.7% (from 0.7%)
  • Safari: 8.3% (from 8.9%)
  • Opera: 3.1% (from 3.2%)
  • Chrome: 6.5% (from 0.7%)

Conclusion: well, here, seeing Firefox loosing 3% in one year (in fact 2% in December alone) seemed weird, while Google Chrome is quite strong. I can’t say I am much surprised though.

Wednesday, December 2 2009

VideoLAN is on Twitter

You should follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/videolan :D

Sunday, November 1 2009

VLC 1.0.3 is out!

Again? A release? Why ?

Instead of enumerating the features that VLC 1.0.3 brings you, let’s talk about why we had to do yet another release.

Speeding the development

With the 1.0.x branch, we decided that we would speed up the release cycle for minor versions, for a few reasons:

  • we didn’t want major bugs to stay around for too long,
  • we find it easier to track regressions,
  • we can fix crashes and potential security issues in a better timely fashion.

That doesn’t mean we were careless about the quality of older releases, it means that now we care MORE about user feedback and quality. This is unlikely to change…

Therefore, since 1.0.0 has been out, we have had:

  • 1.0.1, 3 weeks after 1.0.0.
  • 1.0.2, 8 weeks after 1.0.1.
  • 1.0.3, 1 month after 1.0.2.

1.0.3 is important for Windows users

On Windows, VLC up to 1.0.2 used a way to scale the video that seems to be unsupported by the lastest drivers for Windows 7 (and now affects some Vista drivers too, because they backported the improvements…) and therefore the quality of the video was very bad and pixelated. VLC 1.0.3 fixes that.

Moreover, since VLC has now earned the logo for Windows 7 compatibility, we had to fix this huge bug. :D

I hope you understand our point and have fun with it.

Tuesday, October 27 2009

VLC: CDDB on Windows!

CD-Audio

Audio-CD have usually two main ways to get the meta-data associated with the tracks:

  • embedded CD-Text information
  • online, with CDDB protocol, using FreedDB

VLC and Audio-CD

VLC has had 2 main Audio-CD modules, named CDDA and CDDAX, one using libcdio, the other not.

On windows, because of the difficulty to get libcdio, we use CDDA. But CDDA didn’t have CD-Text support. And libcddb didn’t work for us, at all.

So, on Windows, it used to be no CD-text, no CDDB…

Part one: VLC 1.0.0

VLC 1.0.0 has seen the addition of CD-Text for the CDDA module, and Windows version got it.

Part two: VLC 1.1.0

VLC 1.1.0 will see the addition of the CDDB support for VLC for Windows, since the fixes for libcddb and regex have just been done, tested and pushed by your servant on the main tree of VLC!

Yeah!

Conclusion

While VLC 0.9.x on WIndows didn’t had much to get information from CDs on Windows, VLC 1.1.x will have both CD-Text and CDDB to get informations from your Audio-CDs.

Of course, VLC isn’t the best for audio, but improving can’t hurt, can it?

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Jean-Baptiste KEMPF | jean-baptiste.kempf _(at)_ via.ecp.fr | Powered by Chaussure | xHtml et CSS valide