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Compatible with Windows 7

The new operating system from Microsoft Windows 7 will be out this month.

As every time with Windows, there is a new Logo program for certification. As opposed to Vista, where they were 5 or 6 different logos, there is just one logo for everyone.

VLC 1.0.2 has been tested against the testing suite and was considered as "Compatible with Windows 7". This just mean that VLC conforms to the specifications and tests from Microsoft. It is supposed to check for common issues to minimize the number of crashes, hangs, and reboots and is  compliant with Windows 7 64-bit.
VLC also install and uninstall in the correct way on Windows 7.

Of course, this should be transparent for all users, but it will matter for people upgrading older install of Windows to Windows 7. This also shows the quality that can be managed in open source community.

Works with Windows Vista

At the same time, VLC also got the "Works with Windows VIsta" Logo. I am not sure it is really of any interest now. :D
 

VLC issues on Windows 7

However, be careful, VLC still has issues on Windows 7, because of many broken drivers, made by major hardware makers. It can show pixizelated outputs when rescaling. Please change the video output to OpenGL and restart VLC as a work-around.

Apple OS X 10.6 is out

If you have missed the news, then you are not on the same techy blogs than I am.

So, Apple new operating system Mac OS X.6, named Snow Leopard is out, and it improves a lot the speed, and ports most of its application to 64bits, but doesn’t introduce any important new feature. Learn more about it !

VLC and 64bits

Do you really need 64bits for a video application? I seriously doubt it. But well, you might want/need it in the future.

Linux

VLC 64bits runs on 64bits linux since a long time, and I use it a lot. No majors problems since Linux is cleverly engineered.

Windows

VLC runs on Windows 64 as a Win32 application, but we haven’t finished the port to Win64, especially because of external libraries issues. It will come eventually.

Mac OS X

Since the WWDC ‘08, we know we have to remove all Carbon code, and we have mostly done it.

Leopard

VLC 64bits runs on 32bits Leopard without issues.

Snow Leopard

As one of our OSX developers says: I’ve you had asked me a month ago, I had said that everything is cool and VLC64 will be released the same day as Snow Leopard.

BUT

It doesn’t work now, because of a change in the Cocoa runtime. VLC stopped working in the last two seeds (the GM and the one prior to it).

Launching VLC results in crashes in a low level function called _NSBundleCreate, which is triggered by a whole bunch of Cocoa and IOKit methods. Basically every method of these frameworks results in a crash on Snow Leopard. This is strange, as exactly the same code runs nicely in 64bit on Leopard and prior seeds of Snow Leopard.

The problem is that VLC is not an ordinary NSApplication, but a plain C app, that loads a Cocoa plugin, which instantiates NSApp itself. Therefore, you cannot reproduce the crashes in normal Cocoa apps.

Conclusion

Apple, once again, breaks everything with a new OS, as it happens often, or when a new version of Xcode gets out. Last version of Xcode forced us to drop X.4 if we wanted to go 64bits and compatible with Snow Leopard. Seriously, I don’t get it.

I have applications that are running on the Win7 64bit setup that are Win98 games!

Anyway, to not finish on a bad note, Snow Leopard looks gorgeous!