Yet another blog for JBKempf - VideoLAN

VLC 1.2: nouveautés

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0100

Un an et demi après la dernière version majeure (1.1.0), VLC revient avec une nouvelle version: 1.2.0, disponible en pré-version de test. L'occasion de revenir sur les nouveautés de cette version.

Avec près de 8000 changements fait par 150 développeurs, 600 bugs fermés et près de 200 000 lignes de code modifiées, cette version est une des versions les plus importantes de VLC. Plus d'informations sur les contributeurs de VLC 1.2.

De son petit nom "TwoFlower" (qui vient de l'univers DiscWorld), les principales nouveautés de VLC portent sur les sorties vidéos, les nouveaux codecs, le support des Blu-Ray et les interfaces.

Nota Bene: ce post est un écrit qui a servit de base à un article de PCINpact que vous trouverez en ligne.

Coeur Vidéo

Les modifications les plus importantes, mais aussi moins visibles, portent sur la réécriture du coeur vidéo et les modules d'affichage à l'écran.

Sous-titres

Dans les versions actuelles de VLC, les sous-titres textes ont souvent une mauvaise qualité de rendu, notamment lors de visionnage de vidéo SD sur des écrans HD. En effet, pour des raisons de performance, VLC rend les sous-titres à la taille de la vidéo, puis les intègre dans la vidéo avant de les passer à la carte graphique en une seule texture, qui fait le scaling de l'ensemble. Dans certains cas, les sous-titres sont crénelés et de mauvaise qualité.

Sous TwoFlower, un nouveau mode de rendu est possible: VLC envoie 2 textures à la carte graphique, une pour la vidéo, à sa taille d'origine et une pour les sous-titres, à la taille de l'écran. La carte graphique se charge du scaling de la vidéo et d'afficher l'ensemble. Le résultat est bien plus agréable, mais demande du matériel plus récent.

Ce nouveau mode de rendu est disponible pour les sorties Direct3d pour Windows, OpenGL pour Linux et MacOS X et x11 pour Linux.

Shaders, 3D et performance

Le nouveau coeur vidéo permet aussi des améliorations de performances en déchargeant plus de calculs sur le GPU, lorsque cela est possible.

Par exemple, l'utilisation de shaders ARB dans la sortie vidéo OpenGL permet de faire les conversions YUV vers RGB sur le GPU, même en profondeur de 10 ou 12bits.

De plus, les bases des shaders sous Direct3d et de l'affichage 3D ont été ajoutés pour les prochaines versions. Un fork de VLC permet déjà l'affichage 3D sous nVidia Stereo Vision.

Filtres vidéos

VLC 1.2 voit l'ajout de nombreux filtres vidéos, certains connus, comme hqdn3d (suppression du grain), ou gradfun (suppression des gradients), d'autres originaux comme un nouveau filtre de grain, un filtre d'inverse téléciné ou un filtre de stabilisation pour les caméscopes.

Codecs, Formats

VLC TwoFlower, comme à chaque version, apporte le support de nombreux nouveaux codecs, formats de fichiers et périphériques.

Un support limité des Blu-Rays est donc intégré sur toutes les plate-formes. La configuration est compliquée et peu documentée, et une grosse proportion des Blu-Rays n'est pas supportée du tout. Les menus ne sont pas activés non plus. Ceci étant dit, c'est un premier pas.

L'ajout des protocoles de streaming adaptatifs HLS et DASH, des périphériques de capture de vidéo sous MacOS et des cartes d'acquisition professionnelles de types SDI viennent compléter le tableau au niveau du support des périphériques et protocoles.

Codecs

Au niveau codecs, le décodage multi-coeur est dorénavant possible et activé en H.264, DivX, VP3/Theora, Jpeg2000 et Webm/VP8, ce qui peut apporter des améliorations très importantes en performance, notamment en Full-HD. VLC était, sur ce point là, bien en-dessous des packs de codecs du style CoreAVC.

Autre ajout important, notamment pour les professionnels et les fans d'animation japonaise, les codecs en profondeur 10bits, en H.264, Jpeg2000, DNxHD et ProRes sont dorénavant décodés et correctement affichés.

En plus du support de nouveaux codecs, de très nombreuses améliorations ont été apportés à l'existant, notamment au niveau décodage audio et sous-titres HD, au support des méta-données, des codecs RealVideo, des images fixes et des formats Matroska et MPEG-2 TS.

Enfin, le décodage matériel est dorénavant supporté pour les cartes CrystalHD et les smartphones avec OpenMax IL, sous Android.

Interfaces

Les interfaces de VLC ont toujours été les parents pauvres de ce logiciel, notamment sous Mac OS X.

Cette version introduit donc une réécriture complète des interfaces Mac OS et Web.

L'interface Mac OS se présente dorénavant en une seule fenêtre, avec une barre latérale, comme iTunes ou Mail. 2 styles sont possibles dans les préférences: le noir de QT X et le gris de Lion. La plupart des fenêtres secondaires utilisent la transparence...

Ports

La version 1.2 de VLC apporte le portage de VLC sous iOS, Android, OS/2 et Windows 64bits.

Pour cela, le coeur de VLC a été adapté, des sorties audio et vidéo pour iOS, Android, OS/2 et Direct2d ont été ajoutées, et de nombreuses optimisations assembleurs ARM, ont été écrites.

libVLC en LGPL

La dernière chose importante de VLC 1.2.0, c'est le passage du coeur de VLC (libVLCcore et libVLC) de GPLv2 vers LGPLv2.1. Cela permet aux développeurs utilisant une autre licence que la GPL d'utiliser le moteur de VLC.

VLC 1.2.0 features: part 2, formats

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:46:00 +0100

VLC 1.2.0

I've spoken already about VLC 1.2.0, especially about video, video again and authoring.

However, I haven't spoken about the format supported in VLC 1.2, even if there were some hints in my last post.

Discs and devices

Blu-Ray

One of the major cool thing of 1.2, will be a (very partial) support for Blu-Rays.

Through the VideoLAN project libbluray, VLC 1.2 should be able to open unencrypted disks and backup folders.

Playback of commercially encrypted disks is also doable, but I won't detail the setup here.

DVDs

The whole stack of DVD playback libraries has been updated for VLC 1.2.0.

The releases of libdvdnav, libdvdread, libdvdcss should help to playback more recent disks and fix quite a few annoying issues.

Capture devices

In addition to quite a few fixes on DirectShow and V4L2 capture modules, QTCapture and QTSound capture modules were added for VLC for MacOS X. Requiring QuickTime 7.6.3, it should allow VLC to play, record and stream any QTKit device.

Decklink and DVEO/Linsys/ComputerModules SDI and SDI-HD cards are now supported as input.

PulseAudio devices are now supported as input too.

File formats and protocols

Adaptive Streaming

VLC 1.2 should support, at least partially:

HTTP live streaming, aka HLS, in both live and VOD mode;
MPEG DASH, aka Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, in at least 2 profiles.

Those are still under heavy work, help is welcome.

File formats

First, we will have a completely rewritten support for still images playback. The removal of the old fake module should help to make simpler diaporamas with VLC.

Of course, VLC supports new formats, like caf, mtv, awb, f4v, amr, vro (DVD-VR), VDR recordings folders, EBU subtitles (stl). It also supports sid files, from Commodore 64.

The most important improvements to our existent formats should concern Matroska and TS.

A lot of work has been spent on our Matroska demuxer, to handle split-segments and correct seeking. There is still some work to do, but it should be light-year ahead of VLC 1.1.x.

For broadcast and professional people, in addition to the STL subtitles, we have now durations in the Mpeg2 TS files.

Metadata

Finally, we've worked quite a bit on the Metadata support for most file formats.

APE tags, Ogg tags, seeking in flv, mxf, amr should be better supported. Also, as frequently requested, embedded cover arts in wmv, asf, wma are now correctly detected. The missing bits for cover art support are mainly for MKV and APE formats.

Styles for various subtitles formats are also better supported, especially for simple file formats.

Codecs

Codecs support has also improved quite a bit, but that's for the next blogpost. :D

Disc libraries releases: bluray, aacs, dvdcss

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 13:36:00 +0100

So, we are working quite actively on VLC 1.2. Many improvements were merged into VLC 1.2, notably for DVD and Blu-Ray playback.

Therefore, there were a few releases of libraries used by VLC, lately.

libbluray 0.2.1

A contrario of this weird number, this is actually the first release of libbluray that is usable.

libbluray is an open-source library designed for Blu-Ray Discs playback for media players, like VLC, xine or MPlayer.

It could be seen as the equivalent to libdvdnav, but for Blu-Ray Discs.

libaacs 0.3.0

In spite of this weird number too, this is actually the first release of libaacs.

libaacs is an open-source library implementing the AACS specification, for all systems, for interoperability.

True, stand-alone, it is of very little use :D

libdvdcss 1.2.11

I am, de facto, the new maintainer of libdvdcss. Congratz to me!

Therefore, I've done a release: 1.2.11.

This is just a boring release, just to incorporate patches and small maintenance, but shows that the project is still alive.

Other libraries

I just wanted to mention that:

libdvdnav 4.2.0
libdvdread 4.2.0
libdvbpsi 0.2.2 (not disc related)

were released too, in the last weeks.

Those projects are still alive and maintained. Cool.

Who wrote VLC 1.2?

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:42:00 +0100

VLC 1.2

So, VLC 1.2.x is approaching. But who wrote it? Here are some statistics computed by Rémi. You need iframe to read this.

VLC 1.2.0 features: part 1, video output - update

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 21:34:00 +0200

Video Output modification, continued

I was previously detailing VLC 1.2.x improvements on the video output, a few weeks ago.

Subtitles quality

In comments, on this blogpost and on our IRC, people made a good point that the subtitles improvements were not enough.

Indeed, compared to MPC-HC or VSFilter, the lisibility wasn't the best, and it was notably missing a few options.

Point taken

Since then, VLC devs have added a few things:

better outline with options: thickness, color and opacity
a parametric shadow: distance, angle, color, opacity
a better parametric blackbox: color and opacity

This is an update of the previous rendering on the same video with the shadow and a think outline.

And here is a screenshot of the complete preferences part.

Read the update about VLC formats support in VLC 1.2.0

VLC 1.2.0 features: part 1, video output

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 17:37:00 +0200

Introduction

As promised in my last major post, I will try to discuss about features that are getting shaped for VLC 1.2.0.

This post is therefore the first of the series.

Be careful, this post is a bit technical.

tl;dr version: VLC 1.2.0 will be awesome, faster and have better display quality.

Video Output Rework

When I joined the VideoLAN project and the VLC development team, something like 5 years ago, people were already speaking about the Video Output rework.

This Arlésienne was, to me, a bit like our DNF.

However, during the development of VLC 1.1, VLC guru Laurent Aimar, aka 'fenrir' started to work on it. The VLC 1.1.x series has had part of this work in it, but most of the nice features were hidden to the users.

Vout Rework features

VLC 1.2.0 has seen enormous amount of work to go on this project and this work is almost finished.

This means:

Most of the Video Outputs have been rewritten in a way or another, and their priority revised;
Other Video Outputs were just dropped, like gapi, omapfb, hd1000v;
OpenGL output has now got shaders to do YUV->RGB conversions in the GPU,
Most video filters were ported to the new API, and most of them should be transcodable and streamable now.

New features

But this also means new features, like:

Sharper subtitles rendering,
New Video Outputs were written, notably for Direct2D, for iOS and Android,
Important changes for the deinterlacers,
New filter for debanding videos,
New filter for anti-flickering of videos,
New posterize and sepia filters for more fun.

I would like to speak about 2 of those features, in the following parts of this post.

Subtitles rendering in VLC

Definitions

What we call source size is the original size in pixels of the video in the file. It is often what people call video definition, like 480x640, 576x720, 720x1280, 1080x1920.

What we call window size is the display size in pixels of the video in the file. It is often what people call window resolution. It depends on the size of your VLC window, whether you resize it or not or if you are in full-screen mode or not.

What we call text OSD are text subtitles and OSD were the text is rendered on the screen. Using a renderer, like Freetype, it converts the text into an image.

What we call blending of 2 images, if what people would call merging.

How does VLC display subtitles

Those days, to display subtitles, we have the following steps:

the text OSD is rendered to the source size,
the rendered OSD is blended into the source image,
the resulting image is passed to the video output, that scales to the window size and does it usually in your hardware GPU.

As you can imagine, if your source is 640x480 and your monitor is full HD, the text will be badly scaled.

However, doing this that way is better for your resources, because the most costly operation (scaling) is done in your hardware.

How will VLC display subtitles

But those days, with very powerful GPUs, can't we do differently?

Yes, we can. Using Direct3D or OpenGL.

To display subtitles, we will have the following steps:

the text OSD is rendered to the window size,
the rendered OSD passed to the video output in a texture,
the source image is passed to the video output in a texture,
the video output scales the source texture from source size to window size,
the video output blends both textures.

You can see quickly that the new way is sharper (you might need to click on the images)

Before people scream, yes, it isn't exactly the same frame which is why the colors are different and yes, white on white isn't very readable. But this is beyond the point. The point is the difference in sharpness. I'll do better screenshots, when I got time (never :D).

Compatible Video Outputs

At the time of this writing, the video outputs that can do this blending are:

Direct3D, default on Vista and 7
OpenGL,
x11.

However, notable video outputs like DirectDraw and Xv are not able to work in this mode.

Deinterlacers

In addition to this work, an important amount of work was done on the VLC deinterlacers by Juha.

Notably, he has written new deinterlacer modes, fixed bugs, cleaned the code and written an impressive documentation.

The most notable parts of the work include:

a complete InVerse TeleCine deinterlacer, very useful for old NTSC anime,
a framerate doubling CRT TV simulator mode, named Phosphor.

And all of them are properly documented on our .

Moreover, as previously told, all modes of deinterlacing should be transcodable or streamable.

Thanks for the support. To be continued...

Read: Update of this article

VLC on Gnome3

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sun, 15 May 2011 22:57:00 +0200

Just a couple of small screenshots of VLC on Gnome3...

State of VideoLAN

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Wed, 11 May 2011 12:42:00 +0200

It's been a long time

It's been a long time since the last time I wrote something long enough around here.
But the cool thing is that it is due to being working quite a lot on VLC and different projects...

So, how well is VideoLAN? How well is VLC?

In this post, I will come back on a few points that happened in our last year.

1. VLC

VLC is doing quite well actually, but some things could be better...

1.1.0

VLC 1.1.0 was out last year, in June.

This release was a tremendous success, and probably the one where we've had the best success for launch.

The focus on GPU decoding and some HD codecs was very well welcomed by users, as was the improved Qt interface.

Of course, 1.1.0 had a lot of bugs, since people still refuse to test our betas and RC versions, and as usual, 1.1.1 was ready and out in less than a month.

1.1.x

The 1.1.x-bugfix branch is quite stable and feature-full.

We still have notorious issues with PulseAudio, DVD Unicode path and Font caching on Windows. But all of them have been fixed in the git master.

1.1.0 to 1.1.9 updates

We've done 9 minor additional releases in 11 months from 1.1.0 to 1.1.9. And 1.1.10 is imminent...

While, this is a bit annoying for the users, seeing the poor update mechanism in VLC, this is mostly due to numerous security issues found and fixed in VLC.

This shows that a very small team, like VLC's can care enough to support and have a strong security focus... Even when people are volunteers.

Numbers

Since the switch to SourceForge, for mirroring the downloads, VLC has been downloaded 237 millions of times, in 11 months.

The repartition per country, is the usual one as seen on my numbers post. And 57% of those downloads were done through the upgrade systems of VLC; the rest came from various websites, including the VideoLAN website.

VLC team and development

Unfortunately, the VLC core team is still very small, and I might say smaller than before. The Bus Factor of VLC is still too low.

However, the number of next-to-core VLC developers and the number of VLC contributors has increased quite a bit.

With this increase, the process for reviewing patches and the quality of code entering VLC has improved a lot. This is good for VLC's maturity.

On the same topic, a lot of code has been cleaned up and outdated modules have been removed.

VLC 1.2.x

I will speak of VLC 1.2.x in a later post. But, you should know that VLC 1.2.0 is in a good shape and development is still happening at a very fast pace.

2. VideoLAN

But VLC isn't the only thing happening in VideoLAN.

The VideoLAN association is in a good shape, having fixed all the assets issue we might have had in the past and allowing developers to work together.

Websites and machines

The main VideoLAN website was redesigned and simplified a lot to stop confusing our users. The users feedback was quite good, on this part.

The other services have been cleaned, removed and improved a lot (major software upgrades, spam fighting, uptime improvements).

The main external websites are now:

Software upgrades: libdvbpsi, libdvbcsa

libdvbpsi has seen one major upgrade and a change of license: it is now LGPLv2.1.

libdvbcsa has seen one major upgrade to increase speed.

Phonon-VLC has seen several upgrades in the last year and is now perfectly working on Linux/KDE, Mac and Windows. Most of the rough edges have been fixed now and it will gain maturity this summer, once again. The amazing work from KDE folks, like apachelogger, is to be noted.

libbluray and libaacs

We have welcomed 2 new libraries into VideoLAN: libaacs and libbluray.

Those 2 libraries are focused on Blu-Ray integration for video players, and are still in early development.

Events

On the communication and community work, VideoLAN schedule has been quite full too.

We've been to various events like FOSDEM, CeBIT and LinuxTag.

We've been part of GSoC 2010 and GSoC 2011, like every year since a few years, and we've been also to participating to the first Google Code-In.

And finally, we've celebrated our 10 years of open source in February.

Conclusion

VideoLAN and VLC are now quite mature projects and the last year has re-stated this matter of fact.

VLC 1.1 was quite an important success for the users, and VLC 1.2 is on the way.

However, the fact that the core team is still mainly composed by a handful of volunteers can be worrisome for the future.

We need your help and we are quite confident for the future!

Interview Vidéo sur Nolife TV

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 07:07:00 +0200

J'ai été interviewé, dernièrement, par l'équipe de Nolife, dans le cadre de VideoLAN et de VLC, à l'occasion des 10 ans du passage en GPL de VideoLAN.

Cette interview a été diffusée dans l'émission 101%, pendant la grille horaire TV classique.

Vous trouverez gratuitement l'interview, en ligne pour écouter ce que j'ai à dire...

Si vous êtes abonnés Nolife, vous pouvez retrouver aussi, l'interview complète.

Merci pour le soutien!

HTC Touch Diamond, ROM upgrade and Windows 7

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 12:05:00 +0200

HTC Touch Diamond

Thanks to a friend (Céline, you are amazing), I have now a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone: the HTC Touch Diamond.

I know it is a bit old-fashioned with WM7 getting out soon, but I am not a .Net/Silverlight guy...

Hands on the device

The HTC device is quite classy on the outside as you can see.

Reset and Start-up wizard

First things first, I had reset all the data and reformat the drive, which was simple to find.

Then, the wizard for new installation pops-up, it is quite OK to use, and straight-forward. My memories tells me it was much worse at the time of WM5.

The first start is quite long, but not impossible to bear.

TouchFlo 3D

But at the second start, there is a horrible TouchFLO 3D SFR/Vodafone screens that opens. It is slow, badly designed, and doesn't even remove the start button...

Oh poor me... After finally removing this mess (Settings->Today screen, then go under the items tab and uncheck the TouchFLO 3D box), all is back to normal.

Update ROM

The ROM on the machine was quite old, early 2008, I believe, so, I thought it would be a good idea to update it.

Going to the HTC support website was a great experience. I found the new ROM in a minute or two (1.97.163.4 instead of 1.37.xxx).

Downloading the ROM

Downloading the ROM was a bit more difficult, because it required my phone S/N to allow me to take only the "Vodafone FR" version. Which I don't want...

It proved impossible to download the normal version, without the Vodafone crap on it.

The download took 102MB. I believe this is a big too much for just a ROM, but not that much either, compared to the iPhones updates.

And, of course, the update didn't want to run, because it couldn't find my phone. The connection was not OK.

Connection to PC

I need to correctly link my phone to my computer, running Windows 7. Some red cross tells me it couldn't install the driver...

Downloading WMDC is a mess

My phone tells me to use ActiveSync, but it doesn't exist for Windows 7. After a bit of searching, I find that this has been renamed to Windows Mobile Device Center. And of course, the MicroSoft ActiveSync website doesn't link correctly to this new WMDC... How are normal people suppose to find that out?

Searching a bit more gave me the download link to WMDC for Vista, no mention of 7. Ok, let's try anyway...

And this requires the WGA Validation tool. WTF!! Not in 2010, please... Come on, people just want to install their phones, not install a new cool feature or program.

I had to try 3 browsers to finally be able to get it, and only in French, not in English... And while the download started, it redirected to an error page...

Microsoft download website is probably the worse experience I have seen, with some AOL websites in 1995...

Installing WMDC

Installing WMDC is as simple as downloading it was difficult. Except the name (drvupdate-am64.exe, WTF?), everything was very straight-forward and the interface is actually simple, beautiful and nice!

Is it really Microsoft? </joke>

Updating the ROM

Synchronizing, updating the ROM and re-enabling the device was then uneventful, working and great. It took me a bit over 15minutes including the reboots and the removal of TouchFlo 3D.

Conclusion

I give HTC a B+ (I want the normal ROM) I give Microsoft a C (for the downloading experience, you deserved an E, but WMDC is nice...)

Let's talk about numbers

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:46:00 +0200

VLC numbers

One of the most asked question is about the VLC download numbers. Don't ask me why, this comes all the time back on the subject.

We decided for the 1.1.x releases to use the new sourceforge download service.

There were 2 main reasons to do so:

it provides quite interesting statistics and numbers per file, per OS, per date...
it makes a 3rd party count our numbers, so we can't be accused of cheating, as we were accused in the past.

Therefore, I'll give a few insights on VLC 1.1.x (1.1.0, 1.1.1 and 1.1.2) download stats.

1.1.x download stats

Those download numbers have been done in the first 50 days after the VLC 1.1.0 release.

Average

The average is around 640k (640000) downloads per day, in total, on the official mirror (sourceforge).

This accounts to around 19 million downloads per month...

Operating systems

This OS repartition is quite simple:

Win32 is 86,7%
Mac OS X is 13%
Source is around 0,3%

Of course, this doesn't mean that we don't have any Linux users. It is just that they use their distributions, which is the correct way to do it.

Countries repartition

One the most interesting topic is the repartition per country.

Here is the diagram of the most important downloading countries.

USA is 14,5%
Germany and France are both a bit above 10%
Italy, India and UK are around 5%

Numbers for smaller countries are available on request.

Update vs Direct download

The last important number I will share with you today is the repartition between direct downloads from the website against update from within VLC.

Direct downloads are around 40% of the total downloads
Updates are therefore 60% of the total downloads

This explains why the videolan.org website doesn't get 19 million visitors per month, but just around 8 or 9 million.

So, I bought a blu-ray drive... [Part 2]

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:25:00 +0200

This is the follow-up to the part 1.

Update to the part 1

In the first part, I was wrong when I said that there were 4 programs scheduled to start with Windows... There are 5 of them...

Oh, and one of them (the LG fwupdate.exe) requires UAC to launch, and asks for permission at each start... Oh, why?!?

Initial success over HDCP

Whatever, I've spent some time to fight the HDCP problem... I will not detail all the steps I went through here, but the solution.

Funnily, the only way I could play the BD, was to replace by DVI cable with a VGA cable, since my Monitor is able to get input from VGA. My GPU only has a DVI, so a VGA/DVI convertor was used.

Initial success

Going the VGA way helped me to have a playback with PowerDVD of more than 3 seconds. Yay!

A few questions though:

Is it full resolution? No idea!
So, using VGA is ok, but not DVI? Don't you think I can copy the same?
Why is PowerDVD deactivating Aero? It is 2010, and Vista has been out since more than 3 years...
Why is the taskbar still on top when I play with PowerDVD? Very nice to playback a Video with it above...
Why can't I navigate in the menus with the mouse?

Anyway, I can play one disc, so let's say that I won almost a point on it:
Blu-Ray: 1 - 1 :JB

Initial failure

Let's be a bit less optimistic though, out of the 4 BD-Video, 2 of them play, 2 don't...

No error messages, updated drive, software, player, nothing to do...

Maybe I'll install another player, like WinDVD...

So, I bought a blu-ray drive... [Part 1]

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:24:00 +0200

Going to buy a drive

Today, after getting out of work, I went to buy a Blu-Ray drive, so I can watch HD movies on my computer.

My computer is a big tower, with eSata and a few drives and enough horsepower to decode those Hi-Def movies. I even have a Windows 7 on it!
So, it should be working.

I went to my local computer store and bought a LG drive, pretty standard one.

Drive Installation

It took me some times to plug everything in, since my tower is a bit crowed, and my easy-to-access eSata ports are running short :D

Reboot and everything... Tada, it will work now :D

First playback... or not... and more installation

I put my new MGM movie in it. WMP12 doesn't like it at all:

"Windows Media Player cannot play the DVD. The disc was created in a manner that the Player does not support". Bleh, I'll try the software from the DVD delivered with the drive.

Installation

I then install Blu-Ray Power Suite with a lot of software and PowerDVD installing 160MB of mess (why that much?). And I reboot.

After reboot, PowerDVD warns me about updates. I download 100MB from Internet and install them and reboot...

And so does the LG drive update firmware... And reboot...

At each start-up, they launches 4 software to enable "me": brs.exe, PDVDServ.exe, Language.exe and fwupdate.exe. Why? Oh, why?

Second playback... or not...

Now that all is up-to-date, I can play movies, yay... not!

At each start, PowerDVD switches back from Aero to Basic colors and ask me to register: "I DON'T WANT TO REGISTER, YOU BAST**D"!

And, it still doesn't work, with any of my discs, because it wants HDCP, and I use my old DVI to connect to my screen...

Conclusion

Blu-Ray: 1 - 0 :JB

Let's see how this will go on: in part 2.

On the road to VLC 1.1.0 part 2: better

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:52:00 +0100

Improvements

Being faster is cool, but let’s not forget that multimedia moves fast.

So here are a few improvements that you can expect in VLC 1.1.0.

Codecs, demuxers and protocols

In addition to than GPU/DSP decoding (see my previous post), VLC 1.1.0 will bring:

DVB HD subtitles
PGS Subtitles from Blu-Ray dumps
sftp protocol
Atrac1 audio codec
Indeo5 video codec
AMR (Narrow Band) audio codec
Windows Media Voice/Speech audio codec
Improved Flac support (7.1 and 88.2/176.4/192 kHz support)
7.1 Vorbis audio support
ADPCM in flv files
DVD-Audio files .aob, so you can play your DVD-Audio files on your computer
vqf, amv, wpl and zpl file support
Midi files on Windows port!

And more features…

CDDB support on Windows
Podcast images
Enhancements to our Ambilight support
Extensions in lua script
Services in lua script
Chorus and Flanger audio filter
Visualisation using scripted .milk files
Windows 7 taskbar integration

That’s all for the major features, that are visible to the users…

What is important, is that VLC isn’t getting bloated by all this, and I’ll explain that in my next article.

On the road to VLC 1.1.0 part 1: faster

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:29:00 +0100

Let’s go on with the first part of my articles to introduce you to VLC 1.1.0.

Decoding HD

In these days of HD video, speeding of decoding is more and more critical, and VLC has not shine on these aspects lately, especially on H.264.

VLC 1.1 should partly fix those issues, with:

faster CPU decoding, especially on Windows,
GPU decoding on Windows Vista/7 and on Linux,
DSP decoding with OpenMax IL on embedded Linux, like Maemo.

GPU decoding

Using DxVA2 on Windows Vista and 7 and VAAPI on Linux, the decoding stage of VLC framework can now be done by the GPU.

If you have a compatible GPU, especially an nVidia, it should go way faster. VLC should consume less than 10% of your CPU and your CPU shouldn’t be at full speed anymore.

It even works on Ion/Atom machines! This is cool for HTPC.

DSP decoding using OpenMax IL

VLC has a new decoder that can use OpenMax IL codecs for DSP decoding

If this is chinese to you, it means that VLC is almost the same speed and energy consumption than the native player on the N900.

OpenMax IL in VLC can decode and encode most of the codecs: Mpeg2, Mpeg4, H264, H263, WMV1, WMV2, WMV3, RV10, RV20, RV30, RV40 and aac, amr, mp3.

Better audio pipeline

Also, the audio pipeline has been reworked, (and accelerated on ARM devices), so that we less conversion occur and better filtering happen.

Of course, audio is not that critical today, but it just makes VLC a better audio player.

Less Ram and Less threads

VLC 1.1 should use less threads as Rémi wrote.

VLC 1.1 should also use less Ram than 1.0.5, even though, this might not be very visible in all situations.

Conclusion

VLC 1.1.0 should be faster to decode, using less CPU and able to leverage GPU and DSPs; it should use less RAM and less threads. What more do you want ?

Update Part 2: Better

On the road to VLC 1.1.0: introduction

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:21:00 +0100

VLC 1.0.0

The 1.0.0 version of VLC has been very popular, partly due to its stability (compared to 0.9.x) and due to its constant improvements ( revisions were 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3, 1.0.4, 1.0.5 and soon 1.0.6).

VLC 1.0.0 was out in last July, 8 month ago. We need to move on.

Articles

VLC 1.1.0 is on its way, and I’ll start a few articles to introduce VLC 1.1.0 features and highlights.

VLC 1.1.0: Codename and statistics

VLC 1.1.0 will be named The Luggage, because of DiscWorld.

This is huge change, since VLC codenames were taken from the Goldeneye movie.

Statistics

6800 commits have been pushed since 1.0.0-rc1, the first release candidate of VLC 1.0.0
2327 files changed, 429662 insertions(+), 346267 deletions(-)
139 different commiters
The biggest commiter has 1822 commits, 2 other commiters have around 770 commits, 1 has 650 and 1 has almost 500 commits. Those 5 developers represent 2 thirds of the total of commits.

Highlights

The highlights of VLC 1.1.0 will be…

… at the next articles. :D

Update:

Part 1: Faster

Part 2: Better

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

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:22:00 +0100

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.

VLC 1.0.5 et 1.1

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 02:50:00 +0100

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

videolan.org stats for 2009: 90 million visits

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:00:00 +0100

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:

VideoLAN has seen over 90 million visits on its website,
from 68million different IPs.
Pages view are around 480million pages.
Best month was december, with 9,25 million visits.
0 advertisement.
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.

VideoLAN is on Twitter

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:20:00 +0100

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