Yet another blog for JBKempf - VideoLAN

Meet me at OpenVideoConference in NYC

JBK — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:34:00 +0200

Hello people,

I am going to the Open Video Conference, this week-end, in NYC: Open Video Conference .

So if you are in New York, and want to me someone from the VideoLAN team, don’t hesitate to contact me!

VLC 1.0.0 RC 2

JBK — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:14:00 +0200

1.0.0 RC2

VLC 1.0.0 RC2 (Second Release Candidate) is out!

As all releases of VLC 1.0.0, it introduces:

many new codecs (True HD, DD+, AES3, RV40, SCTE-20, dirac…)
various playback core improvements (frame-by-frame, live-recording, instant pausing, etc…)
interface improvements
interface customization
better multi-channel audio support
better subtitles support
global hotkeys
better integration in GTK environments
better integration in KDE
and so many other bugfixes

Skins contest

And there is a Skins2 contest going on!

Please spread the news!

last.fm, libre.fm and scrobbling

JBK — Sat, 23 May 2009 11:09:00 +0200

Introduction

You may have followed the ongoing dispute around last.fm. You may also have no idea what scrobbling is (it is a way to post the music names what you listen to).

Some alternative exists.

VLC and last.fm

VLC since 0.9.x can scrobble on all platforms to last.fm database and website. Since it was cool addition, and VLC gets more and more audio support, this seemed a good idea and people liked it.

VLC and libre.fm

Some of you know the alternative to last.fm: libre.fm. It is a free software platform that gets your scrobble and will display them, like last.fm.

So far, it is VERY limited compared to last.fm

VLC 1.0.0 and libre.fm

VLC 1.0.0 is able to be configured to scrobble to any scrobbler (like libre.fm): Configuration of VLC to use libre.fm.

Position of VLC team

So far, the default stays on last.fm, but the possibility to scrobble to something else is here. We will see how the future goes.

Do as your heart tells you and share your music!

Want to include vlc in your Qt application?

JBK — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:36:00 +0200

Qt and VLC

Well, we have a very easy howto for you: libVLC in Qt .

This will output the video inside the widget that you want using QWidget::winId() method.

This has been tested on Linux and Windows, using libVLC 0.9.9.

Need

If you can't build your application easily, remember to install libvlc-dev or to use the SDK for windows from the .zip files of the releases!

Participate

Don't hesitate to complete this!

VLC and IDE

JBK — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:19:00 +0200

I receive many questions about using an IDE to build VLC.

Usually, the answer is VIM. But I will try to introduce something else today.

Needs

Yeah, VIM is TEH awesome, but sometimes we would like more. But usually, more is slow, incomplete and boring...

Would you want an editor with:

VIM syntax and command,
Completion that is faster than the one from Eclipse
Git inclusion
Doesn't eat all your RAM
Debuggueur and step-by-step+breakpoints integration like MSVC?

I guess so!

Believe it or not, there is a solution: QtCreator from Nokia/QtSoftware that I have tested to work with VLC.

Even if you don't think this will be useful for you, at least read in diagonale the following post.

Installation

Take QtCreator 1.1 (don't take older versions, they won't fit for VLC, or the VIM part will suck...)

   `apt-get install qtcreator` in Debian/Sid

Take Qt4.5.1 (I mean it, Qt 4.5.0 is buggy!)

Setup

General Setup

Run QtCreator and launch Tools->options
- Activate FakeVim and set ShiftWidth to 4
- Text Editor->Behaviour, set Tab size at 4
- Text Editor->Display, enable Text Wrapping and display right margin, and if you like Alexis' vim, Visualize whitespace
- Text Editor, change the colour schemes to match you old editor

Save options.

VLC Setup

For the example, I assume that you build your vlc in a "build" subdir of the source (as xtophe usually gives advice)

 * File->New
   Select 'Import of Makefile-based Project'
   -
   Project Name 'VLC'
   Location '/home/you/vlc' and Choose, Next
   -
   Let it process... It should take around 1minute
   Finish.

EXIT QtCreator... I MEAN it.

Setup Indexation

QtCreator will have done VLC.includes VLC.creator, VLC.files and a VLC.config in your vlc/ folder.

Overwrite the VLC.includes and the VLC.files with the one you can find:

Doing this will gain you some time. Those could be auto-generated one day, I guess...

Setup Build

Relaunch QtCreator

Select Projects (on the left) and select VLC on the list
Build Settings,
- Change Build directory to /home/you/vlc/build, using browse
Run Settings,
- Add a custom Executable with the blue '+'
- Name it VLC, browse to /home/you/vlc/build/vlc for Executable
- Put -Iqt in Arguments
Click on Edit on the left. You should see VLC with most useful files.

Build VLC and launch it.

In the Menu, Build and Build All, you should see the Compilation output on the bottom (or by clicking on the left build progressbar)
In the same menu, Build and Run it, and VLC will launch directly, outputting everything in the Application output.

Cool. But that was just a minimum...

Using it like VIM: Good!

Open modules/codec/avcodec/audio.c from the file browser and see... You are using VIM commands to control. You have Visual, Edit and all usual VIM modes!

Completion is triggered with Ctrl+Space and will give you a list. If there is no ambiguition, it is filled.
. and -> triggers the list of the members of the struct or the class by default.
After function completions, it will give the type of the arguments.

F2 will give you access to the function definition where your mouse is.

Debugging it: awesome!

You can put breakpoints in the margins near the line numbers. (Like in modules/gui/qt4/main_interface.cpp:100 and 108)

Now re run it using debug running.

It will stop at your breakpoint and you will have the function call lists (and line numbers) but also pointers values (like p_intf, and this in main_interface.cpp)

You can, of course Step In, Step Into and Step Out, resume or stop the code

More coolness:

Locate

Use the locate search box to find quick declarations: 'm vlc_object_act' will help you to go quickly to the method declaration, etc...

Git

Use the Git menu to checkout from within QtCreator.

Nota Bene

The indexing shouldn't be too long, but could be a bit longer the first time you launch the project!

Have fun!

Decoding video in VLC using VAAPI and nVidia

JBK — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:51:00 +0200

I know Phoronix people don't come around here, and that most people reading this blog don't care, but anyway...

GPU video decoding on Linux

On linux, decoding video using GPU means different standards:

Fortunately, we can use VDPAU (nVidia) as a backend to VAAPI. And there is a very nice library, named libva.

VLC and VAAPI

So far, most patches were done on MPlayer and FFmpeg, but here we go:

The sample is a M2TS with H.264 encoded at 32Mbps. Decoding is done without audio and subs and with a command line interface.

Performances

The perfs are quite nice, but they might be better. Why?

Because we don't output directly the video, we just take it back from the decoder, so we have a lot of memcpy, which explains why the decoding could be faster, but isn't...

Does this mean I can decode using GPU and then restream using VLC?

In theory, yes. Not tested yet :D

0.9.9 is released

JBK — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:05:00 +0200

Hello people,

As said on the main website, VLC 0.9.9 has been released.

Many bugfixes and native real video decoding (no need to put dll in the plugins/folder).

Profit, this is probably the latest version of the 0.9.9 series.

Interview dans Linux Pratique Essentiel

JBK — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:07:00 -0700

Bonjour à tous les lecteurs,

J'ai été interviewé dans le dernier Linux Pratique Essentiel N°7, spécial Vidéo/Photo.

Pensez à l'acheter en kiosque ou feuilletez-le sur l'apercu en ligne.

Howto build VLC 1.0.0-git in Ubuntu in less than 5 commands.

JBK — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:38:00 -0800

Since building VLC is easier and easier now, I am compelled to improve my HOWTOS. Here is one for Ubuntu, that can easily adapt to Debian.

This is not a complete and detailed post, but just a summary. If you need more details, take the Build on Intrepid HOWTO.

Get all you need

sudo apt-get build-dep vlc && sudo apt-get install libtool build-essential automake1.10 git-core

Get the source

git clone git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git

Go

cd vlc && ./bootstrap

mkdir build && cd build && ../configure --disable-nls --enable-qt4

make

Done.

Médiamétrie - http://www.videolan.org

JBK — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 10:57:00 -0800

Médiamétrie

Médiamétrie is a French organism that calculates audience of TV, radio, movies and now Internet Web sites in order to know who are the most popular ones.

Of course, it is very biaised, but still very interesting data for us.

VideoLAN on Médiamétrie

Those are the official results...

October 2008: rank 42 - 6 177 000 visits
November 2008: rank 46 - 6 124 000 visits
December 2008: rank 41 - 6 642 000 visits

Rank is on all the websites in France.

Thoughts

This is not too bad from an english website, with 0 advertisement...

Maybe we should add some ads! :D

VLC: From Player to Playa

JBK — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 08:59:00 -0800

Here is an awesome animation from one guy from Newgrounds.

It deserve your votes!

VLC animation.

WxWidgets interface...

JBK — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 01:24:00 -0800

... is finally removed from the main VLC repository.

With Qt moving to LGPL and integration in Gtk environment, it is no more useful.

Moreover, no maintainer showed up. Too bad.

Conference

JBK — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 03:09:00 -0800

Hello/Bonjour,

I am giving a conference next thursday in Paris about VideoLAN. Everyone is welcome.

Je donne une conférence sur VideoLAN jeudi prochain à Paris. Tout le monde est le bienvenu.

View Larger Map

24, rue Pasteur
94270 Le Kremlin Bicetre
Métro Porte d'Italie

VLC 1.0 and VideoLAN for 2009

JBK — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 02:05:00 -0800

VLC 1.0

During the VideoLAN dev days 08 (great success), we discussed many points about VLC, VideoLAN and the future of the projects.

One decision was about the naming of the next release and the timeline of it.

Naming

The discussions was about how do we name the release:

0.10.0
1.0
1.0.0
0.9.9.0

The result was that the next release is going to be: VLC 1.0.0.

Geeks are going to say that this is bad, because in the tradition of open source software, you never reach 1.0... While this is true, users are confused by 0.10.x releases.

Anyway, we voted and acknowledge that vote, so, I doubt there is any going back.

Timeline

The freezing date of VLC 1.0.0 is set on January, 31st 2009.

This means that VLC 1.0.0 alpha, alias VLC 1.0.0-pre1 will be available around the beginning of February.

VLC 1.0.0 release will likely be out during the month of March, then.

Features of VLC 1.0

There are many new things that some of you will like:

Playback

Frame-By-Frame, Improved frame accuracy
Timeshifting and record on the fly for all medias
RTSP trickplay
Faster caching
Faster seeking
Vout and Aout recycling as in 0.8.x
Post-processing is back

New Codecs

Dolby Digital Plus - E-AC3
TrueHD/MLP
Real Video 3.0 and 4.0
Blu-Ray LPCM
Dirac encoding in Ogg
Faster decoding and demuxing
Rewrite of subtitles core

Other

Windows CE experimental port
Maemo port
HTML export of the playlist
Interface customization on Windows and linux
Better GTK integration
Faster

VideoLAN

VideoLAN is going to be a separate non-profit organization for 2009 and I'll be the president of it.

More news on that later...

VLC dresses up for christmas

JBK — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 01:26:00 -0800

Meta blogs

Digg 1

Digg 2

Blogs

http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/88001...

http://blog.sayakbanerjee.com/?p=91

http://www.renjusblog.com/2008/12/v...

http://matt-cutts.blogspot.com/2008...

http://gnulinuxblog.com/uncategoriz...

http://madfactory.de/2008/12/19/vlc...

http://eddie.bodeche.com/2008/12/19...

http://www.geardiary.com/2008/12/19...

http://vishnu.gmurali.com/vlc-playe...

VideoLAN Dev Days '08

JBK — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:17:00 -0800

Meeting

The VideoLAN community is a fast-evolving and ever-changing community, and development happens really fast.

While this is fun, it is always difficult to meet and discuss with each other in Real Life.

Therefore, we are happy to invite you to:

        The VideoLAN Dev Days '08

Location / Date

Location: Paris, France

Date: 20-21 December

Who

Everyone interested is welcome.

But remember, this event is focused on development discussions and on VideoLAN management and is not suited for non-technical users. If you are press or fan and want to meet the team, you are welcome.

If you want to register, please contact us.

Program and exact address will follow for registered people.

ToolBar Editor

JBK — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:11:00 -0800

Working screenshot:

New Codecs for 1.0

JBK — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 03:30:00 -0800

As some of you might know, next major release of VLC, is probably going to be called 1.0.

Some audio codecs were added to VLC for this major release, especially the ones you can find in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disks.

VLC media player 1.0 should be able to decode:

Dolby TrueHD/MLP
Linear PCM 8 channels as in Blu-Ray files
Dolby Digital Plus, DD+ or E-AC-3
AES3 (I know this is not in HD formats)

And VLC should still be able to play:

SMTPE VC-1
MPEG-4 AVC (H.264)
MPEG-2

Here you go, have fun!

Evaluation of Google Summer of Code 2008 for VideoLAN

JBK — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 05:17:00 -0800

This is a post to summarize and evaluate the work that we did this year, compared to last year too.

This was our second year of the Google Summer of Code project.

Google Summer of Code 2008

For the second time, VideoLAN was an association mentor for the Google Summer of Code project.

The 2008 edition of GSoC had a few improvements and change in the way Google and we handled it. Let's detail ours:

VideoLAN, VLC && x264

This year, we decided that VideoLAN would be a mentoring association for BOTH VLC and x264, instead of doing the same confusion as usual between VLC and VideoLAN.

This meant that we had to work with the x264 team to find ideas, mentors and define common rules. This was an extra amount of time, but for a good reason!

VideoLAN rules

After the last year Google Summer of Code summit, we learned quite a few things, and I decided to be a bit more strict during the summer of code. This is Google money, what about using it correctly? Here we go for the major changes:

More publicity,
Qualification tasks. I cannot emphasize more on the goods this brought to us,
Better reviewing from developers, with common rules to follow on how to give points,
More involvements of students in the community (presentation mail on mailing list, mandatory public wiki page),
Mandatory commit and status mail every week to mentor+admin,
A more active special mailing list!

Results

Those changes were great...

Selection

We received many candidacies, with higher quality and we had the possibility to chose 14 students!

One of them stopped before even beginning, because he had found a new job. So we started with 13 students:

9 for VLC media player
4 for x264

Detailed results on VLC:

Just going to review every students and whether their code was merged or not.

Please keep in mind that coding on VLC is not as easy as it might seem. And the code is evolving quite fast, so sometimes, it is difficult to keep stuffs up-to-date.

Lukas Durfina

Lukas was my student and was working on the Fullscreen Controller and Phonon work. The Qt fullscreen controller was in VLC release 0.9.0 and the Phonon work is almost merged in 1.0.

Geoffroy Couprie

Geoffroy had the difficult task to rework on the WinCE/Windows Mobile port of VLC. Most of the work has been merged in the upcoming VLC 1.0.

Antoine Lejeune

Antoine was working on the Maemo port of VLC. The code has been merged in VLC 1.0.

Kaarlo Henrik Räihä

Kaarlo is a very very active member of our community and was working on very difficult aspects of Vista integration, namely DXVA. The project was very difficult and successful for the most part, but it isn't merged yet in VLC.

Fabio Ritrovato

Fabio was working on MTP device integration. The code is good and the project is successful and the merge is pending (hopefully for 1.0)

Mirsal Ennaime

Mirsal is a long time coder in the community and was rewritting the UPnp client and hopefully the server for DLNA. The project was also successful, but the merge is pending because of some services discovery changes in our code. It should happen for 1.0

Dylan Yudaken

Dylan was working on PVR improvements and on timeshifting. The project was also very successful and Dylan was a delight working with. Some things have been merged, some are going to.

Eric Dudiak

Eric reworked our very bad MacOS X interface This was very difficult but the outcome was quite good. The mergins is still pending too.

Vladimir Belousov

This project was a failure.

Google Summer of Code Summit

This summer of code summit was great, because it was 2 days and we had way more time to discuss with other people.

I, however, have found it not enough focused on the GSoC, but maybe this was because I didn't choose the right discussions.

Conclusion

This Google Summer of Code was a HUGE success for VideoLAN and we had some very very good output, some of which you already have on your Computer!

Thank you Leslie!

Build VLC media player under Ubuntu Intrepid

JBK — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:07:00 -0800

This post is an update of the popular howto for Build VLC with feisty and Build VLC with hardy.

Those articles are always popular on my blog, so here is an update.

This post is an update of the popular howto for Build VLC with feisty and Build VLC with hardy.

Those articles are always popular on my blog, so here is an update.

Introduction

So we are going to build the latest VLC possible.

Everything will be done in a console/terminal and should be straight-forward. Every question should be asked on the forum, or in the comments here.

Conventions

Every line beginning with a # should be done as root, or using the sudo command. Every line beginning witha % is a normal line.

Building VLC

Prepare your environment

We need a few package starting from a fresh intrepid:

# apt-get install vlc
# apt-get build-dep vlc 
# apt-get install cvs build-essential git git-core automake1.9 libtool
# apt-get install libcddb2-dev libzvbi-dev yasm

Checkout VLC trunk and bootstrap the tree

% git clone git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git

% cd vlc
% ./bootstrap

Build x264

x264

x264 is a library to encode movies in H.264.

% cd extras/
%
% git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git
% cd x264
% make
% sudo make install
% cd ../..

Configure VLC

Configure

 
% mkdir build; cd build;
%../configure --prefix=/usr --enable-mozilla

Finish

% make

You just have to wait a bit :D