Yet another blog for JBKempf - VideoLAN

Let's talk about numbers

JBK — 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]

JBK — 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]

JBK — 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

JBK — 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

JBK — 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

JBK — 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

JBK — 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

JBK — 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

JBK — 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

JBK — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:20:00 +0100

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

VLC 1.0.3 is out!

JBK — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:40:00 +0100

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.

VLC: CDDB on Windows!

JBK — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:28:00 +0100

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?

VideoLAN and April

JBK — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:25:00 +0200

This is a short post topic about the VideoLAN association.

What is April ?

Pioneer of free software in France, April has been since 1996 a major player in the democratization and the spread of Free Software and open standards to the general public, professionals and institutions in the French-speaking world. In the digital era that is ours, it also aims to inform the public on the dangers of an exclusive appropriation of information an knowledge by private interests. The association is made up of individuals, companies, associations and organizations from various backgrounds who share the values of freedom.

VideoLAN and April

As of today, the VideoLAN association (or non-profit organization) is now a full member of the April association.

We have worked together quite a few times, and you might have seen the April’s campaigns on videolan.org, but we weren’t officially a member.

However, now that VideoLAN has a clean association and status, we were able to formalize this relationship.

Let’s hope it will be for the best.

Meet me in SF bay area soon

JBK — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:41:00 +0200

Hello fellow readers and VideoLAN fans,

This is a very short post to tell you that I will be around San Francisco / Bay Area for a few days at the end of the month.

So, if you need / want to see me or need to discuss VideoLAN matters, please contact me as soon as possible.

VLC and Windows 7 Logo

JBK — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:07:00 +0200

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.

VLC 64bit running on Windows 7 64bits. 1st!

JBK — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:13:00 +0200

64 bits and Windows

64 bits VLC is a "hype" topic those days in our community.

On Windows, we couldn’t have a 64bits native version, because of lack of correct compiler (No, Microsoft Visual doesn’t fit in correct compiler section.

Fortunately, the mingw-w64 hackers are making a new one, and they ROCK. Huge thanks to NightStrike and ktietz!

VLC Win64

So, I have been working a bit on it. And two days ago:

Voilà :D

Don’t expect something complete soon, but still

Snow Leopard is out! And why you will not have VLC 64bits right now...

JBK — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:59:00 +0200

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!

VLC 1.0.0, 1.0.1, a backward look

JBK — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:22:00 +0200

VLC 1.0.0, 1,5 months ago

So, VLC 1.0.0 was released almost 7 weeks ago, at the time of this writing.

VLC 1.0.1, the bugfix version of 1.0.0, was released almost 4 weeks ago.

VLC 1.0.0 was downloaded around 13 million of time, during the 3 first weeks of the release, and that is a very high download rate. VLC 1.0.1 is around 13 million downloads too.

Was VLC 1.0.0 a success ?

Well, YES, because:

we had a lot of downloads,
many good reviews,
a lot of testing was done (more than 3 months between feature freeze and release!),
server hold still (even after the 1,3Million visitor in the first day),
no major regressions and issues.

But, we had a few issues that were important:

WMV could have no audio with low caching values,
mpeg2 videos could freeze the video after seek,
some flv videos were unseekable,
some VC1 video could crash the windows build.

That is why we released 1.0.1 quite soon after 1.0.0.

3 weeks between 1.0.0 and 1.0.1

Is that much?

Well, yes/no.

The first week after the release was totally focused on maintaining the servers running, answering the mails, and press (not much of those, fortunately).

Then, the second week was compilation of the main issues and tryout to fix most of them.

And then, you got your 3 weeks time, with the win32 codecs updates and setting up the release…

1.0.2 soon?

Well, as far as I see, except some SSA updates and v4l2 fixes, there is no rush to release…

If an important security issue arrives, then we will release a 1.0.2, but no roadmap is set yet.

Conclusion

As far as I am concerned, VLC 1.0.0 was a great success, let’s hope 1.1 will be as good!

VLC 1.0.0 goes above 3 million in less than 3 days!

JBK — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:43:00 +0200

UPDATE: After exactly 3 days, we are near 3.5Million

As you should know now, VLC 1.0.0 was out 61 hours ago (2 and a half day ago).

In order to not kill the servers, the download counting was deactivated. After reactivation and recounting, VLC 1.0.0 has been downloaded more than 3 million times in less than 3 days.

The VideoLAN website has seen more than 1,5 million unique visitors (and 0 advertisement) and around as many have downloaded through external websites directly linking to our repository.

On the first 48 hours, the counting was around 2,3 million.

Of course, this is a bit less than Mozilla Firefox, but still those are impressive numbers.

VLC 1.0.0 is out.

JBK — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:52:00 +0200

You know that this blog has been a bit quiet, because I had a lot of work to do.

This new version includes:

Live recording
Instant pausing and Frame-by-Frame support
Finer speed controls
New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, …)
New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, …) and majors improvements in many formats…
New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
Video scaling in fullscreen
RTSP Trickplay support
Zipped file playback
Customizable toolbars
Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
Better integration in Gtk environments
MTP devices on linux
AirTunes streaming
New skin for skins2 interface

Have fun!