Yet another blog for JBKempf - Tag - 1.1.0

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On the same topic, a lot of code has been cleaned up and outdated modules have been removed.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

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: CDDB on Windows!

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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?