Yet another blog for JBKempf - Tag - Release

VLC media player release: 0.8.6e and coverity

JBK — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:04:00 +0100

Release

We just released a new stable version.

This version is ONLY focused on security vulnerabilities and minor bugfixes.

0.9.0

0.9.0 version is in the work, and an alpha preview is due soon. :D

Coverity

I am quite unpleased with Coverity, that does a free scanning of open source projects. We applied many times for VLC, and they always replied that they would do it soon, but they actually never done it. :'(

Security

This is a bit bad, because VLC is one important Open Source project, and more used that some of the projects they already scan...

Anyway, this is a bit problematic, because we need help in finding security issues and do some auditing of the VLC media player code. And since there are web plugins on VLC, this is dangerous.

VLC media player 0.8.6d release

JBK — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:52:00 +0100

Announce

The VideoLAN Team is pleased to announce the release of VLC media player 0.8.6d.

This release is aimed at fixing security vulnerabilities in the Active X plugin and the the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) library which affect VLC media player 0.8.6c and lower. For more technical details see our advisory: http://www.videolan.org/sa0703.html.

Improvements in this release include better Video Output compatibility on Mac OS X and Apple Remote support on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Please note that Mac OS X 10.3.9 is no longer supported.

The full list of changes can be found on our tracking site: http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/browser/tags/0.8.6d/NEWS.

We strongly recommend all users to update to this new version and as always to only download from the main VideoLAN website.

Bad Sites

As usual, several sites (neowin.net, gratisdrivers.net, xiabar.com, chatzworld.com, multihunter.com, tweakers.net, computerbase.de) have linked to or still offer (filehippo.com, majorgeeks.com, kaldata.com) early and broken development versions from before the official release was made available.

Those binaries (done by your servitor) weren't good release. This was clear and written in a README file. I just want to tell them how much they don't help us. Those guys are really a pain.

Bad, but less sites

Moreover, I am bored of Download.com that does almost the same, and that doesn't use our link to the files, but either:

mirror the exe (and forget to update it) and we can't count our download number
link directly to our main FTP and don't use the links that help us mirroring and kill our webserver...

USE: http://www.videolan.org/mirror.php?file=vlc/0.8.6d/win32/vlc-0.8.6d-win32.exe http://www.videolan.org/mirror.php?file=vlc/0.8.6d/macosx/vlc-0.8.6d.dmg

Enjoy this release,

The VideoLAN Team

Bugfix Release: 0.8.6c

JBK — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 07:00:00 +0200

Changes

This is not a big release, neither a big annoucement.

However, for most Vista users, the problems are solved. So if you are using this OS, please upgrade.

But, the important information is about security issues that need to be solved. Ogg, Vorbis, theora comments are dangerous. CDDA and SAP too.

Summary

Unless you have a strong reason not to upgrade, do it.

Release process

I was not happy with the release process. Some people on the forum took the FTP exe and disclaimed it as official everywhere before the release. This is not so bad, except when they advertise a broken binary.

We work for everyone best pleasure. If we don't release even if some binaries are done, this is always for a good reason.

The rule is easy: DON'T DOWNLOAD ANY UNSIGNED UN-MD5 BINARY

Mirrors

However, if sometimes you found some bonaries on our FTP that are not yet a released version, it is because we are waiting for our official mirrors to take the good files.

In fact, many of the unofficial mirrors are linking to the direct files or caching the exe and we can't count the download numbers... :'( And many serve the wrong files.

HAPPY Release...

...to everyone

VideoLAN: What I have been doing lately?

JBK — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:06:00 +0200

Hello to everyone,

This blog has been silent for a couple of weeks. I am so sorry. Let me explain you why.

Google Summer of Code

I had to finish all the stuff about the new students, a lot of discussion, reviews and choices for GSoC. All the team trusted me on the choice, so, that was difficult. But I am very happy with everything we have come up with.

Thanks Google!

Holidays and elections

Two weeks ago, it was easter's week end,
Last week, I was in Bretagne to help for one of my friends' wedding,
Yesterday, I was in Paris, for the French presidential elections.

Therefore, I wasn't home enough to work and document for VLC.

0.8.6b release

As some have noticed we had a small release on VLC branch. This is going to be the latest on this branch, I think. But I had to do win32 binaries and source tarballs... We still have issues with Vista, but well, until drivers are correctly written, we cannot do what we want...

0.9.0 - Qt4

I was chasing bugfix and not really adding new features. This will change in the next few days.

0.8.6a or how to do a fast release....

JBK — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:39:00 +0100

This is the short story of how we had to release 0.8.6a version of VLC media player because of some bugs...

A Bugfix Release

Intro

Everything was going great under the best world. VLC 0.8.6 was out during December without a lot of troubles, with a lot of fixes... A mature release, but...

Initial report

Month of Apple Bugs has started on the first of January. And the second day was a VLC security problem.

First, we did not think that we could be targeted, because we are not an Apple company... On the same day, there was a patch on the mailing-list. The fix was quite quick in the trunk.

Decisions

There was a lot of FUD and publicity around that MoAB, so we couldn't do nothing. The problem is that the chief releaser of 0.8.6, and one of the main OSX Coder was away.

So we decided to release a bugfix version without his advice.

On the third of January the packages were uploaded, a fix for ancient release was proposed.

Release

On the 4th, we announced the release after having signed the binaries...

The problem

VLC media player CDDA (CD Digital Audio) and VCDX (Video CD) plugins are prone to a C-style format string vulnerability when trying to open a media resource location. The bug occurs when handling error and debug messages from underlying library libcdio.

Personal remark

A lot of publicity around a non-event. VLC must have a lot of other security problems. We need to analyze a bit more some code...

But we react quickly enough. Great!

VLC release

JBK — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 13:05:00 +0100

VLC 0.8.6 was released yesterday. For me, it is a very special release, because it is the first release I really feel from the inside.

However, this release is a bit a bastard release, since the main upgrades are from FFMPEG updates or only for Mac Users. And there are a lot of bugfixes, that will help the forum to be a bit less overloaded.

I am waiting so much to see next release (0.9.0).

Main features

WMV, WMA, FLV partial support
Wavpack, TTA support
H264 improvements
Notifications
And a lot of stuff for MacOS...

Comments

Windows 9x/ME is not officially supported anymore, mainly because of the network layer. However, it still works with not many problems, but there is no official support. Maybe next release will be more problematic with these old OSes. For those users, you can upgrade to this version, but please change OS !
BeOS's version has been very difficult to build because of GCC 2.95. I think the trunk does not work anymore on BeOS. And FFMPEG thinks of dropping BeOS support...
SuSE malediction is finished ! Indeed, since we refused the SuSE maintener role to Voldemort, we had a lot of SuSE developpers that proposed to package VLC, but none of them stayed enough to make an actual VLC package... :D Now, Domique (dimstar) had taken the job, and we all helped him.
Next version will be 0.9.0 with a new playlist-media library, new plugins, new libVLC, more bindings, more codecs and a new GUI using Qt4.

New skin

I also just wanted to show a very beautiful skins that was made by Anton Boskovski.

It is a skin that uses the latest skins2 improvements that were made during 0.8.6 development. You should give this one a try. For once, it is not a pale copy of another player. I hope we can make a skin contest for next release.

Team

The VideoLAN team is very cool, but really short-staffed, with only a few people actually working on it. The support is very difficult to do, because of all the modules of VLC, and people who want a lot of different features, that we cannot make. But, for me, it is a good experiment, and I found it very funny. Let's hope, I 'll become a VLC guru, one day.