Yet another blog for JBKempf - Tag - VLC media player

VLC media player and GTK

JBK — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:48:00 -0700

Switch to Qt4

As many of you know now, VLC main interface will switch to Qt4 for many reasons that we have already detailed.

GTK issues

Many GNOME users are not pleased because of the differences between the look of Qt applications and native looks of GNOME/GTK application.

Solution

Trolltech has made a new QGtkStyle that uses GTK to design the widgets. Then you can have a VLC using Qt that seems exactly like any Gtk application.

Screenshots

VLC 0.9.0 and subtitles support

JBK — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:26:00 -0700

This is a short post about subtitles support in VLC.

Current support

As it is released, VLC doesn't support a lot of subtitles, especially the text based ones.

Moreover, SSA/ASS subtitles script don't get all the styling they need.

Development support

Some work has been done so far :

USF complete decoding
HTML improvements for styling
SSA/ASS complete rewriting
Ogg/Kate support
AQTitle support
MPSub support
MPL2 support
RealText basic support
PowerDivx support
DKS support
SubViewer 1.0 support
JacoSub basic support (no styles yet)

Conclusion

I know it is not enough and it has come late, but we are catching up :D

Build VLC media player under Ubuntu Hardy (8.04)

JBK — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:49:00 +0100

I found an ubuntu hardy installation, and needed to test something on the trunk of VLC so I needed to compile a VLC for it. Here is a complete HOWTO to do the same !

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

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 hardy:

# apt-get install vlc
# apt-get build-dep vlc 
# apt-get install cvs build-essential subversion git git-core automake1.9 libtool
# apt-get install libgcrypt-dev
# apt-get install libfaad-dev libtwolame-dev libqt4-dev libjack-dev 
# apt-get install libxpm-dev libcddb2-dev liblua5.1-0-dev libzvbi-dev libshout-dev

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-snapshot --enable-debug \
        --enable-dbus-control --enable-musicbrainz \
        --enable-shared-libvlc --enable-mozilla \
        --enable-lirc \
        --with-ffmpeg-tree=../extras/ffmpeg \
        --enable-x264 --with-x264-tree=../extras/x264 \
        --enable-shout --enable-taglib \
        --enable-v4l  \
        --enable-dvb  \
        --enable-realrtsp --disable-xvmc \
        --enable-svg   --enable-dvdread \
        --enable-dc1394 --enable-dv \
        --enable-theora --enable-faad \
        --enable-twolame --enable-real \
        --enable-flac --enable-tremor \
        --enable-skins2 --enable-qt4 \
        --enable-ncurses \
        --enable-aa --enable-caca \
        --enable-esd --disable-portaudio \
        --enable-jack --enable-xosd \
        --enable-galaktos --enable-goom \
        --enable-ggi \
        --disable-cddax --disable-vcdx \
       --disable-quicktime --enable-lua

Finish

% make

You just have to wait a bit :D

Howto build VLC on Windows on a fresh Windows

JBK — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:49:00 +0100

Hello to everyone!

Yet again

I already explained how to compile trunk versions of VLC on linux, ubuntu and debian.

I rewrote the howto for Windows, using CYGWIN and put it on our wiki.

Find it here.

VLC switched to Git

JBK — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 11:14:00 +0100

Everything is in $subject.

Anyway, to check out the VLC repository, now:

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

Have fun!

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.