Yet another blog for JBKempf - Tag - VLC media player

VLC 2.0 pour MacOS X

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:41:00 +0100

Intro

La nouvelle version de VLC, nommée TwoFlower ou 2.0, apporte de nombreuses améliorations et modifications spécifiques à MacOS X. Ce petit article permet de passer en revue ces améliorations, qui sont souvent peu décrites dans les articles plus généralistes.

Ces dernières années, le développement de VLC sous OSX a été un peu chaotique et incertain, avec un vrai questionnement sur le futur du projet. Néanmoins, sur l'année passée, Félix, aidé par plusieurs autres développeurs externes, par le reste de l'équipe de VLC et par un jeune designer, a pris le taureau par les cornes. Il est évident que de nombreux bugs resteront sur les premières moutures, mais les versions devraient se suivre rapidement pour réparer vos bugs les plus gênants.

Nouvelle Interface

La modification la plus visible de Twoflower est la nouvelle interface. Cette interface remplace l'ancienne interface, qui datait des premières versions de OSX.

Tout d'abord, cette interface se présente en une seule fenêtre, pour mieux coller au look actuel des applis OS X. Ensuite, elle existe en deux couleurs: une version noire, qui ressemble au look QuickTime X, et une version grise, comme pour Lion. De plus, sous Lion, elle permet de choisir entre le plein écran natif Lion ou le plein écran classique de VLC.

La plupart des fenêtres utiles lors de la visualisation des vidéos, notamment les filtres audio et vidéo, ont migré vers le style gris transparent HUD. De nombreuses autres fenêtres ont évolués, mais sans bouleversement.

Extensions

La nouvelle interface supporte les extensions lua de VLC pour créer des nouvelles fenêtres et fonctionnalités, comme l'intégration IMDB, Wikipedia, OpenSubtitles et autres. Ce support a été fait tardivement dans le développement, donc une période de stabilisation sera probablement nécessaire.

Périphériques

Jusqu'ici, sous Mac, VLC ne pouvait lire que la webcam intégrée. À partir de VLC 2.0, un support générique des périphériques QTKit a été ajouté pour l'audio (QTSound) et pour la vidéo (QTCapture). Cela devrait permettre de visionner et de rediffuser les webcams externes USB et FireWire, les microphones ainsi que les cartes DVB et SDI compatibles.

Au niveau du support Blu-Ray, VLC 2.0 permet de lire des disques et des dossiers non chiffrés de façon limitée, sous Linux et Windows. Une fois que certains bugs seront résolus, cela devrait être aussi le cas sous MacOS X, mais probablement seulement sous Snow Leopard et Lion. Pour les Blu-Rays chiffrés, la bibliothèque libaacs, n'est pas encore porté sous MacOS X. Avis aux amateurs!

Codecs

La version MacOS X de VLC 2.0 bénéficiera du même support amélioré des codecs, des formats et des filtres vidéos que les versions des autres plate-formes. La partie la plus intéressante concerne le décodage multi-threadé des codecs majeurs pour profiter des machines modernes multi-cores. De nouveaux codecs sont supportés, comme le ProRes, l'AVC/Intra, les codecs 10bits et certaines nouvelles variantes WMV. Le support des formats de fichiers existants a aussi nettement été amélioré, notamment pour le MKV et le MOV.

Le décodage GPU sous OSX, aka VDADecoder, n'est pas de la partie dans cette version, pour des raisons de priorité de développement. Sébastien, développeur VLC, a porté le code dans FFmpeg, mais la partie VLC n'est pas encore prête. On espère que cela arrivera dans une version mineure suivante.

Sortie vidéo

La sortie vidéo, en OpenGL a subit quelques modifications, simplifications et améliorations. Dorénavant, les sous-titres sont rendus à la taille de la fenêtre de sortie, quel que soit la source et directement fusionnés avec la vidéos en OpenGL. Cela améliore la qualité et la netteté des sous-titres. De plus, l'utilisation de fragment shaders pour faire les conversions d'espace de couleurs, même lorsque la source est en 10bits, devrait améliorer les performances.

Support OS X et PowerPC

Cette version 2.0 est compatible Leopard, Snow Leopard et Lion. La version intel 64 bits est la version prioritaire pour Snow Leopard et Lion, car elle seule a le support natif du plein écran sous Lion. La version intel 32 bits fonctionne quant à elle aussi sous Leopard. Il existe toujours une version powerpc pour Leopard, mais qui n'est testée que sous G5, faute de matériel. Cette version powerpc supporte aussi le multi-threading pour le décodage des formats HD, pour ne pas jeter tout de suite les derniers Mac Pro G5 Il est cependant possible que la prochaine version majeure (2013?) ne supporte plus cette architecture.

Le futur

Plusieurs pistes de travail sont en cours: finir l'interface et la peaufiner pour palier aux manques qui seront forcément présents dans les premières versions, travailler sur le support Blu-Ray qui reste trop basique, intégrer le code pour le décodage GPU et changer la licence de VLCKit vers la LGPL afin de permettre de construire des applications non-GPL au-dessus du moteur de VLC.

Nota Bene: Cet article a été écrit par mes soins et donné gracieusement à MacBidouille et Mac4ever.

VLC 1.2: nouveautés

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0100

Un an et demi après la dernière version majeure (1.1.0), VLC revient avec une nouvelle version: 1.2.0, disponible en pré-version de test. L'occasion de revenir sur les nouveautés de cette version.

Avec près de 8000 changements fait par 150 développeurs, 600 bugs fermés et près de 200 000 lignes de code modifiées, cette version est une des versions les plus importantes de VLC. Plus d'informations sur les contributeurs de VLC 1.2.

De son petit nom "TwoFlower" (qui vient de l'univers DiscWorld), les principales nouveautés de VLC portent sur les sorties vidéos, les nouveaux codecs, le support des Blu-Ray et les interfaces.

Nota Bene: ce post est un écrit qui a servit de base à un article de PCINpact que vous trouverez en ligne.

Coeur Vidéo

Les modifications les plus importantes, mais aussi moins visibles, portent sur la réécriture du coeur vidéo et les modules d'affichage à l'écran.

Sous-titres

Dans les versions actuelles de VLC, les sous-titres textes ont souvent une mauvaise qualité de rendu, notamment lors de visionnage de vidéo SD sur des écrans HD. En effet, pour des raisons de performance, VLC rend les sous-titres à la taille de la vidéo, puis les intègre dans la vidéo avant de les passer à la carte graphique en une seule texture, qui fait le scaling de l'ensemble. Dans certains cas, les sous-titres sont crénelés et de mauvaise qualité.

Sous TwoFlower, un nouveau mode de rendu est possible: VLC envoie 2 textures à la carte graphique, une pour la vidéo, à sa taille d'origine et une pour les sous-titres, à la taille de l'écran. La carte graphique se charge du scaling de la vidéo et d'afficher l'ensemble. Le résultat est bien plus agréable, mais demande du matériel plus récent.

Ce nouveau mode de rendu est disponible pour les sorties Direct3d pour Windows, OpenGL pour Linux et MacOS X et x11 pour Linux.

Shaders, 3D et performance

Le nouveau coeur vidéo permet aussi des améliorations de performances en déchargeant plus de calculs sur le GPU, lorsque cela est possible.

Par exemple, l'utilisation de shaders ARB dans la sortie vidéo OpenGL permet de faire les conversions YUV vers RGB sur le GPU, même en profondeur de 10 ou 12bits.

De plus, les bases des shaders sous Direct3d et de l'affichage 3D ont été ajoutés pour les prochaines versions. Un fork de VLC permet déjà l'affichage 3D sous nVidia Stereo Vision.

Filtres vidéos

VLC 1.2 voit l'ajout de nombreux filtres vidéos, certains connus, comme hqdn3d (suppression du grain), ou gradfun (suppression des gradients), d'autres originaux comme un nouveau filtre de grain, un filtre d'inverse téléciné ou un filtre de stabilisation pour les caméscopes.

Codecs, Formats

VLC TwoFlower, comme à chaque version, apporte le support de nombreux nouveaux codecs, formats de fichiers et périphériques.

Un support limité des Blu-Rays est donc intégré sur toutes les plate-formes. La configuration est compliquée et peu documentée, et une grosse proportion des Blu-Rays n'est pas supportée du tout. Les menus ne sont pas activés non plus. Ceci étant dit, c'est un premier pas.

L'ajout des protocoles de streaming adaptatifs HLS et DASH, des périphériques de capture de vidéo sous MacOS et des cartes d'acquisition professionnelles de types SDI viennent compléter le tableau au niveau du support des périphériques et protocoles.

Codecs

Au niveau codecs, le décodage multi-coeur est dorénavant possible et activé en H.264, DivX, VP3/Theora, Jpeg2000 et Webm/VP8, ce qui peut apporter des améliorations très importantes en performance, notamment en Full-HD. VLC était, sur ce point là, bien en-dessous des packs de codecs du style CoreAVC.

Autre ajout important, notamment pour les professionnels et les fans d'animation japonaise, les codecs en profondeur 10bits, en H.264, Jpeg2000, DNxHD et ProRes sont dorénavant décodés et correctement affichés.

En plus du support de nouveaux codecs, de très nombreuses améliorations ont été apportés à l'existant, notamment au niveau décodage audio et sous-titres HD, au support des méta-données, des codecs RealVideo, des images fixes et des formats Matroska et MPEG-2 TS.

Enfin, le décodage matériel est dorénavant supporté pour les cartes CrystalHD et les smartphones avec OpenMax IL, sous Android.

Interfaces

Les interfaces de VLC ont toujours été les parents pauvres de ce logiciel, notamment sous Mac OS X.

Cette version introduit donc une réécriture complète des interfaces Mac OS et Web.

L'interface Mac OS se présente dorénavant en une seule fenêtre, avec une barre latérale, comme iTunes ou Mail. 2 styles sont possibles dans les préférences: le noir de QT X et le gris de Lion. La plupart des fenêtres secondaires utilisent la transparence...

Ports

La version 1.2 de VLC apporte le portage de VLC sous iOS, Android, OS/2 et Windows 64bits.

Pour cela, le coeur de VLC a été adapté, des sorties audio et vidéo pour iOS, Android, OS/2 et Direct2d ont été ajoutées, et de nombreuses optimisations assembleurs ARM, ont été écrites.

libVLC en LGPL

La dernière chose importante de VLC 1.2.0, c'est le passage du coeur de VLC (libVLCcore et libVLC) de GPLv2 vers LGPLv2.1. Cela permet aux développeurs utilisant une autre licence que la GPL d'utiliser le moteur de VLC.

Who wrote VLC 1.2?

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:42:00 +0100

VLC 1.2

So, VLC 1.2.x is approaching. But who wrote it? Here are some statistics computed by Rémi. You need iframe to read this.

VLC 1.2.0 features: part 1, video output - update

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 21:34:00 +0200

Video Output modification, continued

I was previously detailing VLC 1.2.x improvements on the video output, a few weeks ago.

Subtitles quality

In comments, on this blogpost and on our IRC, people made a good point that the subtitles improvements were not enough.

Indeed, compared to MPC-HC or VSFilter, the lisibility wasn't the best, and it was notably missing a few options.

Point taken

Since then, VLC devs have added a few things:

better outline with options: thickness, color and opacity
a parametric shadow: distance, angle, color, opacity
a better parametric blackbox: color and opacity

This is an update of the previous rendering on the same video with the shadow and a think outline.

And here is a screenshot of the complete preferences part.

Read the update about VLC formats support in VLC 1.2.0

VLC 1.2.0 features: part 1, video output

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 17:37:00 +0200

Introduction

As promised in my last major post, I will try to discuss about features that are getting shaped for VLC 1.2.0.

This post is therefore the first of the series.

Be careful, this post is a bit technical.

tl;dr version: VLC 1.2.0 will be awesome, faster and have better display quality.

Video Output Rework

When I joined the VideoLAN project and the VLC development team, something like 5 years ago, people were already speaking about the Video Output rework.

This Arlésienne was, to me, a bit like our DNF.

However, during the development of VLC 1.1, VLC guru Laurent Aimar, aka 'fenrir' started to work on it. The VLC 1.1.x series has had part of this work in it, but most of the nice features were hidden to the users.

Vout Rework features

VLC 1.2.0 has seen enormous amount of work to go on this project and this work is almost finished.

This means:

Most of the Video Outputs have been rewritten in a way or another, and their priority revised;
Other Video Outputs were just dropped, like gapi, omapfb, hd1000v;
OpenGL output has now got shaders to do YUV->RGB conversions in the GPU,
Most video filters were ported to the new API, and most of them should be transcodable and streamable now.

New features

But this also means new features, like:

Sharper subtitles rendering,
New Video Outputs were written, notably for Direct2D, for iOS and Android,
Important changes for the deinterlacers,
New filter for debanding videos,
New filter for anti-flickering of videos,
New posterize and sepia filters for more fun.

I would like to speak about 2 of those features, in the following parts of this post.

Subtitles rendering in VLC

Definitions

What we call source size is the original size in pixels of the video in the file. It is often what people call video definition, like 480x640, 576x720, 720x1280, 1080x1920.

What we call window size is the display size in pixels of the video in the file. It is often what people call window resolution. It depends on the size of your VLC window, whether you resize it or not or if you are in full-screen mode or not.

What we call text OSD are text subtitles and OSD were the text is rendered on the screen. Using a renderer, like Freetype, it converts the text into an image.

What we call blending of 2 images, if what people would call merging.

How does VLC display subtitles

Those days, to display subtitles, we have the following steps:

the text OSD is rendered to the source size,
the rendered OSD is blended into the source image,
the resulting image is passed to the video output, that scales to the window size and does it usually in your hardware GPU.

As you can imagine, if your source is 640x480 and your monitor is full HD, the text will be badly scaled.

However, doing this that way is better for your resources, because the most costly operation (scaling) is done in your hardware.

How will VLC display subtitles

But those days, with very powerful GPUs, can't we do differently?

Yes, we can. Using Direct3D or OpenGL.

To display subtitles, we will have the following steps:

the text OSD is rendered to the window size,
the rendered OSD passed to the video output in a texture,
the source image is passed to the video output in a texture,
the video output scales the source texture from source size to window size,
the video output blends both textures.

You can see quickly that the new way is sharper (you might need to click on the images)

Before people scream, yes, it isn't exactly the same frame which is why the colors are different and yes, white on white isn't very readable. But this is beyond the point. The point is the difference in sharpness. I'll do better screenshots, when I got time (never :D).

Compatible Video Outputs

At the time of this writing, the video outputs that can do this blending are:

Direct3D, default on Vista and 7
OpenGL,
x11.

However, notable video outputs like DirectDraw and Xv are not able to work in this mode.

Deinterlacers

In addition to this work, an important amount of work was done on the VLC deinterlacers by Juha.

Notably, he has written new deinterlacer modes, fixed bugs, cleaned the code and written an impressive documentation.

The most notable parts of the work include:

a complete InVerse TeleCine deinterlacer, very useful for old NTSC anime,
a framerate doubling CRT TV simulator mode, named Phosphor.

And all of them are properly documented on our .

Moreover, as previously told, all modes of deinterlacing should be transcodable or streamable.

Thanks for the support. To be continued...

Read: Update of this article

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

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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...

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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 is out.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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!

VLC 1.0.0 RC 2

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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!

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

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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.

ToolBar Editor

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:11:00 -0800

Working screenshot:

New Codecs for 1.0

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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!

Build VLC media player under Ubuntu Intrepid

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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

SourceForge Award Trophee for VLC

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 06:10:00 -0800

SourceForget Awards

As some of you know it, VLC media player won a Community Choice Award this year (2008). Organised by our friend from SourceForge, this was the first year that the contest was opened to outside the strict SourceForge Community.

The award just arrived to my house, and I can now share some photos.

Thanks

The whole VideoLAN Team would love to thanks so many times people from SourceForge.net and from their overlord SourceForge Inc. for their dedication, time and work around this event.

Special Kudos go to Ross Turk.

Photos

You can find all the photos on VideoLAN's people.

Trivia

The award ceremony was during the OSCON '08 in Portland, that I attended.

However, I did not know that we were selected for the finals, so, during the ceremony, I was geeking with some Qt4 dude I had meet there... No comment...

Anyway, this was fun and great and I am so glad for everything.

VLC media player and GTK

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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)

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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!