Yet another blog for JBKempf - Tag - VLC

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 ?

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

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.

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?