Yet another blog for JBKempf - Tag - VideoLAN

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.

VLC 1.2.0 features: part 2, formats

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:46:00 +0100

VLC 1.2.0

I've spoken already about VLC 1.2.0, especially about video, video again and authoring.

However, I haven't spoken about the format supported in VLC 1.2, even if there were some hints in my last post.

Discs and devices

Blu-Ray

One of the major cool thing of 1.2, will be a (very partial) support for Blu-Rays.

Through the VideoLAN project libbluray, VLC 1.2 should be able to open unencrypted disks and backup folders.

Playback of commercially encrypted disks is also doable, but I won't detail the setup here.

DVDs

The whole stack of DVD playback libraries has been updated for VLC 1.2.0.

The releases of libdvdnav, libdvdread, libdvdcss should help to playback more recent disks and fix quite a few annoying issues.

Capture devices

In addition to quite a few fixes on DirectShow and V4L2 capture modules, QTCapture and QTSound capture modules were added for VLC for MacOS X. Requiring QuickTime 7.6.3, it should allow VLC to play, record and stream any QTKit device.

Decklink and DVEO/Linsys/ComputerModules SDI and SDI-HD cards are now supported as input.

PulseAudio devices are now supported as input too.

File formats and protocols

Adaptive Streaming

VLC 1.2 should support, at least partially:

HTTP live streaming, aka HLS, in both live and VOD mode;
MPEG DASH, aka Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, in at least 2 profiles.

Those are still under heavy work, help is welcome.

File formats

First, we will have a completely rewritten support for still images playback. The removal of the old fake module should help to make simpler diaporamas with VLC.

Of course, VLC supports new formats, like caf, mtv, awb, f4v, amr, vro (DVD-VR), VDR recordings folders, EBU subtitles (stl). It also supports sid files, from Commodore 64.

The most important improvements to our existent formats should concern Matroska and TS.

A lot of work has been spent on our Matroska demuxer, to handle split-segments and correct seeking. There is still some work to do, but it should be light-year ahead of VLC 1.1.x.

For broadcast and professional people, in addition to the STL subtitles, we have now durations in the Mpeg2 TS files.

Metadata

Finally, we've worked quite a bit on the Metadata support for most file formats.

APE tags, Ogg tags, seeking in flv, mxf, amr should be better supported. Also, as frequently requested, embedded cover arts in wmv, asf, wma are now correctly detected. The missing bits for cover art support are mainly for MKV and APE formats.

Styles for various subtitles formats are also better supported, especially for simple file formats.

Codecs

Codecs support has also improved quite a bit, but that's for the next blogpost. :D

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

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 on Gnome3

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sun, 15 May 2011 22:57:00 +0200

Just a couple of small screenshots of VLC on Gnome3...

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!

Interview Vidéo sur Nolife TV

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 07:07:00 +0200

J'ai été interviewé, dernièrement, par l'équipe de Nolife, dans le cadre de VideoLAN et de VLC, à l'occasion des 10 ans du passage en GPL de VideoLAN.

Cette interview a été diffusée dans l'émission 101%, pendant la grille horaire TV classique.

Vous trouverez gratuitement l'interview, en ligne pour écouter ce que j'ai à dire...

Si vous êtes abonnés Nolife, vous pouvez retrouver aussi, l'interview complète.

Merci pour le soutien!

Let's talk about numbers

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:46:00 +0200

VLC numbers

One of the most asked question is about the VLC download numbers. Don't ask me why, this comes all the time back on the subject.

We decided for the 1.1.x releases to use the new sourceforge download service.

There were 2 main reasons to do so:

it provides quite interesting statistics and numbers per file, per OS, per date...
it makes a 3rd party count our numbers, so we can't be accused of cheating, as we were accused in the past.

Therefore, I'll give a few insights on VLC 1.1.x (1.1.0, 1.1.1 and 1.1.2) download stats.

1.1.x download stats

Those download numbers have been done in the first 50 days after the VLC 1.1.0 release.

Average

The average is around 640k (640000) downloads per day, in total, on the official mirror (sourceforge).

This accounts to around 19 million downloads per month...

Operating systems

This OS repartition is quite simple:

Win32 is 86,7%
Mac OS X is 13%
Source is around 0,3%

Of course, this doesn't mean that we don't have any Linux users. It is just that they use their distributions, which is the correct way to do it.

Countries repartition

One the most interesting topic is the repartition per country.

Here is the diagram of the most important downloading countries.

USA is 14,5%
Germany and France are both a bit above 10%
Italy, India and UK are around 5%

Numbers for smaller countries are available on request.

Update vs Direct download

The last important number I will share with you today is the repartition between direct downloads from the website against update from within VLC.

Direct downloads are around 40% of the total downloads
Updates are therefore 60% of the total downloads

This explains why the videolan.org website doesn't get 19 million visitors per month, but just around 8 or 9 million.

So, I bought a blu-ray drive... [Part 2]

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:25:00 +0200

This is the follow-up to the part 1.

Update to the part 1

In the first part, I was wrong when I said that there were 4 programs scheduled to start with Windows... There are 5 of them...

Oh, and one of them (the LG fwupdate.exe) requires UAC to launch, and asks for permission at each start... Oh, why?!?

Initial success over HDCP

Whatever, I've spent some time to fight the HDCP problem... I will not detail all the steps I went through here, but the solution.

Funnily, the only way I could play the BD, was to replace by DVI cable with a VGA cable, since my Monitor is able to get input from VGA. My GPU only has a DVI, so a VGA/DVI convertor was used.

Initial success

Going the VGA way helped me to have a playback with PowerDVD of more than 3 seconds. Yay!

A few questions though:

Is it full resolution? No idea!
So, using VGA is ok, but not DVI? Don't you think I can copy the same?
Why is PowerDVD deactivating Aero? It is 2010, and Vista has been out since more than 3 years...
Why is the taskbar still on top when I play with PowerDVD? Very nice to playback a Video with it above...
Why can't I navigate in the menus with the mouse?

Anyway, I can play one disc, so let's say that I won almost a point on it:
Blu-Ray: 1 - 1 :JB

Initial failure

Let's be a bit less optimistic though, out of the 4 BD-Video, 2 of them play, 2 don't...

No error messages, updated drive, software, player, nothing to do...

Maybe I'll install another player, like WinDVD...

So, I bought a blu-ray drive... [Part 1]

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:24:00 +0200

Going to buy a drive

Today, after getting out of work, I went to buy a Blu-Ray drive, so I can watch HD movies on my computer.

My computer is a big tower, with eSata and a few drives and enough horsepower to decode those Hi-Def movies. I even have a Windows 7 on it!
So, it should be working.

I went to my local computer store and bought a LG drive, pretty standard one.

Drive Installation

It took me some times to plug everything in, since my tower is a bit crowed, and my easy-to-access eSata ports are running short :D

Reboot and everything... Tada, it will work now :D

First playback... or not... and more installation

I put my new MGM movie in it. WMP12 doesn't like it at all:

"Windows Media Player cannot play the DVD. The disc was created in a manner that the Player does not support". Bleh, I'll try the software from the DVD delivered with the drive.

Installation

I then install Blu-Ray Power Suite with a lot of software and PowerDVD installing 160MB of mess (why that much?). And I reboot.

After reboot, PowerDVD warns me about updates. I download 100MB from Internet and install them and reboot...

And so does the LG drive update firmware... And reboot...

At each start-up, they launches 4 software to enable "me": brs.exe, PDVDServ.exe, Language.exe and fwupdate.exe. Why? Oh, why?

Second playback... or not...

Now that all is up-to-date, I can play movies, yay... not!

At each start, PowerDVD switches back from Aero to Basic colors and ask me to register: "I DON'T WANT TO REGISTER, YOU BAST**D"!

And, it still doesn't work, with any of my discs, because it wants HDCP, and I use my old DVI to connect to my screen...

Conclusion

Blu-Ray: 1 - 0 :JB

Let's see how this will go on: in part 2.

videolan.org stats for 2009: 90 million visits

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — 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.

VideoLAN is on Twitter

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:20:00 +0100

You should follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/videolan :D

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?

Meet me in SF bay area soon

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:41:00 +0200

Hello fellow readers and VideoLAN fans,

This is a very short post to tell you that I will be around San Francisco / Bay Area for a few days at the end of the month.

So, if you need / want to see me or need to discuss VideoLAN matters, please contact me as soon as possible.

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

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 and IDE

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:19:00 +0200

I receive many questions about using an IDE to build VLC.

Usually, the answer is VIM. But I will try to introduce something else today.

Needs

Yeah, VIM is TEH awesome, but sometimes we would like more. But usually, more is slow, incomplete and boring...

Would you want an editor with:

VIM syntax and command,
Completion that is faster than the one from Eclipse
Git inclusion
Doesn't eat all your RAM
Debuggueur and step-by-step+breakpoints integration like MSVC?

I guess so!

Believe it or not, there is a solution: QtCreator from Nokia/QtSoftware that I have tested to work with VLC.

Even if you don't think this will be useful for you, at least read in diagonale the following post.

Installation

Take QtCreator 1.1 (don't take older versions, they won't fit for VLC, or the VIM part will suck...)

   `apt-get install qtcreator` in Debian/Sid

Take Qt4.5.1 (I mean it, Qt 4.5.0 is buggy!)

Setup

General Setup

Run QtCreator and launch Tools->options
- Activate FakeVim and set ShiftWidth to 4
- Text Editor->Behaviour, set Tab size at 4
- Text Editor->Display, enable Text Wrapping and display right margin, and if you like Alexis' vim, Visualize whitespace
- Text Editor, change the colour schemes to match you old editor

Save options.

VLC Setup

For the example, I assume that you build your vlc in a "build" subdir of the source (as xtophe usually gives advice)

 * File->New
   Select 'Import of Makefile-based Project'
   -
   Project Name 'VLC'
   Location '/home/you/vlc' and Choose, Next
   -
   Let it process... It should take around 1minute
   Finish.

EXIT QtCreator... I MEAN it.

Setup Indexation

QtCreator will have done VLC.includes VLC.creator, VLC.files and a VLC.config in your vlc/ folder.

Overwrite the VLC.includes and the VLC.files with the one you can find:

Doing this will gain you some time. Those could be auto-generated one day, I guess...

Setup Build

Relaunch QtCreator

Select Projects (on the left) and select VLC on the list
Build Settings,
- Change Build directory to /home/you/vlc/build, using browse
Run Settings,
- Add a custom Executable with the blue '+'
- Name it VLC, browse to /home/you/vlc/build/vlc for Executable
- Put -Iqt in Arguments
Click on Edit on the left. You should see VLC with most useful files.

Build VLC and launch it.

In the Menu, Build and Build All, you should see the Compilation output on the bottom (or by clicking on the left build progressbar)
In the same menu, Build and Run it, and VLC will launch directly, outputting everything in the Application output.

Cool. But that was just a minimum...

Using it like VIM: Good!

Open modules/codec/avcodec/audio.c from the file browser and see... You are using VIM commands to control. You have Visual, Edit and all usual VIM modes!

Completion is triggered with Ctrl+Space and will give you a list. If there is no ambiguition, it is filled.
. and -> triggers the list of the members of the struct or the class by default.
After function completions, it will give the type of the arguments.

F2 will give you access to the function definition where your mouse is.

Debugging it: awesome!

You can put breakpoints in the margins near the line numbers. (Like in modules/gui/qt4/main_interface.cpp:100 and 108)

Now re run it using debug running.

It will stop at your breakpoint and you will have the function call lists (and line numbers) but also pointers values (like p_intf, and this in main_interface.cpp)

You can, of course Step In, Step Into and Step Out, resume or stop the code

More coolness:

Locate

Use the locate search box to find quick declarations: 'm vlc_object_act' will help you to go quickly to the method declaration, etc...

Git

Use the Git menu to checkout from within QtCreator.

Nota Bene

The indexing shouldn't be too long, but could be a bit longer the first time you launch the project!

Have fun!

Interview dans Linux Pratique Essentiel

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:07:00 -0700

Bonjour à tous les lecteurs,

J'ai été interviewé dans le dernier Linux Pratique Essentiel N°7, spécial Vidéo/Photo.

Pensez à l'acheter en kiosque ou feuilletez-le sur l'apercu en ligne.

Médiamétrie - http://www.videolan.org

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 10:57:00 -0800

Médiamétrie

Médiamétrie is a French organism that calculates audience of TV, radio, movies and now Internet Web sites in order to know who are the most popular ones.

Of course, it is very biaised, but still very interesting data for us.

VideoLAN on Médiamétrie

Those are the official results...

October 2008: rank 42 - 6 177 000 visits
November 2008: rank 46 - 6 124 000 visits
December 2008: rank 41 - 6 642 000 visits

Rank is on all the websites in France.

Thoughts

This is not too bad from an english website, with 0 advertisement...

Maybe we should add some ads! :D