48th VideoLAN report

Another week passes by and here is a new weekly report about the VLC and VideoLAN communities!

Features

VLC

Like our previous week, most of the work was focused on stabilizing features and bug fixing. Therefore, the changelog will be quite short too. :D

A new type of module was introduced, named demux filter; they are used to filter or intercept demuxer controls commands and demuxing.
The first use case of this type of module is the ChromeCast demux filter, to show the correct playback time when using the ChromeCast, that we merged this week too.

Some work was done to support the next version of macOS: Sierra. This notably concerns the input capture plugin.
Also, on MacOS X, the interface for renderers was merged.

The 2 SPDIF modules, ac3 and dts have been merged into a single one.

In the core, we've seen fixes for UTF-8 support, media discoverers API, libVLC parsing calls memleaks, tests, buildsystem and Windows threads.

Android

On Android, we've done the same kind of bugfixing as last week, and we have released 2.0.0 RC4 and pushed it on the store.

Not many issues are remaining for the release, now.

WinRT/UWP

On WinRT, we are also in the bugfixing phase, with a lot of commits to make sure the application does not crash too much.

Indeed, we're closing to an open beta release, but the number of crashes was still too high, especially when using the application for a long time.

We also fixed the background audio support on Windows 10 Mobile phones; and reworked the thumbnailer.

The application should be opened in beta to everyone soon.

iOS

The iOS application got a few fixes, notably for remote playlists and XDCAM support and we're pushing an update named 2.7.8 this week.

That's it for this week, stay tuned!

46th VideoLAN report

A new week, a new weekly report about the VLC and VideoLAN communities!

Vienna Meeting

This week-end was the Q2 meeting of the VideoLAN asso, hosted in Vienna, by PSPDFKit.

We gathered to fix pending issues for VLC 3.0, and we worked on the mobile apps and the VideoLAN server infrastructure. It was a great week-end!

Features

VLC

During the week-end, we released VLC 2.2.4, to fix 2 security issues, one in VLC, one in a 3rd party library! It is already released and pushed to our users.

Core and libVLC

The input core was modified to support network slaves, aka external subtitles or audio tracks, over the network. In the past, it was only working for local subtitles.
The libVLC API added for this is called libvlc_media_player_add_slave.

The core threading code was improved for recent versions of Windows: it can use futeces and generic semaphore, starting from Windows 8.

We also added the libvlc_media_player_(get|set)_role calls for libVLC, to set the media role (notification, video, audio) that are reflected to the audio output mixer. This is notably used for the PulseAudio output.

Finally, the preparser was reworked to allow interruption and have a default timeout. Applications can also now cancel their preparsing requests with libvlc_MetadataCancel.

Modules

The Qt interface received the first renderers selection dialog. You should be able to detect your ChromeCast from this interface, and stream to it.

The UPnP module was improved to support more type of servers, more metadata per item and the code was heavily cleaned. (The library we use is still very bad though).

The OS X interface got new HUD panels and widgets for the dark mode.

Finally, we added the first AppStream Metadata for Linux distributions, a few Qt minor changes, support for GoPro highlights chapters in MP4 and some OS X interface fixes.

Android

Nothing very exciting on Android, just the beta 1.9.13, 2.0.0-rc1 and 2.0.0-rc2 releases, pushed to the store.

For 1.9.13, we mostly focused on activating subtitles over the network, and improving the support for subtitles.

2.0.0-rc1 was mostly focused on fixing the UPnP support and 2.0.0-rc2 was minor fixes for bugs reported by several beta testers.

WinRT

On WinRT, we reimplemented the playlists management, and the support for playlists in the PlaybackService.

The Search page, that was hidden, is now visible again, and we support favorites for streams and servers, like the Android version.

The notifications and toasts were reworked to be less intrusive, and Cortana support was improved.

Finally, the new equalizer got a facelift.

And of course, numerous bugs were fixed, so we can have a proper release soon!

That's already quite a bit for last week, see you next!

44th VideoLAN weekly report

Once again, unfortunately, the report skipped a week

But this report, the 44th report, is quite important for 2 reasons:

• it's been over one year I've started those reports, since the first one was published on May 10th, last year;
• and this post is the 300th blogpost on this very blog!

This also mean I skipped 8 weekly reports, and did dual-reports for those weeks, which is not too bad, compared to what I hoped to achieve...

So, without waiting any further, here is the report about what happened in the last 2 weeks in the VideoLAN and VLC development community! It was a couple of busy weeks!

Features and changes

VLC

The week started by some work on the supported MIME-types for the .desktop file for VLC on Linux, by a Debian developer, which cleaned and merged all our different mimetypes support correctly.

Then, a very large patchset for seeking in the MKV (matroska) files was merged. It rewrites most of the seeking support and builds an index when playing the file. This new code fixes quite a few bugs we had on the matroska support.

We added support for subtitles over the network, with a set of functions named libvlc_media_slaves_add, libvlc_media_slaves_get (and related).
At the same time, we now auto-detect subtitles in networking shares; this is currently tested on SMB and UPnP.

We've had improvements on the Qt main window resizing, and on the playlist model.

The work on DVB scan was continued, notably to support device limits.

Another batch for ChromeCast was merged, mostly focusing on seeking and stopping the stream. We're still missing a few bits, though

And finally, we improved again our adaptive streaming support, our Blurays menus support, added support for vorbis and flac inside MP4, improved WMV metadata and prepared support for streaming output on Android.

VLC core for WinRT

The VLC engine has seen many changes for WinRT, in the last few weeks, mostly to merge the existing patches we had pending.

The 3rd party libraries (contribs) were updated and patched to correctly compile for the WinRT/UWP version.
At the same time, we merged numerous patches for the core, the modules and the buildsystem.

We improved quite a bit the Direct3D11 output, both for desktop and the WinRT version. We notably fixed the green line issue and added support for more hardware decoders on Windows Phone/RT.
We also accelerated the chroma conversions when using hardware decoding.

Finally, the WinRT audio module now supports volume changes. This was forbidden in Windows 8 apps, but is allowed in Windows 10.

Android

As we're approaching the 2.0.0 release, the Android port was quite calm.

We pushed 2 beta releases on the store: 1.9.10 and 1.9.11 to fix minor issues, mostly to fix subtitles regression and improve the thumbnails look.

We then added support for the network subtitles and subtitles downloading for network media.

This will be in the next release, that should come soon.

iOS

We released VLC 2.7.7 for iOS and 1.0.6 for AppleTV, to fix minor issues, update the software decoders, and activate AC3 and E-AC3 decoding on 64bit device and the Apple TV.

Since then, there were fixes for onedrive support, for subtitles over FTP and for SPDIF pass-through support.

WinRT / UWP

The WinRT port was extremely busy, these past two weeks.

Indeed, we are preparing a beta version named 1.9.0, that would prepare for the first true UWP version, that will be named 2.0.0.

We've added most of the features that you usually see on the Android and iOS versions of VLC, notably UPnP and network shares browsing, support for HTTPS and adaptive streaming, better hardware decoding, dialogs support, as many codecs as the desktop version, and so on.
Moreover, the engine use the runtime 12.0_app instead of the 11.0 one we used on the WinRT version.

On the UI side, we now support correctly Windows 10 integration, with Cortana, drag and drop, tablet mode and a lot of fixes so that the application looks responsive enough on all the devices, from mobile to the Xbox 1. We polished this UI and fixed a few important regressions, notably on the playback and the thumbnailer.

The application is currently in private beta mode, so that the biggest issues are fixed before opening it up.

libbluray

We released a new version of libbluray, numbered 0.9.3

This release:

• adds a bd_open_files() function, deprecating old global file system hooks;
• adds flags for on-disc menu support to DISC_INFO,
• improves Java building and Linux integration
• enable UDF/ISO support by default,
• improves BDJ_EVENT_CHAPTER, main title detection,
• improve BD-J compability, and fixes numerous bugs on BD-J,
• improves libaacs and libmmbd detection.
• fixes a large number of bugs too long to describe here

That's all for those weeks! See you soon!