jb, 24y

Announce

The VideoLAN Team is pleased to announce the release of VLC media player 0.8.6d.

This release is aimed at fixing security vulnerabilities in the Active X plugin and the the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) library which affect VLC media player 0.8.6c and lower. For more technical details see our advisory: http://www.videolan.org/sa0703.html.

Improvements in this release include better Video Output compatibility on Mac OS X and Apple Remote support on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Please note that Mac OS X 10.3.9 is no longer supported.

The full list of changes can be found on our tracking site: http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/browser/tags/0.8.6d/NEWS.

We strongly recommend all users to update to this new version and as always to only download from the main VideoLAN website.

Bad Sites

As usual, several sites (neowin.net, gratisdrivers.net, xiabar.com, chatzworld.com, multihunter.com, tweakers.net, computerbase.de) have linked to or still offer (filehippo.com, majorgeeks.com, kaldata.com) early and broken development versions from before the official release was made available.

Those binaries (done by your servitor) weren't good release. This was clear and written in a README file. I just want to tell them how much they don't help us. Those guys are really a pain.

Bad, but less sites

Moreover, I am bored of Download.com that does almost the same, and that doesn't use our link to the files, but either:

• mirror the exe (and forget to update it) and we can't count our download number
• link directly to our main FTP and don't use the links that help us mirroring and kill our webserver...

USE: http://www.videolan.org/mirror.php?file=vlc/0.8.6d/win32/vlc-0.8.6d-win32.exe http://www.videolan.org/mirror.php?file=vlc/0.8.6d/macosx/vlc-0.8.6d.dmg

Enjoy this release,

The VideoLAN Team

Hello to everyone,

This blog has been silent for a couple of weeks. I am so sorry. Let me explain you why.

Google Summer of Code

I had to finish all the stuff about the new students, a lot of discussion, reviews and choices for GSoC. All the team trusted me on the choice, so, that was difficult. But I am very happy with everything we have come up with.

Thanks Google!

Holidays and elections

• Two weeks ago, it was easter's week end,
• Last week, I was in Bretagne to help for one of my friends' wedding,
• Yesterday, I was in Paris, for the French presidential elections.

Therefore, I wasn't home enough to work and document for VLC.

0.8.6b release

As some have noticed we had a small release on VLC branch. This is going to be the latest on this branch, I think. But I had to do win32 binaries and source tarballs... We still have issues with Vista, but well, until drivers are correctly written, we cannot do what we want...

0.9.0 - Qt4

I was chasing bugfix and not really adding new features. This will change in the next few days.

VLC 0.8.6 was released yesterday. For me, it is a very special release, because it is the first release I really feel from the inside.

However, this release is a bit a bastard release, since the main upgrades are from FFMPEG updates or only for Mac Users. And there are a lot of bugfixes, that will help the forum to be a bit less overloaded.

I am waiting so much to see next release (0.9.0).

Main features

• WMV, WMA, FLV partial support
• Wavpack, TTA support
• H264 improvements
• Notifications
• And a lot of stuff for MacOS...

Comments

1. Windows 9x/ME is not officially supported anymore, mainly because of the network layer. However, it still works with not many problems, but there is no official support. Maybe next release will be more problematic with these old OSes. For those users, you can upgrade to this version, but please change OS !
2. BeOS's version has been very difficult to build because of GCC 2.95. I think the trunk does not work anymore on BeOS. And FFMPEG thinks of dropping BeOS support...
3. SuSE malediction is finished ! Indeed, since we refused the SuSE maintener role to Voldemort, we had a lot of SuSE developpers that proposed to package VLC, but none of them stayed enough to make an actual VLC package... :D Now, Domique (dimstar) had taken the job, and we all helped him.
4. Next version will be 0.9.0 with a new playlist-media library, new plugins, new libVLC, more bindings, more codecs and a new GUI using Qt4.

New skin

I also just wanted to show a very beautiful skins that was made by Anton Boskovski.

It is a skin that uses the latest skins2 improvements that were made during 0.8.6 development. You should give this one a try. For once, it is not a pale copy of another player. I hope we can make a skin contest for next release.

Team

The VideoLAN team is very cool, but really short-staffed, with only a few people actually working on it. The support is very difficult to do, because of all the modules of VLC, and people who want a lot of different features, that we cannot make. But, for me, it is a good experiment, and I found it very funny. Let's hope, I 'll become a VLC guru, one day.