Friday, September 4 2009
By JBK on Friday, September 4 2009, 10:13 - VideoLAN
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!
So, I have been working a bit on it. And two days ago:
Voilà :D
Don’t expect something complete soon, but still 
Friday, August 28 2009
By JBK on Friday, August 28 2009, 10:59 - VideoLAN
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 !
Do you really need 64bits for a video application? I seriously doubt it. But well, you might want/need it in the future.
VLC 64bits runs on 64bits linux since a long time, and I use it a lot. No majors problems since Linux is cleverly engineered.
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.
Since the WWDC ‘08, we know we have to remove all Carbon code, and we have mostly done it.
VLC 64bits runs on 32bits Leopard without issues.
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.
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!
Monday, August 24 2009
By JBK on Monday, August 24 2009, 01:22 - VideoLAN
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.
Well, YES, because:
But, we had a few issues that were important:
That is why we released 1.0.1 quite soon after 1.0.0.
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…
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.
As far as I am concerned, VLC 1.0.0 was a great success, let’s hope 1.1 will be as good!
Tuesday, July 7 2009
By JBK on Tuesday, July 7 2009, 12:52 - VideoLAN
You know that this blog has been a bit quiet, because I had a lot of work to do.
This new version includes:
Have fun!
Thursday, May 28 2009
By JBK on Thursday, May 28 2009, 14:14 - VideoLAN
VLC 1.0.0 RC2 (Second Release Candidate) is out!
As all releases of VLC 1.0.0, it introduces:
And there is a Skins2 contest going on!
Please spread the news!
Tuesday, March 3 2009
By JBK on Tuesday, March 3 2009, 13:38 - VideoLAN
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.
sudo apt-get build-dep vlc && sudo apt-get install libtool build-essential automake1.10 git-core
git clone git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git
cd vlc && ./bootstrap
mkdir build && cd build && ../configure --disable-nls --enable-qt4
make
Done.
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