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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?

Apple OS X 10.6 is out

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 !

VLC and 64bits

Do you really need 64bits for a video application? I seriously doubt it. But well, you might want/need it in the future.

Linux

VLC 64bits runs on 64bits linux since a long time, and I use it a lot. No majors problems since Linux is cleverly engineered.

Windows

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.

Mac OS X

Since the WWDC ‘08, we know we have to remove all Carbon code, and we have mostly done it.

Leopard

VLC 64bits runs on 32bits Leopard without issues.

Snow Leopard

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.

Conclusion

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!

UPDATE: After exactly 3 days, we are near 3.5Million

As you should know now, VLC 1.0.0 was out 61 hours ago (2 and a half day ago).

In order to not kill the servers, the download counting was deactivated. After reactivation and recounting, VLC 1.0.0 has been downloaded more than 3 million times in less than 3 days.

The VideoLAN website has seen more than 1,5 million unique visitors (and 0 advertisement) and around as many have downloaded through external websites directly linking to our repository.

On the first 48 hours, the counting was around 2,3 million.

Of course, this is a bit less than Mozilla Firefox, but still those are impressive numbers.