jb, 27y

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...

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:

1. VideoLAN has seen over 90 million visits on its website,
2. from 68million different IPs.
3. Pages view are around 480million pages.
4. Best month was december, with 9,25 million visits.
5. 0 advertisement.
6. 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.

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?