jb, 28y

Keyword - VideoLAN

Entries feed - Comments feed

Wednesday, May 11 2011

State of VideoLAN

It's been a long time

It's been a long time since the last time I wrote something long enough around here.
But the cool thing is that it is due to being working quite a lot on VLC and different projects...

So, how well is VideoLAN? How well is VLC?

In this post, I will come back on a few points that happened in our last year.

Continue reading...

Wednesday, April 6 2011

Interview Vidéo sur Nolife TV

J'ai été interviewé, dernièrement, par l'équipe de Nolife, dans le cadre de VideoLAN et de VLC, à l'occasion des 10 ans du passage en GPL de VideoLAN.

Cette interview a été diffusée dans l'émission 101%, pendant la grille horaire TV classique.

Vous trouverez gratuitement l'interview, en ligne pour écouter ce que j'ai à dire...

Si vous êtes abonnés Nolife, vous pouvez retrouver aussi, l'interview complète.

Merci pour le soutien!

Thursday, August 12 2010

Let's talk about numbers

VLC numbers

One of the most asked question is about the VLC download numbers. Don't ask me why, this comes all the time back on the subject.

We decided for the 1.1.x releases to use the new sourceforge download service.

There were 2 main reasons to do so:

  • it provides quite interesting statistics and numbers per file, per OS, per date...
  • it makes a 3rd party count our numbers, so we can't be accused of cheating, as we were accused in the past.

Therefore, I'll give a few insights on VLC 1.1.x (1.1.0, 1.1.1 and 1.1.2) download stats.

1.1.x download stats

Those download numbers have been done in the first 50 days after the VLC 1.1.0 release.

Average

The average is around 640k (640000) downloads per day, in total, on the official mirror (sourceforge).

This accounts to around 19 million downloads per month...

Operating systems

This OS repartition is quite simple:

  • Win32 is 86,7%
  • Mac OS X is 13%
  • Source is around 0,3%

Of course, this doesn't mean that we don't have any Linux users. It is just that they use their distributions, which is the correct way to do it.

Countries repartition

One the most interesting topic is the repartition per country.

Here is the diagram of the most important downloading countries.

  • USA is 14,5%
  • Germany and France are both a bit above 10%
  • Italy, India and UK are around 5%

Numbers for smaller countries are available on request.

VLC download numbers

Update vs Direct download

The last important number I will share with you today is the repartition between direct downloads from the website against update from within VLC.

  • Direct downloads are around 40% of the total downloads
  • Updates are therefore 60% of the total downloads

This explains why the videolan.org website doesn't get 19 million visitors per month, but just around 8 or 9 million.

Sunday, August 8 2010

So, I bought a blu-ray drive... [Part 2]

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...

Friday, August 6 2010

So, I bought a blu-ray drive... [Part 1]

Going to buy a drive

Today, after getting out of work, I went to buy a Blu-Ray drive, so I can watch HD movies on my computer.

My computer is a big tower, with eSata and a few drives and enough horsepower to decode those Hi-Def movies. I even have a Windows 7 on it!
So, it should be working.

I went to my local computer store and bought a LG drive, pretty standard one.

Drive Installation

It took me some times to plug everything in, since my tower is a bit crowed, and my easy-to-access eSata ports are running short :D

Reboot and everything... Tada, it will work now :D

First playback... or not... and more installation

I put my new MGM movie in it. WMP12 doesn't like it at all:

"Windows Media Player cannot play the DVD. The disc was created in a manner that the Player does not support". Bleh, I'll try the software from the DVD delivered with the drive.

Installation

I then install Blu-Ray Power Suite with a lot of software and PowerDVD installing 160MB of mess (why that much?). And I reboot.

After reboot, PowerDVD warns me about updates. I download 100MB from Internet and install them and reboot...

And so does the LG drive update firmware... And reboot...

At each start-up, they launches 4 software to enable "me": brs.exe, PDVDServ.exe, Language.exe and fwupdate.exe. Why? Oh, why?

Second playback... or not...

Now that all is up-to-date, I can play movies, yay... not!

At each start, PowerDVD switches back from Aero to Basic colors and ask me to register: "I DON'T WANT TO REGISTER, YOU BAST**D"!

And, it still doesn't work, with any of my discs, because it wants HDCP, and I use my old DVI to connect to my screen...

Conclusion

Blu-Ray: 1 - 0 :JB

Let's see how this will go on: in part 2.

Thursday, January 7 2010

videolan.org stats for 2009: 90 million visits

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.

- page 2 of 9 -


Jean-Baptiste KEMPF | jean-baptiste.kempf _(at)_ via.ecp.fr | Powered by Chaussure | xHtml et CSS valide