new libVLC backend for EFL/Emotion

26 September 2015

This is quite short a post about libVLC in EFL (Enlightenment).

Emotion is the multimedia API of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) used in the e17 desktop environment. It is similar to KDE’s phonon.

For a long time, the libVLC backend for Emotion was not a full backend, but was considered as a generic player, mainly because of the license, at the time.

The 2 full backends in EFL were based on GStreamer and Xine.

Since last week, there is now a FULL Emotion backend based on libVLC: see libVLC emotion commit.

Notes:

  • It requires libVLC 3.0.0
  • It supports the major part of the Emotion API, including some that the other backends don’t support,
  • It misses visualization support because there is no libVLC API for this yet,
  • It misses mouse events support because there is no libVLC API for this yet,
  • It misses some events, notably to change the DVD angles and some other we did not understand,
  • It’s not yet the fastest, because it would require a new video output in VLC.

We will use that backend to port VLC on Tizen :)

Please test it and report bugs :)

Jean-Baptiste Kempf