19th week of VideoLAN reports
Because of the VideoLAN Dev Days that happened last week-end, here is a dual-week report of what has happened in the VideoLAN community and VLC development, during the past 2 weeks. :D
It explains also why there may not be as many commits as we usual have. This report is also shorter because I don’t have enough time to detail as much as I’d like.
VDD 2015
The VideoLAN Dev Days 2015 were a huge success, with numerous attendees and quite a few nice conferences.
I’ll do a longer post about it, but here is a nice picture during one of our meetings!
Features and changes
VLC
We’ve finally merge the work from outreachy on the TTML subtitles. Largely reworked by Hugo, this makes it supports most of the styles from the TTML specification.
We still need a bit of work to merge multiple styles.
François worked on the subtitles support for DASH and HLS, because we had quite a few issues with subtitles streaming input; be careful, it is not ready yet. :)
He also worked on lazy-loading of the playlists, mp4 seeking.
David found a work-around for AirPlay output that was stuttering, on OS X.
We’ve had large refactoring on the OS X interface, to continue the cleaning, that you’ve seen in the past weeks.
Rémi worked on the avcodec direct-rendering support, to always assume edge-emulation; and on simplifications of the hardware decoding setup in this module.
This work introduced 2 calls in the core: decoder_GetPicture() and picture_pool_Wait(). The first can be used instead of decoder_NewPicture() when the decoder manages correctly the format updates. The latter is a variant of picture_pool_Get() that sleeps until a picture is available.
This could be useful for the future asynchronous decoding feature…
Finally, we’ve had fixes on the Mac OS X advanced preferences, the iOS vout, the Direct3D11 video output, a 2.2.0 WMV regression, videotooolbox crashes.
iOS
The iOS port has been quite busy, starting by fixes for iOS 9.
We did a release numbered 2.6.5 of VLC for iOS.
The MediaLibraryKit project was updated for iOS 9 and for tvOS.
We’ve also had fixes for WatchOS, for iOS 9 searches, for the database indexing, and thumbnails.
We’ve also disabled the search if the folder is hidden behind a passcode, to avoid embarrassing results. :)
WinRT
We did a 1.7.0 release for Windows Phone, Windows RT and Windows 8.1/10.
This is major WinRT release, adding the hardware decoding, changing a lot of the internal, and improving the interface to match Windows 10 look.
We’ve updated the projects to support both a Universal Windows Project and a Windows 8.1 project.
We’ve fixed a few bugs from this 1.7.0 release, notably crashes.
Android
After the 1.5.90 release, things have been quiet on the Android front.
We’ve had translations updates, fixes for crashes, fixes for last playlist resuming, playlist&random states on resume and a few other small bugs.
Finally, yours truly fixed a very important bug, where we exported more than 14000 symbols in libvlcjni.so instead of 200. This will make the binary quite smaller and faster to load.