New report about the WinRT port

2 April 2013

News and Excuses

I must start this post by sharing some excuses of not doing enough updates lately.

The main reason is that we’ve been mostly under-water with the current development, that took most of our time.

News and report

The good news is that we have had tremendous progress…

The bad is that we have still a bit of work to do before sharing it on the store, as I will explain soon.

Pictures

But first, the current pictures:

Current start screen

Metro Start Screen

Metro Main Screen

Fully working playback

Metro Playback

Metro Playback 2

Technical update

If you followed closely, our main work, in addition to the UI, was to fight and replace the forbidden symbols not allowed on Windows App Store mode.

We’ve been quite efficient at that, working closely with Mingw-w64 project and GCC developers.

The biggest result is that we have now cut down 90% of our symbols, that are forbidden on Metro Mode.

We mostly did this by:

  • replacing our forbidden calls with newer authorized equivalent calls,
  • modifying gcc and Mingw-w64,
  • writing new code in a special library of ours,
  • writing dummy functions,
  • disabling VLC code that would not work on the Metro platform,
  • moving VLC to MSVCRT 11.0,
  • moving all the VLC codebase to UNICODE and WideChars to fit the new requirements.

We did also a lot of minor things to help the integration of libVLC and VLC in this modern platform.

What are we working on now:

We are now mainly working on 2 things:

  • make VLC work with MSVCRT 11.0 without crashing ;)
  • write headers and C/C++ code to access the new fashion of COM APIs in which WinRT is written in.

What we are gonna work just after:

  • ARM, ARM, ARM,
  • WP8

Goodies

They are gonna get shipped soon :)

Jean-Baptiste Kempf

Comments

  1. On 30 May 30300, 9:12 by Mahdi Ghiasi

    VLC will be able to run on 512MB RAM WP8 Devices, like Lumia 620. Right?
    (I think WP8 restrict apps to use 150MB RAM on such devices)

    Can’t wait to use it on my Lumia 620. I hope it releases soon. Please keep us updated with such news!

  2. On 29 May 29290, 2:59 by Jean-Baptiste Kempf

    @juliannojungle: it will be free, of course.

  3. On 25 May 25250, 4:36 by juliannojungle

    No news, too bad… Can’t wait to use it on Lumia 920 (wp8). Don’t care about price, Just release it on shop, please! I bet that everyone will pay for it!

  4. On 23 May 23230, 1:39 by Turefu

    i want to see evangelion 1.11 in my win 8 pc (like you) :))

  5. On 17 May 17170, 6:55 by babak

    I need to output video into 2 specific windows in my application, that is windows with specific HWND ids. I understand that something like this could be achieved using the clone filter. However, if I specify a command line argument “–vout-filter=clone”, I somehow need to pass the HWND handles to it. I thought maybe through “clone-vout-list” but I can’t find documentation about it anywhere, I’ve been searching for hours.
    pease with sample

  6. On 16 May 16160, 7:08 by parsuram

    really good job iam waiting for vlcc on player.

  7. On 3 May 3030, 4:27 by Dru

    Well done on the progress guys! Keep going! I’ve got a windows 8 tablet and just bought a WP8 today. Waiting eagerly for finger friendly and most versatile app to play mkv videos etc. Will also donate what I can to help! Just keep going!

  8. On 3 May 3030, 11:13 by David

    Really good job. I’m eagerly waiting for VLC on WP8. That will definitely be one the 2013 killer app!