This week in …
It’s can be sometimes quite difficult to follow what’s going on inside the VideoLAN community and VLC development, without reading numerous mailing lists. Therefore, I’m going to start to write a post every week doing a short summary of the interesting news.
The issue, of course, lies in the fact that some weeks will be more interesting than others. :)
Those kind of posts might also become a long list of unrelated things… If so, I’m sorry in advance, but I’ll do my best to just speak about the most important :)
Features and changes
VLC
Last week-end, we merged the text shaping patch using the Harfbuzz library for our freetype module. This will solve the issues with some Arabic and South-East Asia languages, where the glyph were not merged correctly.
The first version of the TTML decoder was merged and was activated last week.
readdir was implemented in the FTP access, this will allow browsing of the FTP servers, that are announced in a service discovery.
$o is now usable to get the total number of tracks metadata, in the str_format_meta, to modify your VLC Window title.
libvpx was updated to 1.4.0 for the next releases.
The brightness/chroma adjustment filter was ported to support 9bits and 10bits chromas.
The default compression value for the PNG encoder was lowered to create faster snapshots (and backported to 2.2.2).
The height of the audio bar of the audiobargraph modules is now customizable.
Crashes were fixed in the TS, MP4, image and playlists demuxers.
And quite a few improvements were done in the MP4 and DASH modules.
Voice and Gestures control
I’ve also been coding some voice and gestures control for VLC, using RealSense SDK on Windows.
Try it!
Android
VLC for Android mostly had a bugfixing week.
The directory browser got improved a bit, in order to merge it with the folder preferences.
The AudioService has been moved from URI to MediaWrapper, which will allow to pass media options for playback (and should bring support for more format).
Some Samsung CPU are banned from Hardware decoding (Samsung Galaxy Core, Samsung Galaxy Ace 4), because they are too buggy.
The mini audio player was restored in most audio browsing activities. This was a regression due to the move to AppCompat 21.
A Play action was added to folders, and the Play as audio action was fixed.
And finally, we did a lot of code cleanup after running Coverity analysis.
iOS
Not much was done on VLC for iOS this week, beside bugfixes. The reason is that Felix, Caro and Tobias are all working on a branch, that should be merged soon. We’ll speak about it when it’s merged in the main line.
What I can say is that the next release of VLC for iOS should be named 2.6.0.
WinRT
A contrario, the WinRT port has been quite busy.
We’re preparing a 1.4.0 release for WinRT (Metro) that should fix most of the important regressions we had (subtitles, DLNA) and should also fix the missing metadatas. For that, we’ve updated the libVLC core, patched taglib library, and reworked the whole media creation in the code.
The winrt access module now is way more clean and accepts both URLs and WinRT Tokens.
We still have one big bug to fix, so let’s hope that we can release next week :)
libbluray, libdvd*
After numerous BD-J fixes last week, this week was a stabilization week for libbluray, so nothing exiting here.
libaacs, on the contrary, got quite a bit of cleanup, and notably the split of system-dependent code to different files. Quite a few potential crashes were fixed.
libbdplus got common code merged from libbluray and libaacs.
Web plugins
The rework with libvlcpp is coming to the end.
This week, a few bugs and regressions were fixed, especially on return types. And compilation with MSVC should be fixed.
Association
This week, we’ve been discussing updates on our development bounties list we have. We’re discussing new ones, and increasing the prices of some other. We’ll discuss that at our next meeting, at the end of the month.
We’ve been discussing also the possibility of moving our servers outside of France, because of the new spying laws.
We’ve also given commit access to Tobias, to the iOS port and libraries. May he fix all our remaining bugs.
And that’s all for this week!