12th week of VideoLAN reports
The summer goes on, and here I publish another weekly report of what’s happening in the VideoLAN community and VLC development teams!
This week was quite cool, and quite busy, with some of the team going to Spain for aKademy
Features and changes
VLC
The week started by the continuation of the OS X cleaning by Felix, preparing for the next releases of OS X and Xcode, removing the old QTCapture module, switching more code to ARC, splitting the code of the interface in smaller files and improve the code style of the OS X modules.
This important cleaning work went on until Wednesday night.
The Windows code is now calling SetThreadErrorMode() on Windows 7 and is calling a fallback for older versions. This is necessary for proper thread-safety of libVLC.
The helpers vlc_access_NewMRL(), vlc_access_Delete() were introduced in the core, along with inline function helpers like vlc_access_Tell(), vlc_access_Seek(), vlc_access_Eof(), vlc_access_Read() and vlc_access_Block().
All this should make the writing of an access modules easier.
And we got a new concat access module, to concatenate multiple access objects, using those new APIs.
Rémi went on by simplifying the peek() features of the stream filters: we have now a generic stream_Peek() front-end and now pf_peek are now gone from stream filter modules. At the same time, access_GetParentInput() and demux_GetParentInput() got removed from the core.
François added the support for alternative audio/groups in HLS, fixed relative paths in DASH, and finally merged both HLS and DASH modules into one adaptive module; this will make improvements in one format available in the other. He also added support in DASH/HLS for parsing the language, the role and the description of each track.
We deprecated libvlc_media_player_set_agl(), because this is an old Apple technology that noone uses anymore. And we fixed the plugins cache signature issue on OS X.
Finally, Rémi worked on ACCESS_GET_CONTENT_TYPE to remove the access_t.psz_demux variable that was used to force the demuxer from the access module. This was a dangerous design that did not work well with stream filters.
Android
The Android port got a few fixes on the audio output, notably a circular buffer to improve the whole VLC performance, a hack for 4.4.2, and stabilization for Android Lollipop.
In the core, we also added interlacing detection for MediaCodec acceleration.
On the interface side, the important changes were mostly on the Android TV version, notably adding Now Player Tile and fixing reported issues.
iOS
Last week was quite busy on iOS, culminating with a 2.6.3 release.
On the VLCKit SDK, we removed headers that are useless on iOS (MobileVLCKit). We also fixed crashes in the MediaLibraryKit SDK.
Then, more than 20 commits were pushed and 6 tickets closed to fix random crashes of the 2.6.x versions of VLC, including backports from the 2.7 branch.
The 2.6.3 tag was pushed on Friday, ending the week. :) It should be on the store in the next days.
WinRT
After a few calm weeks, the WinRT port got a lot of work this week.
First, we added a SlideShow subproject, to display nice animations in the background.
Then, we fixed the MediaFoundation backend, we fixed some issues with the new SDK and new VisualStudio version and the newer libVLC.
We then updated slightly the desktop design and the icons, in order to simplify the interface and the mini-player, and match the Windows 10 look.
The interface for Windows Phone was also improved for Windows Mobile 10.
Finally, quite a bit of work went into the hardware acceleration for Direct3D11. It’s almost fully working for us :)
Tizen
The first code was pushed to the Mike git repository to build libVLC on Tizen.
Community and VDD
As you saw in the introduction, Rémi, Felix and me went to aKademy to speak with our KDE friends. It was in A Coruña.
We also finally announced VDD for this September, in Paris. Register now!