15th week of VideoLAN reports
Yet another week, and yet another weekly report of what’s happening in the VideoLAN community and VLC development teams!
We’re going back to one report per week, as holidays are over.
But, to be honest, this week has not been the busiest, I guess mostly because of holidays.
Features and changes
VLC
Yet another week started with MediaCodec fixes, which prevented all MediaCodec decoding on most Samsung devices! Ooops :)
François fixed numerous issues with Closed Captions, in the decoder and the text renderer.
This also fixed some background alignment issues that we’ve had for years…
Felix merged his 0-copy code for the hardware decoding for iOS. This should get very good performances on iOS.
We had a couple of important fixes for the pulseaudio module, that were backported to 2.2.2; and we’re now generating Diffie-Hellman parameters dynamically, instead of hardcoding them.
Finally, we had a MKV subtitles regression, an H.264 extradata parsing issue and a large number of memory leaks, that are now past history.
Android
The Android project was moved to the latest version of the Android SDK, and to the last version of AppCompat and we had a few compatibility issues to fix.
We also updated our buildsystem to gradle 2.6, and updated the build-tools and gradle plugins accordingly.
We eventually fixed the loading for playlists and added an option to not rescan the database, if necessary.
In the end, we released VLC for Android 1.5.2 to the store, as a beta version.
iOS
As mentioned above, the most important part for iOS this week is the addition of 0-copy hardware decoding.
We also saw a small bug fixed that could make some files invisible from the media library.
That’s not much, but the complete hardware decoding is big enough to explain this :)
WinRT
WinRT was way more interesting, with a couple of releases.
After the 1.5.0 version for Windows, we published a version named 1.6.0, and then one 1.6.1, fixing numerous issues, notably:
- fixing subtitles display for SRT and SSA, and external subtitles loading,
- more stable hardware decoding,
- reworking the main interface, the mini player, and the file explorer,
- fixing hundreds of bugs found by testers,
- and fixing a weird crash on Windows RT, coming from the Windows Runtime.
We also published a beta for Windows Phone, named 1.6.0, introducing hardware decoding (disabled by default), and all the updates from the Windows world.
The code between Windows Phone and Windows is now more than 90% the same code.
Expect 1.6.2 and 1.7.0 quite soon.
x264
The x264 project also received almost 20 commits, this week; mostly to fix build issues with Visual Studio, inclusion in C++ projects, and a few other minor bugs.