This week in VideoLAN - 20

20th week of VideoLAN reports

For the 20th time, here is the weekly report of what has happened in the VideoLAN community and VLC development, during the past week.

I’m surprised to have been keeping at it for already 5 months. It’s a bit boring to do, and also a bit lonely, but I believe it is necessary so that everyone knows what’s going on.

Features and changes

libVLC

For once, we’ll start with libVLC, and the new libVLC backend for EFL/Emotion. You can now use libVLC easily in an EFL or Elementary application!

VLC

Last week started with Felix fixing an open bug on the Lua extensions of VLC on OS X.

Then, we received a new audio output for the Tizen Operating System.

So far, it works quite fine on Tizen 2.3 but has extra features on 2.4. The audio/video synchronization is not yet complete, though.

The iOS OpenGL video output was improved to support OpenGL off the main-thread and multiple OpenGL contexts in a sharegroup (multi-thread OpenGL for the n00bs like me in OpenGL).

The libVLC port for tvOS was also improved, notably to correctly disable ARMv7 assembly, that cannot run on the Apple TV.

There were also changes to speed up subtitles sorting and fixes on TTML, WPL, adaptive streaming, and the videotoolbox module.

libbluray

There was a 0.9.0 libbluray release on Saturday, that mostly added:

• new API to access files from the VFS, useful for embedded subtitles,
• largely improved support of the BD-J menus and features,
• and better support for usage in C++ projects.

It should be integrated in the next major version of VLC.

WinRT

The week was extremely busy on the WinRT side: we’ve had more than 140 commits in a week!

The commits were mostly to fix more of the 1.7.0 release issue, but also adding features:

• a new way to log all the information and a feedback system to send us the logs, so we can fix the bugs,
• prepare the live tiles for the UWP Project,
• use the operating system accent color, if you want it!
• right-click menu support for mouse users,
• zoom features on the video player,
• add a vlc:// protocol,
• string cleaning, translations and a French translation!
• propagate better the light theme,
• fix biography and database refreshing issues,
• kill warnings, and use more C# 6 features,
• prepare transition for Window 10 universal applications.

Let’s hope 1.8.0 can be out next week!

Android

Not much on Android, this week, just a couple of bugfixes.

Tizen

Quite a few things happened on the Tizen port, and we have a basic application running well.

More on this in a later post, I believe :)

iOS

iOS received a few fixes for:

• GDrive support,
• Spotlight indexing,
• RTL support,
• collection view sizes, and transparency issues,
• and a few other bugs :)

The tvOS port had a few changes, notably on the bitcode integration. More on this, a bit later, when we have something to show.

That’s quite a bit for this week! See you next!