21st week of VideoLAN reports
For the 21st time, here is the weekly report of what has happened in the VideoLAN community and VLC development, during the past week.
Features and changes
VLC
Last week started again with Felix committing, this time to port the CAOpenGLLayer to OS X.
The iOS AudioUnit output gain support for a correct mute implementation, and was moved to a modern Objective-C syntax.
The core gained stream_CustomNew(), to create custom streams; it also gained demux_New() and those 2 functions will be used for adaptive streaming, that need slave streams and demux.
The bluray module gained support for Blu-Ray ISO, through the new UDF implementation.
The HLS module now supports HLS discontinuities, which has been a pain to support for us, so far.
We’ve also added support for WebVTT and TTML in DASH.
The libass version was updated to 0.13.0 and this should remove the infamous “rebuilding font cache” on OS X and Windows Vista (and later). Anime fans will be happy :)
A Text-to-Speech subtitle renderer was added for Windows, like we did for OS X. It’s useful for people with visual deficiencies, that can’t read those subtitles very well. It’s based on the SAPI 5.1 API.
Finally, we also got fixes for HLS, DASH, cache prefetching, Blu-Rays, OS/2, Closed Captioning sizes, Chromecast, TTML probing and the About view of the OS X interface.
DVBlast
DVBlast, the VideoLAN DVB server, had a 3.0 release.
This release is an important version, that was partially rewritten to use the libev library for the event loop.
It’s also the first release supporting OS X.
The new features include PID and SID remapping and support for Deltacast ASI cards.
Download it now!
multicat
At the same time, multicat got a 2.1 release.
This release:
- adds support for FreeBSD and OS X
- supports changing source address with raw sockets
- adds packets reordering based on sequence numbers instead of timestamps
- adds capping, syslog logging, binding to specific interfaces,
- and quite a few other things (see NEWS file in the tarball).
Tarballs are available now on the project page.
Android
The Android port was busy to prepare a 1.6.0 and a 1.6.1 releases.
The most visible change of last week was a big interface speed up, in the video and audio lists and the thumbnailer, done by limiting the number of threads and removing some unneeded thread barriers.
We’ve also added an application-wide threadpool to help managing those threads.
libVLCjni was fixed to support and run correctly on Android 6.0. There is still work left to do for the new permissions model, but that will follow quite soon.
We’ve had numerous fixes for small regressions mentioned during the 1.4.x and 1.5.x development cycles, notably in MKV/FLV support, screen dimming, various crashes, and incomplete metadata.
The releases 1.6.0 and 1.6.1 were pushed in Beta and in Stage-Rollout on the market.
iOS
MobileVLCKit, the libVLC binding for iOS got support again for the VLCAudio class, including mute support.
There has been improvements on the snapshots events and methods.
The port to tvOS has also been worked on, notably by separating more cleanly the interface from the logic in the iOS apps, so we can have a different interface for tvOS.
WinRT
The WinRT port got changes in the theme, and some colors should now be in your roaming settings.
One of the major crash in the Thumbnailer (start of the application) was fixed: it was due to a race condition when seeking to get the snapshot.
The Windows Indexer API is now used on the Windows 10 Mobile version, to get better search results.
We have more strings translated, and an update of the French translation.
Finally, the gestures are now correctly disabled in locked mode.
The releases 1.8.0 and 1.8.1 were pushed on the store, with all the fixes and features of this week and the previous week.
x264
This week, quite a few changes happened to x264.
The largest changes were ARMv7 and ARMv8 optimizations, done by Martin and Janne, which total around 30 commits on the 40 commits pushed this week on x264.
Anton changed the predictors update and the the row VBV algorithms.
Finally, x264 also has received fixes for PowerPC on FreeBSD, and for the high bit depth lookahead cost compensation algorithm.
That’s quite a lot for this week! See you next!