This week in VideoLAN - 22

19 October 2015

22nd week of VideoLAN reports

A new week, a new weekly report about the VideoLAN community and where the VLC development is going.

Compared to the very busy previous week, this one might look a bit calm. :D

Features and changes

VLC

The week started with fixes in quite a few modules: the new SAPI module, HLS, videotoolbox, TTML, MMAL raspberryPi decoder, OS X interface and several encoders.

As prepared during the previous week, the new SSA renderer for OS X and iOS was plugged.

There were numerous changes to our MP4 demuxer, notably to better support fragments. This was required to support seeking in DASH streams dumped to files.

The Tizen audio output was modified to detect, at runtime (instead of compile time), the API level supported by the platform.

The Disc Total metadata was added to VLC core, VLC Qt interface, and libVLC.

Parsing Disc number/Disc Total metadata in MP4 and MP3 files was also added.

The Soundcloud parser was completely rewritten.

We’ve added support for the SAT>IP protocol and discovery in our UPnP stack.

Finally, a new module for OS X notifications was added, to support the native notifications, instead of Growl.

Android

This week was a bug-fixing week in Android: we’ve published 1.6.2, 1.6.3 and 1.6.4 during the week.

All of those releases were focused on fixing small issues like:

  • crashes on broken phones from Wiko and QMobile,
  • fixing wake-lock or screen-dimming on older phones,
  • small crashes in the interface,
  • updating to the last version of appcompat library.

iOS

On iOS, we’ve released the VLC/iOS version 2.6.6 in beta. It should fix the biggest crashes, and adds support for SSA-styled subtitles.

On the development branch, we’ve worked on AutoLayouts, RTL, the sidebar menu.

We’ve also added support for Touch ID, to unlock the application and synchronization of recently played streams via iCloud.

On tvOS, a bit more work was done to split the interface from the logic. As I already said, the goal is to have one-logic and 2 different interfaces, a bit like we do on Android and Android TV.

We now support UPnP, SAP and SMB in the tvOS application.

WinRT

On WinRT, we’ve actually pushed 1.8.2, 1.8.3, 1.8.4 on the store for both Windows Phone and Windows RT.

The main features are:

  • you can force the landscape orientation in the settings,
  • you can access now a Stretch Zoom,
  • resizing of numerous widgets depending on the scale and DPI,
  • fixing of some green screen issues,
  • improvements of the crash reports,
  • fixing some crashes :)

We’ve also had commits in DVBlast, libdvdread, libbluray and VLC/Tizen.

That’s all for this week! And thanks for all the fish!

Jean-Baptiste Kempf

Comments

  1. On 21 May 21210, 6:14 by dedanna1029

    I tried that. :(
    Ran beaucoup searches on it and tried everything I could. It wouldn’t work.

  2. On 21 May 21210, 3:06 by Jean-Baptiste Kempf

    @dedanna1029: it should work, if you force it as a dvd:// in the open dialog.

  3. On 21 May 21210, 3:05 by Jean-Baptiste Kempf

    @Kostya: who would care about that?

  4. On 21 May 21210, 10:05 by Kostya

    What about, say, a crowdfunding campaign for fixing bug #15472? Bounties don’t seem to work after all.

  5. On 21 May 21210, 1:44 by dedanna1029

    There was a day when VLC supported playback of video iso files. I was on Linux at the time, this was some three years ago.
    I’m on Windows now. I am dual-booting with Mageia, but in Windows I’m finding no support to play back video iso (backup) files (iso of a dvd, which I use for backup).
    I’ve even tried mounting the iso with Virtual Clone Drive.
    What happened to this feature?

    Thanks!