27th week of VideoLAN reports
And we’re back to normal, so here is the (now usual) report detailing the work in the VideoLAN community, from last week.
Paris Open Source Summit
The VideoLAN team was at the Paris Open Source Summit, in the association village.
Our stand was featuring the Android TV version decoding 4K playback on a Sony TV, a few tablets running various versions of VLC, the Nexus player with VLC playing DVDs on Android TV.
We also had hellium-balloons, lots of candies and free t-shirts.
Features and changes
VLC
This week, we’ve started by updating the VideoToolbox decoder for iOS to support 4K decoding on iPhone6S and iPhone6S+.
We’ve improved the Blu-Ray module to correctly save-and-select the subtitles when activated from the Top Menu, and not from the VLC menu. We also got fixes for the next/previous chapters buttons.
Also, a way to call the pop-up menu was merged in the core.
As it’s now customary, our Freetype decoder was improved again: on Windows, it can now support Fonts fallback when the font name or filename are not in English. This is great for asian names, but also for German, where all the font names are translated. (The bug was opened 5 years ago).
The iOS and OS X Freetype font fallback was implemented, at the end of the week. We should now have support for ComplexTextLayout and fonts fallback working on all the major platforms, and the Freetype module should be as nice as the QuartzText renderer, on OS X.
We’ve also improved the seeking for CD-G files (karaoke), and the fix came from a new contributor!
The adaptive streaming module was also modified to improve the bandwidth detection and tweak the adaptivity algorithm (moving average/vertical horizontal filter with an observation window of 250ms) and merge more code between HLS and Dash.
The last part of the core input seeking/decoding deadlock were merged and fixed. See previous weeks for details. :)
We’ve also added support for embedded cue-sheets in FLAC.
Finally, we updated PNG library for CVE and the iOS Dialog Provider was also largely rewritten to support tvOS.
Android
We’ve spent most of the week stabilizing the Android 1.7.0 release.
Notably, we’ve improved the playlist look, refactored and removed most of the dialogs (using Snackbars), changed the file deletion logs, and fixed the playback service and the notification.
We’ve also been working on the next big features: video playlists and extensions. Those will be merged later. :)
WinRT
We’ve did a lot of fixes in the streaming panel, so it has all the features of the iOS and Android versions.
iOS
We’ve pushed the tvOS beta in Testflight, for the people who registered :)
A lot of features have been merged on the project. A blogpost will follow with the complete features.