28th week of VideoLAN reports
Another week, another weekly report about VideoLAN and VLC development.
I’m still here. :)
Features and changes
VLC
Following last week’s work on Freetype font fallback on OS X and iOS, after a few fixes, we removed the QuartzText and the WinGDI text renderers.
The Freetype renderer should always be the best one, now.
We’ve added a new libVLC event: libvlc_MediaPlayerChapterChanged to detect a change of chapters and we’ve fixed the libvlc_MediaPlayerTitleChanged event, that was not fired in all cases.
The core handling of objects was changed, to notably have a lock per parent-object and not per instance; this should reduce the lock contention.
Also in the core, the variables callbacks were changed in order to be privatized and some string-related functions were renamed.
Also in the core, an important change was introduced in the flush mechanism for decoders and packetizers, adding a custom pf_flush function.
The HLS support was improved by adding support for inconsistent HLS playlist numbering, fixing live pruning, using targetduration hints for HLS updates and other small fixes.
On the Blu-Ray side, we’ve fixed interactive titles selection, subtitles that disappeared too quickly, and implemented overlay wiping to fix some HDMV menus selections.
Finally, our last.fm plugin now supports NowPlaying events and we’ve pushed fixes for the Qt interface, for an XSS in the HTTP interface, the new Youtube URLs, and improved our OS/2 support.
Android
On Android, we’ve polished the 1.7.0 release, fixing the menu’s look, some crashes and some alignments in the video player. This version should go live during this week :)
We’ve worked quite a bit on the ChromeOS version, more news about this, next week :)
However, the biggest work was done for the next release, by adding support for video playlists, something that was requested for years…
The core of the feature is done, the playback is correctly working, and you can play a group or all the elements from a directory.
What is currently missing is an interface to manage those.
iOS
On iOS, we’ve integrated the new subtitles renderer based on Freetype, improved our fonts support and fixed some crashes in the core.
We’ve also improved the notifications, the information panels, the media library and the SMB browsing.
A lot of features were added to the tvOS port, but once again, this is still only for testers. The release is on its way, as soon as we can push it on the store.
libbluray and other libraries
On libbluray, we’ve fixed the Android compilation (no BD-J support and untested), fixed small numbering parsing issues, and fixed support for Windows pathes that are in non-ASCII folders.
On libudfread, we’ve made the same changes for Android compilation.
That’s all for this week, folks, see you next one!