This week in …
Continuing what I did the last two weeks, here is a third post summing up what happened, this past week, in the VideoLAN community and VLC development teams.
Features and changes
VLC
The week started with the continuation of the work on the VLC Windows threads implementation, by Rémi.
In a similar way, the work on blocking SIGPIPE in libVLC went on. It went on during the whole week, notably to correctly maintain support for old BSD and OS X.
We then got a complete rewrite of the Jamendo service discovery, made by a developer of the Jamendo team.
Support was added for 2 uncommon video file types, created by some QNAP recording devices.
The Android MediaCodec module was reworked, cleaned and split in order to create a new video decoder module using the NDK MediaCodec API, instead of the SDK API. This should be cleaner, and faster than the old one, because written directly in C. However, it will only work on Android 5.0 and later.
A set of patches was merged on Wednesday to rework the browsing of network directories, like SMB, FTP or UPnP. Those patches will allow better filtering, better browsing recursivity, and add this browsing capability to the Samba module of VLC.
The SMB browsing module based on libDSM was reworked too and was fixed to support Guest login detection.
The sharpen video filter should be now faster, by improving the possible auto-vectorization.
Finally the week ended with some rework on the internal variable system of VLC, removing some types, some cases, some locking and simplifying the code.
Android
This week, we released version 1.4.1 of VLC on Android to the store. This is an interesting release, containing a large amount of fixes, stabilizing version 1.4.0, that was never pushed to the store. It should now feature the new browsing view, the MediaCodec NDK module, and lots of small changes of the interface.
We added return information from the VideoPlayer activity, so that applications calling VLC with an Intent could get some result information at the end of playback, on the playback status.
The support for some content:// URI has always been broken in VLC. This was fixed :)
The Deletion dialogs were reworked and fixed, and some small bugs were fixed and translations were updated before the release.
After the release, the support for libarchive was added and a lot of code was cleaned.
iOS
After the beta from the previous week, a lot of commits were done to fix the various issues reported.
I hope that there the release is now just around the corner :)
WinRT
This week, we released version 1.4.1 of VLC on WinRT to the store. It was mostly done to fix a subtitle issue we had on some hardware, and the look of Flyouts.
Then, the week was mostly spent to port the code to the Windows 10 SDK, and restructure the project files accordingly, which took a lot many commits.
The support for DiscNumber and AlbumArtist was also added in the code, for the next release.
libvlcpp and libraries
libvlcpp finally got it’s first official release, numbered 0.1.0; it should be now usable in your projects, without big issues. Please try it and report :)
libbluray, libdvdread and the other discs libraries got a few commits to fix crashes and stability issues.
The webplugins also had a few bugs fixed on the ActiveX version.
See you, next week!
Of course, I have probably forgotten some minor things, but that should be most of it!
Have fun, and see you next week!