32nd VideoLAN report
Another year, and another week working on VLC and VideoLAN.
Happy New Year 2016!
Features and changes
VLC
Another week started with improvements on the new HTTP/2 stack.
We mostly got support for HTTPS through HTTP proxy and HTTP tunnel (RFC7639) but also a better documentation and better cookies handling.
The large work of the week was the merge of the new Keystore API for the VLC core.
It allows to store user passwords and credentials in the secure storage provided by the Operating System. This is notably for HTTP or SMB passwords.
This was implemented for HTTP, RTSP, SFTP, FTP(S), SMB. And we have now a KDE Kwallet, a Gnome libsecret and a plaintext backends to store those in the disk.
Hopefully, one for iOS/OSX and Windows will follow soon.
The TLS support has a new shinny test, that helped improve the GnuTLS module, which provides TLS on most platforms. This is going to be important for HTTP/2.
To also help this HTTP/2 module, the core got a new socket function named vlc_socketpair() to create a pair of sockets.
The H.264/HEVC packetizers were made faster, using some SSE2 optimizations.
We also should detect now JP2K inside TS streams.
Finally, we’ve had fixes for securetransport, improvements for the OS X interface, and improvements on the EAC3 detection in TS.
Android
Android port got quite busy this week, with more than 50 commits from Geoffrey.
In summary, we:
- reworked all the existing snackbars for deletion (or related actions),
- reworked the advanced options dialog,
- added a context menu to delete and play as audio for all files in the file browser (even the ones we don’t know the type),
- adding file deletion in more context menus,
- added an option to disable the playback history,
- reduced the number of refreshs in the video, audio and playlist views,
- improved auto-scroll in the playlist,
- moved the targetSDK to MarshMallow,
- added an option to disable gestures,
- allowed to cancel a swipe on an item in the playlist,
- added Media Information panel for audio,
- improved video list and media information fragments post file deletions,
- moved the ‘save playlist’ feature to advanced options,
- change the icon for the Google Drive extension,
- added other look and small fixes improvements.
:)
iOS
After releasing VLC for iOS 2.7.1 last week, we prepared a version named 2.7.2 fixing more issues reported, notably for UPnP playback, changing subtitles size and passcode lock.
This release is in review on the store.
At the same time, we’ve prepared the release of the Apple TV version, that will be out this week, (if everything happens according to schedule).
WinRT
The WinRT port is getting in shape and was quite busy too this week, with almost 50 commits from Thomas!
The largest part of the work was the improvement of the Database speed, playing with threads, bindings and properties.
We fixed a large number of bugs on this part.
We also improved and fixed the look for the navigation, when switching from Light Mode to Dark Mode.
That’s all, this week for VLC! All my best wishes for 2016!