34th VideoLAN report
I was traveling quite a bit lately, so here is a double-week report about the VLC and VideoLAN communities.
FOSDEM
Once again, the VideoLAN team was present at FOSDEM.
Here is a the usual Delirium Cafe photo!
And of course, my talk about VLC 3.0.
Features
VLC
The first change was related to ChromeCast: a new module was added, to split the control of the chromecast from the streaming part. More code on that feature should come in the next weeks.
Petri then got us support for a Bluray demuxer in our Bluray module. It was only an access_demux before, and will now allow to open ISO files of Blurays over the network, including FTP, SMB, NFS or HTTP. Additionally, you can now use the default drive with the MRL bluray://.
We fixed the support of Windows XP for the 3.0 release: but XP support is now only on a best-effort basis.
François also got support for ATSC A65, aka PSIP, or information like EPG and related, for ATSC broadcasted streams.
Almost at the same time, we received support for SCTE-18 / AES, aka alerting system inside broadcast.
Hugo added support for Metadata over UPnP, (notably artist, album, cover ART and related fields) and fixed quite a few issues on this module.
We finally will get proper UPnP support soon!
We also received fixes for TS sections, dialogs, win32 installer, TS seeking, DxVA decoding and MIDI. And also improved the features merged in the last weeks: keystore, the dialogs and SMB modules.
iOS / Apple TV
After the release of the Apple TV version in my last report, we produced 2 updates to fix bugs: 1.0.1 and 1.0.2.
We’re still waiting for feedback to improve for the future releases.
On the main development branch, we mostly got:
- improvements on FTP and Plex protocols,
- support to play “next item” automatically,
- support for a “play all” action,
- support for 3D Touch Quick Actions,
- and a few bugfixes.
Android
Android development was quite busy too, as it’s been the usual in the last few weeks.
The most visible change is that from now on, you will have only one version and apk for both Android TV and Android.
We also got:
- a new File Browser for the Android TV version,
- an option to select Android TVs or Android look, (useful for TV devices not officially Android TV),
- support for the history view on TVs,
- support for icons in the extensions,
- media directories are now displayed on the main TV screen,
- fixes for keyboard and remotes navigation,
- fixes for bitrate display, preferences and equalizer,
- improved now-playing support,
- the About and License dialog in the TV interface,
- numerous fixes for crashes,
- memory reduction when the application background.
WinRT
WinRT development was quite active too, mostly focusing on a complete UWP project.
Thomas:
- improved the launch speed of the application,
- reworked numerous exceptions,
- fixed numerous crashes,
- reduced the amount of WindowsPhone specific code,
- improved the responsiveness of the application,
- improved our Pivot-control,
- improved the audio metadata,
- added various interface fixes and improvements,
- and many other small tweaks…
That’s mostly it for those weeks, see you next time!