37th week of VideoLAN reports
Another week, another weekly report about VideoLAN and VLC development.
Yes, I’m still here, and code is still happening :)
Features
VLC
The week started by numerous patches cleaning the codebase. This is a trend we’ve seen a lot in VLC lately, and is a great sign.
Thomas removed a few weird JNI interdependencies between modules, libVLC and libVLCjni for Android. The modules do not depend anymore on code in the libVLCjni library.
Related to that, the way to get access to the JavaVM pointer inside VLC is now simpler, and the applications using libVLC does not need to pass it anymore explicitly.
We then got quite a few patches for the adaptive streaming module, to cleanup the connection process and possibly allow the connections to use VLC’s core.
To continue the work of the previous weeks, we got a few changes on the keystore APIs:
- a new module was introduced for in-memory storage, so that the keys are valid during the same session,
- a new module named plaintext_file was introduced, disabled by default for obvious security reasons, since the storage is in plaintext,
- a new module named crypt_file was introduced, and should be usable when the system can store securely files,
- the crypto module was implement for Android 6.0 and later, where the data will be stored in the secure-zone, using Android Keystore System,
- and, of course, small fixes in the core and related modules for those APIs.
So, in practice, we’re almost good, for storing passwords. We’re just missing Windows and iOS.
We also got numerous fixes in the Qt module, notably to fix resizing issues and crashes in the customize dialog.
And the Qt module was renamed from qt4 to qt, since it’s compatible with both Qt4 and Qt5.
We got a large patchset to fix crashes and security issues in the RealRTSP module (disabled by default). They were backported for 2.2.3.
The Windows green line issue on Direct3D was fixed and backported for 2.2.3, and hopefully, for good. :)
The TS demuxer had improvements for the EIT and the EPG, notably for now_playing information.
Finally, we got various improvements, notably for the duration of some MP4 files, and numerous fixes for leaks and buildsystem improvements.
Android
As we’re preparing for Android 2.0.0, we’ve focused on adding the last missing features and bug fixing:
- the libraries were split between libvlc and libvlcjni,
- prepare the storage of users and passwords in the crypto store,
- improvements for external displays handling,
- improve the switch to video for some streams,
- add a new video playlist icon,
- fix playlist item duplication,
- fix crashes FilePicker and parsing subdirectories
- fix video lock control,
- prepare for Appcompat 23.2,
- we now pause onaudiofocus loss, instead of stopping the stream,
- and finally JNI vout refactoring.
WinRT
The WinRT translations system was moved to a new version of the Multilingual Toolkit, which was one of the major remaining issue for the port to UWP.
We improved the UI, notably for album and artists views, the video player, activate mouse gestures and improve libVLCX in UWP mode.
libbluray
On libbluray, we’ve had improvements on the loading of libmmbd and libbdplus, which are incompatible between each other.
We’ve also had improvements on Xlet and BDLocator and minor fixes.
On libaacs, we’ve mostly seen fixes for Windows directories that contain non-ASCII paths.