38th week of VideoLAN reports
Another double-week report about VideoLAN and VLC development.
Features
VLC
After the major work of the previous weeks on the topic, the week started with quite a few fixes on credentials and dialogs.
We then repaired the Avahi service discovery (that has been broken for years), so that it can discover SMB, FTP, SFTP and NFS shares on Linux.
The Qt playlist now allows to sort by disc number, and the search field is accessible with Ctrl+K shortcut.
The Windows Direct3D11 module was improved to avoid some GPU buffer copies; this will restrict the module to versions of Windows more recent than Windows 7 SP1, since we need D3D11.1. In a similar way, we’ve improved the Direct3D9 for performance, device management and to get more debug information.
François made, once again, improvements on the TS module, notably about EPG and channels management; and simplified the standards (DVB, ARIB, ATSC) selection. The support for DVB subtitles was improved too.
We’ve then had some major MKV demuxer code cleaning, code simplification, but also some parsing speed improvements.
An external contributor gave us support for the OggSpots codec.
Petri added support for public key authentication in our SFTP module.
We fixed regressions and a crash on the MediaCodec module for Android.
Finally, we’ve had fixes for ALAC inside MKV issues, HTTP redirect, SFTP browsing, Qt recents, and for crashes in chroma conversions.
Android
In the last 2 weeks, we’ve published 3 betas of the future 2.0.0 VLC for Android: 1.9.0, 1.9.1 and 1.9.2.
It brings a lot of features, but notably:
- network disk browsing (Windows shares, UPnP, NFS, FTP, SFTP…),
- favorite folders and URLs,
- video playlists (and control),
- Full Android 6.0 compatibility (including permissions)
- rewritten notifications and control,
- rewritten history (permanent, not like in the 0.9 days, and disable in preferences),
- cleaner preferences
- lots of small improvements
It is also a merge of Android TV and Android versions, so that every device can optionally get the Android TV interface.
Please note that we have a new repository for examples on how to use libVLC on Android. It contains both a Java application and a Native application.
WinRT
On the WinRT front, we’ve been quite active on performance and interface.
The interface should now be mostly usable with a keyboard or a gamepad, to be more Universal.
The interface got a few refinement, notably to simplify the main user interface and use only the SlideShow in the music pages.
Hopefully a new beta quite soon.
libdvdcss
A few fixes on libdvdcss, this week, to fix the cache on Linux systems. A 1.4.1 release will probably follow.
That’s all for these 2 weeks! See you next!