A new week in VideoLAN world
Continuing what I did the last three weeks, here is a new post summing up what happened, this past week, in the VideoLAN community and VLC development teams.
VideoLAN
For once, I’ll speak about the VideoLAN team before speaking about VLC.
This week-end, we had the Q2 meeting of the VideoLAN non-profit organization. We met in Hamburg, hosted by Google.
We spoke about VLC development, VLC new features, VLC mobile ports, libVLC, libav and the non-profit life, including the next VideoLAN Dev Days.
Here is a photo of the group:
Features and changes
VLC
The week started with a classic fight we have with COM threading on Windows, for the Qt interface.
Then, the Direct3D11 video output, that we plan to use for Windows 10, WinRT and Windows Phone, got subpictures blending support. This should get sharper subtitles for WinRT and Windows Phone, and less CPU used. Some related work on DxVA acceleration was done too.
The buildsystem was then broken (and fixed) by yours truly, to use C++11 atomics; this is the ongoing change to have a more modern toolchain for VLC.
A really cool new feature was added to the OS X interface: the keyboard backlight will dim during playback! This might not work totally if you are on automatic mode. So far, we can’t do that on other platforms.
Finally, a long-standing issue, where you could not get the AVI duration over HTTP or FTP protocols, was fixed. This should notably help, in the UPnP cases over HTTP :)
… and many other small fixes.
Android
This week on Android was a refactoring week. Thomas and I did more than 100 commits on refactoring and cleaning the foundation of our VLC for Android application.
The major changes are, of course, not really visible, but are mostly focused on refactoring the libVLCjni code to match better libvlc, libvlcpp and get rid of the kludges that accumulated on the Android application. Some of those commits are quite extensive, but they should not break too much the application.
We also fixed a couple of issues and added the access to Media Information in the browsing view for videos.
iOS
A contrario from the previous weeks, iOS development has been extremely busy, with more than 100 commits too. The work was focused on the 2.6.0 release, and fixing a large number of tickets.
The most important fixes went into the library, GDrive, the equalizer, the playback view (including cropping), UPnP and thumbnails.
The mini-player was also extended quite a bit and the ARMv7s slice was re-activated.
The 2.6.0 release is now almost ready.
WinRT
There were less commit in the interface, this week. However, quite a bit of work on the hardware decoding was done, and is pending merges!
More news about that next week.
libraries
We’ve seen quite a few fixes in libvlcpp, libaacs, VLCKit and the web plugins, but nothing newsworthy :)
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!