43rd VideoLAN weekly reports
After my 42nd report last week, and some nice encouragements, here is another weekly report about VideoLAN and VLC development.
I was far from a computer last week, so here are 2 weeks in one.
Features
VLC
Renderers
The previous week, we started to introduce the concept of renderers in VLC.
Those are distant devices displaying audio and/or video, instead of playing it locally. The usual device people know are ChromeCasts, UPnP/DLNA renderers, AirPlay, WiDi or DIAL devices.
A new type of VLC module was introduced: renderer discovery. Like Service Discovery, they can find those renderers devices on the network, using one of the discovery protocols.
The renderer discovery capability was implemented in our mDNS module.
The Chromecast code was heavily reworked at the same time, and after 4/5 redesigns, we’re almost happy with the code :)
The interface is still missing, but it should come soon!
Other features
The S/PDIF passthrough was implemented in the WASAPI module for Windows. This is important, as this module will be the default, starting in 3.0, for most Windows users.
The work on DVB scanning is still going on. We had numerous patches this week on this topic.
Our mDNS module now supports IPv6 and our MKV demuxer started to get a heavy lifting.
We also had fixes for the TS demuxer and muxer, the libVLC headers, the VideoToolbox decoder, Hurd compilation and improvements on the Direct3D11 video output!
Android
The Android port got 2 more beta releases for 2.0.0: 1.9.9 and 1.9.10.
We added numerous fixes, notably in the popup video view, the binder, keyboard and pad management, title display and the video view.
And of course, improvements for the subtitles download feature.
Hopefully, we will push the release soon.
WinRT
If you follow Thomas on Twitter, you will know that the WinRT port has been quite busy lately.
Cortana is now integrated in the application, so you can ask VLC to launch an album or the last video viewed.
Drag and Drop should now work almost everywhere, and you can drop just a subtitle on a playing video, if you want.
The Stream and the File dialogs have been relifted; the Settings dialog in the same way.
The mini-player and the command bar controller have been merged, together, if you have a Windows Preview build.
On the backend, some work was done on the thumbnailer, and the music and video libraries have been merged into one single library.
Some video information is now pulled from TheMovieDB.
Finally, some work was done to adapt the interface to Windows 10 Mobile.
Soon a release? :)
iOS/tvOS
On AppleTV, search was implemented for local servers browsing.
And we also got support for repeat on the AppleTV application.
We should get updates on those 2 applications soon, on the App Store.
That’s all for those 2 weeks, see you soon!