44th VideoLAN weekly report
Once again, unfortunately, the report skipped a week :(
But this report, the 44th report, is quite important for 2 reasons:
- it’s been over one year I’ve started those reports, since the first one was published on May 10th, last year;
- and this post is the 300th blogpost on this very blog!
This also mean I skipped 8 weekly reports, and did dual-reports for those weeks, which is not too bad, compared to what I hoped to achieve…
So, without waiting any further, here is the report about what happened in the last 2 weeks in the VideoLAN and VLC development community! It was a couple of busy weeks!
Features and changes
VLC
The week started by some work on the supported MIME-types for the .desktop file for VLC on Linux, by a Debian developer, which cleaned and merged all our different mimetypes support correctly.
Then, a very large patchset for seeking in the MKV (matroska) files was merged. It rewrites most of the seeking support and builds an index when playing the file. This new code fixes quite a few bugs we had on the matroska support.
We added support for subtitles over the network, with a set of functions named libvlc_media_slaves_add, libvlc_media_slaves_get (and related).
At the same time, we now auto-detect subtitles in networking shares; this is currently tested on SMB and UPnP.
We’ve had improvements on the Qt main window resizing, and on the playlist model.
The work on DVB scan was continued, notably to support device limits.
Another batch for ChromeCast was merged, mostly focusing on seeking and stopping the stream. We’re still missing a few bits, though :)
And finally, we improved again our adaptive streaming support, our Blurays menus support, added support for vorbis and flac inside MP4, improved WMV metadata and prepared support for streaming output on Android.
VLC core for WinRT
The VLC engine has seen many changes for WinRT, in the last few weeks, mostly to merge the existing patches we had pending.
The 3rd party libraries (contribs) were updated and patched to correctly compile for the WinRT/UWP version.
At the same time, we merged numerous patches for the core, the modules and the buildsystem.
We improved quite a bit the Direct3D11 output, both for desktop and the WinRT version. We notably fixed the green line issue and added support for more hardware decoders on Windows Phone/RT.
We also accelerated the chroma conversions when using hardware decoding.
Finally, the WinRT audio module now supports volume changes. This was forbidden in Windows 8 apps, but is allowed in Windows 10.
Android
As we’re approaching the 2.0.0 release, the Android port was quite calm.
We pushed 2 beta releases on the store: 1.9.10 and 1.9.11 to fix minor issues, mostly to fix subtitles regression and improve the thumbnails look.
We then added support for the network subtitles and subtitles downloading for network media.
This will be in the next release, that should come soon.
iOS
We released VLC 2.7.7 for iOS and 1.0.6 for AppleTV, to fix minor issues, update the software decoders, and activate AC3 and E-AC3 decoding on 64bit device and the Apple TV.
Since then, there were fixes for onedrive support, for subtitles over FTP and for SPDIF pass-through support.
WinRT / UWP
The WinRT port was extremely busy, these past two weeks.
Indeed, we are preparing a beta version named 1.9.0, that would prepare for the first true UWP version, that will be named 2.0.0.
We’ve added most of the features that you usually see on the Android and iOS versions of VLC, notably UPnP and network shares browsing, support for HTTPS and adaptive streaming, better hardware decoding, dialogs support, as many codecs as the desktop version, and so on.
Moreover, the engine use the runtime 12.0_app instead of the 11.0 one we used on the WinRT version.
On the UI side, we now support correctly Windows 10 integration, with Cortana, drag and drop, tablet mode and a lot of fixes so that the application looks responsive enough on all the devices, from mobile to the Xbox 1. We polished this UI and fixed a few important regressions, notably on the playback and the thumbnailer.
The application is currently in private beta mode, so that the biggest issues are fixed before opening it up. :)
libbluray
We released a new version of libbluray, numbered 0.9.3
This release:
- adds a
bd_open_files()function, deprecating old global file system hooks; - adds flags for on-disc menu support to DISC_INFO,
- improves Java building and Linux integration
- enable UDF/ISO support by default,
- improves BDJ_EVENT_CHAPTER, main title detection,
- improve BD-J compability, and fixes numerous bugs on BD-J,
- improves libaacs and libmmbd detection.
- fixes a large number of bugs too long to describe here :)
That’s all for those weeks! See you soon!