45th VideoLAN report
After a couple of very busy weeks, we’re back on a normal schedule. Therefore, here is the weekly report about the VLC and VideoLAN communities!
Features
VLC
We started the week by adding the support for MPEG-2 and VC-1 hardware decoders on Android in the mediacodec module.
We also fixed some MPEG-4 regressions on this module.
Hugo fixed a few issues on the UPnP module, and mostly added the support for Windows Media Sharing servers, in this module.
We also added support for subtitles over UPnP, using the work done in the core the previous week.
The Matroska demuxer got a few fixes for some regressions, but mostly implemented the fast-seek option, that is imprecise, but faster than the normal seek. This is useful when computing thumbnails, for example.
Some changes on the libVLC parsing events were done, to simplify the handling in client applications. If you were using the not-stable-yet libVLC 3.0, beware!
Near the end of the week, the core got some important changes on threads manipulation, with the introduction of vlc_thread_self() and vlc_thread_id(). The usage of futeces was introduced in the core: see Rémi’s post about it.
The MMDevice audio output on Windows now supports device change events.
The Windows 64bits build will now have high-entropy ASLR activated, which should reduce the possibility of exploitation of security issues.
On Windows, we also fixed the raising issue of the Qt tooltip that we had with Qt5, the 2.2.3 DirectDraw regression and a small D3D improvement when handling large pictures.
Finally, a few H264 annex-B parsing issues were fixed and the video headers were modified to support, in the future, VR videos (nothing working yet).
Android
On the Android side, we’re going on fixing issues for the 2.0.0 release.
This week, we:
- improved the subtitles downloader, to activate it from within the player, and for any video,
- improved the interface for scanning, the browsing and the video player animations,
- improved the audio player on Android TV,
- improved the speed of MKV thumbnails,
- fixed a few remaining small issues.
All this was pushed in the update 1.9.12 on the play store. Hopefully, the 2.0.0 release will come this week. :)
WinRT / UWP
As last week, the WinRT port has been very busy again, with almost 100 commits.
As for Android, we’re focusing on preparing the release, and fixing the biggest bugs people have reported.
On the libVLC backend, we fixed a few performance issues, we added more codecs support, and we improved the UPnP and SMB browsing.
On the interface side, we improved the thumbnailing and parsing process, we fixed numerous bugs that happened when resizing (and Windows 10 Mobile look) and we fixed a few crashes.
We also improved the settings and activated the access to the equalizer.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to open the beta to the public soon.
That’s all for this week! See you next!