Another week in VideoLAN world
Continuing what I did the last few weeks, here is a new post summing up what happened, this past week, in the VideoLAN community and VLC development teams.
For some technical reasons, this post was delayed a bit. I hope it won’t happen again. It still covers only what happened from Monday to Sunday, last week.
Features and changes
VLC and libVLC
A good Monday starts with Android MediaCodec bugfixes: this time, they were mostly done in order to fix issues with the Nexus 10 tablet.
The input core was modified by Rémi, to add vlc_write() and vlc_writev() helpers, to finish the work on SIGPIPE (see previous weeks).
Then, a lot of code was removed to avoid call to the infamous vlc_object_alive() call, in the core and some input access modules. The cleaning led to the removal of input_thread_t.b_eof and input_thread_t.b_error and the deprecation of input_thread_t.b_dead.
If you don’t understand what this means (that’d be normal :) ), it’s a great cleaning of an unsafe function in VLC.
Julian finally got all his rPI and rPI2 patches (27 of them) for MMAL hardware decoders and video filters merged. Decoding on the rPI with VLC 3.0.0 should be faster and more stable now.
We also fixed a build issues on OS/2 and a potential buffer overflow in the RealRTSP plugin.
The end of the week got VLC the DxVA2 + Direct3D9 0-copy video acceleration for Windows. This is what we already support on Android and Linux with VDPAU, to avoid copies between the CPU and the GPU: decoding and video output happen on the GPU. This reduces quite a bit the CPU usage when using hardware acceleration.
And at the same time, we got a D3D11 decoder and 0-copy video acceleration. This will be useful for Windows 8.1 and should be on Windows Phone 8.1 too, to finally get the full acceleration of the Lumia devices!
Android
The refactoring started last week on libVLC was continued, notably on the Media and MediaList classes and items.
We also started the integration of the Design Support Library to help VLC become more Material.
The real question here is why did they not release this library when they released Material Design last year???
Therefore, we’ve started using the provided SnackBar and FloatingActionButton classes from this library. And we got the best commit log ever:
Replace some Toasts by Snackbars
And finally, we fixed a lot of small issues due to our big refactoring. Hopefully, we’re getting closer to a release.
iOS
The iOS development is accelerating quite a bit, lately. We’ve pushed 2 betas of VLC 2.6.0 last week.
More than 20 bugs have been fixed on this release, especially on the mini-player, the playlist and the video output. Release incoming :)
WinRT
Most of the work on the WinRT port was done in the underlying library, to support hardware decoding. Everything is not yet plugged in, yet, though.
We also did adaptations for Windows 10, for TV shows support and numerous small issues reported on our bugtracker.
The next version will be able to get all this together :)
libdvbpsi 1.3.0
libdvbpsi 1.3.0 was released this week, adding a few descriptors:
- 0x10 Smoothing Buffer
- 0x11 STD descriptor
- 0x12 IBP descriptor
- 0x1b MPEG-4 video descriptor
- 0x1c MPEG-4 audio descriptor
And fixing bugs in some tables and descriptors.
Conferences
Last week, I went to web2day and SSTIC to speak about VLC.
The web2day conference was a classic VLC/VideoLAN presentation, focused on mobile applications.
The SSTIC talk was focused on DRM integration in VLC, libdvdcss, libbluray, and legal topics with HADOPI. It’s quite more technical than the usual talks I give, and it was in French. But you should really watch the video of the talk.
That’s all for this week!