Yet another week in VideoLAN world
Continuing what I did for the last few weeks, and to please my friend Kostya; this post will tell you the interesting things that happened in the VideoLAN community and VLC development teams, for the last week.
Features and changes
VLC and libVLC
The week started with a few bug fixes, notably to improve the seek over HTTP, in the mp4 demuxer, the audiotrack Android output and the iOS video output.
2 important new API were added to libVLC to correctly get information about chapters and titles, useful for DVD control: libvlc_media_player_get_full_title_descriptions and libvlc_media_player_get_full_chapter_descriptions.
On Wednesday, an extensive patchset was merged by François, modifying the adaptive logic from the DASH module, in order to rewrite the HLS demuxer using the same core logic.
The new HLS module should be easier to maintain, and will benefits from the improvements of the DASH module.
The skins2 module received numerous fixes for UTF-8 strings and Unicode filenames.
In the core, when looking for a codec, the lookup used to be a linear search, and this was just rewritten as a binary search.
Finally, we also got some OS/2 threading changes, Direct3D9 speed improvements for subtitles, more smooth streaming codec support, a new Xcode project to build VLC, improvements on our Doxygen documentation and better support for CC in mp4.
iOS
This week, the version 2.6.0 of VLC for iOS was tagged and pushed on the store for review.
This version:
- supports the Apple Watch,
- adds a mini-player to control playback when browsing movies or audio,
- adds better playlists support,
- improves the interface and thumbnails,
- fixes numerous issues and crashes.
The version 2.7.0 was started, directly after. It will drop support for iOS6 versions, and the work to support SMB networking was started this week.
Android
The refactoring work of the last weeks was continued. The audio playback background service was rewritten, with the objective of merging it with the video playback, in order to support video playlists.
The requested permissions were also simplified, and some were removed for the recent Android versions.
The VLC control widget is now resizable, we support more remote controls buttons (in both TV and normal modes), and we detect USB plugging/unplugging to refresh the library.
Finally, more code cleanups and MRL fixes in the library were merged.
WinRT
The WinRT port has seen mostly designs rework this week.
The MiniPlayer is now smaller and translucent, the application is faster to start, the palette were refreshed, and the code structure of the Background audio was completely re-done.
libdvbpsi
The work on libdvbpsi 2.0.0 was started, and it started by dropping the support for WinCE.
That’s all for this week! See you next one!