Yet another week in VideoLAN world
A new week, a new weekly report about what has happened in the VideoLAN community and VLC development teams, during the last week.
Features and changes
VLC and libVLC
Interestingly, this week was quite calmer than the previous weeks.
The Direct3D11 code was modified, simplified and fixed to match the allowed WinRT APIs. The hardware decoding was also improved, to be faster to load and compile in more situations.
2 annoying bugs were fixed for hardware decoding on the RaspberryPI, that could happen for some files in some specific formats.
The Mac OS X VLC binary was heavy reworked, in order to fix a mainloop issue that caused race conditions on the start of VLC, between the interface and the video output.
Quite a bit of work went on on the adaptive streaming common code, notably to fix DTS issues.
We also fixed a crash with Skins2, cleaned the new chapters/titles API, fixed filedescriptor leaks and an iOS dialog issue.
iOS
This week, iOS was quite a bit more busy.
First, we added support for SMB shares on VLC for iOS. This also includes parsing changes to VLCKit to support network shares.
The UPnP and FTP interface code was modified to be able to support UPnP shares. This was done by doing a shared class for all network browsing, that is also including PLEX client interface.
The chapters and title libVLC API was exposed to VLCKit and is now used in the application too. The next major release will use libVLC 3.0.0; therefore VLCKit gained all the new media properties libvlc received for 3.0.
The password storing is now using the system toolchain, and the bookmarks were rewritten.
Finally a new build of 2.6.0 was pushed on the Store, to fix an iOS 6.1 interface issue. We hope it will be approved soon.
Android
On Android, we started by using some of the new classes from Android Design Support Library to reduce our code and match the Material Design as much as possible.
We added autodetection of the USB keys, both on the Android and Android TV applications.
We now save the position and time in the last playlist played, for audio playback.
We also fixed some issues for the Amazon Fire TV, added the option for background playback on Android and improved the 3rd party Intents.
Finally an important rework of the libVLC Video Surfaces and playback service was done, but was not yet merged. This will clean a lot the core code for VLC on Android, and should allow better 3rd party applications.
libvlcpp
After libVLC, and VLCKit, libVLCpp got the new chapters and title libVLC API exposed. This API will only work if you have libVLC 3.0.0.
That’s all for this week, folks! See you next one!