Yet another week in VideoLAN world
Another week, another weekly report about what has happened in the VideoLAN community and VLC development teams, during the last week.
This week was pretty busy on most VLC related projects, as you’ll see soon.
Features and changes
VLC and libVLC
The week started with more C11/C++11 integration, which is proving harder than expected, notably on the atomic integration side. Changes on this part went on the whole week.
SAT>IP servers integration was started by implementing the support of the RTSP dialect used on those SAT>IP servers. The UPnP part is still not present, yet.
We added support 9-bit and 10-bit GBR planar formats, that can be seen in professional files.
We’ve had numerous fixes on the Direct3D11 output, notably on cropping and displayed dimensions.
The VLC 2.2.0 regression for anamorphic snapshots was finally fixed, and, related to it, some transcoding sizing issues were fixed.
The OS X minimum version has upgraded to 10.7. This is required to use modern C++ features (C++11), which forces us to change the standard C++ library.
The OS X interface item management was completely reworked and splitted in a different class, which should simplify the maintenance of this part of the code.
A new hardware acceleration module for OS X and iOS was merged in the main line: the VideoToolbox decoder can decode H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-4 Part 2.
Finally, some important work on the video picture pool in the core was started, to remove picture copies, use less locks and more atomics.
Android
All the Android video outputs have been merged together. There used to be 2 of them, one for Android 2.1+ and one for Android 2.3+.
It’s interesting to know that at one point, we had 3 Android video outputs.
We’ve added a new libVLC function called libvlc_media_player_set_android_context that allows to set the JavaVM and Surface for a libVLC MediaPlayer instance.
This new function added to a cleanup in all the Android specific modules removes most static instances and variables, and will allow multiple surface and multiple players on Android, like on all the other OS. Finally, libVLCjni should be totally usable for 3rd party users, without restrictions. The buildsystem will now provide a libvlc-x.x.x.aar package to integrate libVLC directly in Android Studio.
We’ve also fixed minor UI issues on Android.
iOS
The biggest changes, this week, has been the integration of the VideoToolbox module, I spoke about earlier, for iOS. It will be used in VLC for iOS 2.7.0.
The 2.6.0 is still pending release, but should arrive soon.
WinRT
The Direct2D video output was removed from the WinRT project and replaced by the new Direct3D11 module, we’ve been speaking of, in the previous weeks.
This new module should be faster, and should allow hardware decoding and hardware rendering in the next releases. Stay tuned!
That’s quite a bit for this week! See you next one!