VLC 1.2.0 features: part 2, formats

5 December 2011

VLC 1.2.0

I’ve spoken already about VLC 1.2.0, especially about video, video again and authoring.

However, I haven’t spoken about the format supported in VLC 1.2, even if there were some hints in my last post.

Discs and devices

Blu-Ray

One of the major cool thing of 1.2, will be a (very partial) support for Blu-Rays.

Through the VideoLAN project libbluray, VLC 1.2 should be able to open unencrypted disks and backup folders.

Playback of commercially encrypted disks is also doable, but I won’t detail the setup here.

DVDs

The whole stack of DVD playback libraries has been updated for VLC 1.2.0.

The releases of libdvdnav, libdvdread, libdvdcss should help to playback more recent disks and fix quite a few annoying issues.

Capture devices

  • In addition to quite a few fixes on DirectShow and V4L2 capture modules, QTCapture and QTSound capture modules were added for VLC for MacOS X. Requiring QuickTime 7.6.3, it should allow VLC to play, record and stream any QTKit device.

  • Decklink and DVEO/Linsys/ComputerModules SDI and SDI-HD cards are now supported as input.

  • PulseAudio devices are now supported as input too.

File formats and protocols

Adaptive Streaming

VLC 1.2 should support, at least partially:

  • HTTP live streaming, aka HLS, in both live and VOD mode;
  • MPEG DASH, aka Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, in at least 2 profiles.

Those are still under heavy work, help is welcome.

File formats

First, we will have a completely rewritten support for still images playback. The removal of the old fake module should help to make simpler diaporamas with VLC.

Of course, VLC supports new formats, like caf, mtv, awb, f4v, amr, vro (DVD-VR), VDR recordings folders, EBU subtitles (stl). It also supports sid files, from Commodore 64.

The most important improvements to our existent formats should concern Matroska and TS.

A lot of work has been spent on our Matroska demuxer, to handle split-segments and correct seeking. There is still some work to do, but it should be light-year ahead of VLC 1.1.x.

For broadcast and professional people, in addition to the STL subtitles, we have now durations in the Mpeg2 TS files.

Metadata

Finally, we’ve worked quite a bit on the Metadata support for most file formats.

APE tags, Ogg tags, seeking in flv, mxf, amr should be better supported. Also, as frequently requested, embedded cover arts in wmv, asf, wma are now correctly detected. The missing bits for cover art support are mainly for MKV and APE formats.

Styles for various subtitles formats are also better supported, especially for simple file formats.

Codecs

Codecs support has also improved quite a bit, but that’s for the next blogpost. :D

Jean-Baptiste Kempf

1.1
2.0
Blu-Ray
DASH
DVD
HLS
QTKit
VLC
VideoLAN

Comments

  1. On 31 May 31310, 10:50 by Tim

    For your web site in French, I view it using Firefox 9.0 and when I see your site, for the French, I cannot see properly various French letters that are replaced with an interrogation mark. Checking View, Character Encoding, it is set at Unicode (UTF-8).

    Here are the French letters that do not show properly (say checking the page at http://oss.jbkempf.com/news.php ): e with acute accent, a with grave accent, c with cedilla, e with grave accent. Basically any French letter that has any kind of accent added to the main French letter. I hope this help you.

    I use English as my first language but I expect Firefox to be intelligent enough to display properly foreign languages, especially the main ones such as French.

    Another remark aside from what is above. I checked other video/audio media players and I cannot understand why there are several other free video/audio media players instead of uniting all the developers to work to create one single video/audio media player that would be even better than any of the individual video/audio media players!
    I say that because many of the alternative free video/audio media players use many, if not most, of the open source code that is used in the VLC media player.
    For instance, the KMPLayer at http://www.kmplayer.com/korea/index… and several others.
    Therefore, maybe you could check these free video/audio media players and contact the developers and ask them to join the developers of the VLC media player and add their features and ideas to the VLC media player instead of creating a (less good) clone of the VLC media player.

    I wait with impatience the next version (1.2) of the VLC Media Player!

  2. On 29 May 29290, 2:02 by proxy list

    I’m a long time watcher and I just believed I’d drop by and say hello there for your very first time.

  3. On 17 May 17170, 3:43 by Jean-Baptiste Kempf

    @Michael: we support ATI for a long time now for GPU decoding… I was answering to the previous comment…

  4. On 17 May 17170, 9:31 by Michael

    Hello Jean-Baptiste,

    You say:
    “GPU accel needs Windows Vista or 7 and any cards from nVidia since the last 3 years.”
    Doesn’t VLC 1.2 support the ATI mobility graphics cards? If not, you really should!
    Nvidia and ATI graphics cards being the two leading graphics cards manufacturers.

    By the way, I have Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium with 8GB of RAM and, on my notebook, a graphics card ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 with 1GB of graphics memory (even able to use quite a lot of the available RAM) and a processor Intel Core i7 CPU Q720 with 4 cores and 2 threads per core. The resolution of my monitor is 1920x1080.

  5. On 16 May 16160, 12:41 by Jean-Baptiste Kempf

    @Nigel: it should just work. If not, share the problematic file.

  6. On 16 May 16160, 5:10 by Nigel Burton

    support on mac for avid mxf file playback? ETA ? and great work thus far.

  7. On 15 May 15150, 7:33 by Jean-Baptiste Kempf

    GPU accel needs Windows Vista or 7 and any cards from nVidia since the last 3 years.

  8. On 15 May 15150, 6:42 by andrea

    please,the minimum system requirements approved byyou to fet good playback with 1.2 with gpu accel. enabled.
    it is enoguht the nvida driver from january 2011?ùthanks.

  9. On 9 May 9090, 3:58 by Matt

    VLC 1.2 is looking so good, you could almost call it 2.0. Especially with the video output rewrite. Great work, and FSM Speed!

News

All

Conferences

All