Planet VideoLAN
Welcome on Planet VideoLAN. This page gathers the blogs and feeds of VideoLAN's developers and contributors. As such, it doesn't necessarly represent the opinion of all the developers, the VideoLAN project, ...
July 19, 2014
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
VLC, Android and DVDs
DVD on Android
If you're like me, you probably have a large number of DVDs at your place.
Of course, the DVD format is outdated, but it has a few advantages:
- Everything is available on DVDs and it's cheap to buy,
- It's cheap to decode MPEG-2 with any CPU (even mobile),
- It's very simple and well supported,
- It has menus and bonuses,
- Most patents for decoding DVDs are over (or almost),
- It does not need an Internet connection to work.
Adding to the fact that you have probably numerous legally bought DVDs in your home, and that VLC plays DVDs since a long time, we've decided to add DVD support on VLC for Android.
It's also great when you travel, in car, trains or planes.
Therefore, we've added support for DVD ISOs (encrypted or not) and DVD menus interactivity in the latest VLC for Android version (0.9.7.1).
As we support full DVD ISOs, you don't need to rip the DVD, remove the protection or do any transcoding: you just need to do an image of the DVD. This is totally legal in most countries, notably in Europe, since this is for your own usage (or your family).
DVD in action
Here are a few screenshots of VLC on Android with a DVD.
DVD menu interactivity:
DVD playback with audio, subtitles selection and menu buttons:
Recycle your old device
Finally, the great thing is that this works quite well also on older Android machines, like on this Motorola Defy. It's a Cortex A-8 800Mhz, running Android 2.2, and was out 4 years ago!
Have fun!
July 12, 2014
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Blu-Ray playback libraries updates (BD-J)
Triumvirat update
6 months after the first libbdplus release, and my post about the open Blu-Ray playback stack state, we've updated a bit the libraries.
We have seen, in the last weeks, the release of:
So, the three libraries of the stack have been updated with a few important features.
What's new
For libaacs and libbdplus, the updates are minor and are mostly for fixing compilation against new libgcrypt, build system issues and a speed issue in libaacs when using MMC to retrieve the MKB.
For libbluray, this update is a major update.
This release is the first release where the BD-J (the Java interactivity layer) is actually usable.
The Java code was tested on Linux, Windows and MacOS, and it should work with J2ME and J2SE and with both the OpenJDK and Sun/Oracle's JDK projects.
It's quite big, since it adds more 200 commits, mostly in the Java code base (the diff is more than 15kLoC).
In addition to BD-J, it fixes numerous issues on Win32, improves cross-compilation and allows to compile without libxml.
Photos
In addition, here are 2 photos of VLC on a rPI, with a USB BD-drive, using VLC 2.2.0 hardware acceleration for decoding.
Note: this is not my setup.
Video
Pierre Dandumont made a couple of video of a Blu-Ray with menus.
July 11, 2014
Ludovic Fauvet
Mirrorbits is now on github!
Few months back I started working on a new project for the VideoLAN organization called Mirrorbits. Fast-forward, now in July 2014 it is finally online and open-sourced on Github!
Mirrorbits is a geographic download redirector written in Go. Let me rephrase that, it’s an application server that finds the best mirror to redirect a given user based on its location, pretty much like a CDN but using a pure software stack. For example, to distribute VLC we have to rely on a bunch of mirrors (around 70) located around the world and to make you able to download VLC faster we use mirrorbits to find the most suitable mirror for you. That means finding a mirror close to you, that is up and which has the file you requested. At first glance it can seem to be a pretty easy task to achieve but in reality there’s a lot of things to take care of. Take a look at the main features to find out all the things it can do.
The software is still in a early stage but is already used in production since April of this year, handling an average of 1 million downloads each day without a single hiccup and with a very low footprint. The system does not require a lot of attention and can run for months without human intervention since most of the usual tasks are fully automated. If a mirror goes down it will temporary be disabled until it recovers, all the scans of the mirrors (via rsync / ftp) are done in the background, …
Unlike other redirectors that only support the standard HTTP redirect, mirrorbits also has a JSON query API to be able to generate your own customized download page for showing alternate mirrors or a sponsor logo along with a countdown. On the control side it has a simple but yet powerful CLI to do the general maintenance.
Usage: mirrorbits [OPTIONS] COMMAND [arg...]
A smart download redirector.
Commands:
add Add a new mirror
disable Disable a mirror
edit Edit a mirror
enable Enable a mirror
export Export the mirror database
list List all mirrors
refresh Refresh the local repository
reload Reload configuration
remove Remove a mirror
scan (Re-)Scan a mirror
upgrade Seamless binary upgrade
version Print version informations
But that’s not all, it also has a web interface to get details about any served file, get real-time download statistics and see the number of downloads for each mirror.
Feel free to use mirrorbits for your own purpose but keep in mind that it’s still a very young project. And since I did not have the time to write a documentation yet you can contact me directly by email to get personal support 
To get the latest news about the project you can either star it on Github or follow the twitter account @mirrorbits.