Planet VideoLAN
February 01, 2010
Rémi Duraffort
Visualisations in VLC
Last summer, I worked on VLC media player as part of the Google Summer of Code, One part of my job was to integrate libprojectM inside VLC media player.
libprojectM is a library that create visualisation accoring to the samples it receive. As you can see the results are really amazing. And for the next version of VLC media player you will normally see this nice feature. Lest enjoy a first screenshot!
by Rémi Duraffort at February 01, 2010 02:21 PM
January 31, 2010
Rémi Denis-Courmont
VLC & the chipmunks
How and why to disable the scaletempo audio filter.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
VLC and GPU decoding on linux aka Re: Welcome to the Thicket
Mike Melanson from FFmpeg and Adobe made a great post on hardware decoding APIs, named Welcome to the Thicket.
Once again, it is quite well written, and features an awesome graph: 
Path chosen in VLC.
As you might know, VLC 1.1 is quite closer and we have worked quite a bit on the various GPU accelerations.
Windows
On Windows, everything is simple, we use DxVA2.
Linux
On Linux, as you can see the mess on the graph.
VLC has had patches for VDPAU and VAAPI.
We have now decided to only support VAAPI in the upstream source of VLC, and allow VDPAU through the VDPAU-VAAPI wrapper.
So far, it works fine with nVidia cards and some Intel ones.
by JBK at January 31, 2010 09:22 AM
January 30, 2010
Jean-Philippe André
Extensions in VLC
A general introduction to VLC Extensions.
Starting with version 1.1, users will be able to write their own plugins for VLC, codenamed Extensions. The difference with other VLC modules consists in the language used to write these Extensions: Lua, a simple a lightweight scripting language, embbeded inside VLC media player.
Why extensions?
The success of Firefox over the past few years can be explained quite easily when you have a look at its main features. The major differences between Firefox and IE reside in the Open Source model, and the possibility for community users to write their own plugins. Some of these plugins, like AdBlockPlus, really change the way you enjoy the Web. As a consequence, you can't use any other browser, as long as you need your favorite Firefox plugins.
The same idea can apply to media players. With the constant progress of web technologies, you get more and more access to a lot of free content from your home computer. Why not binding this content with the software you love and the medias you watch or listen to? In less abstract terms, what if you could get the subtitles of the movie you are watching in less that one click, read the lyrics of the current track, learn about the artist's biography and discography right inside VLC?
Well, the answer is that you actual can. Just try VLC Extensions now and you'll see you can forget about your browser when it comes to multimedia-related content.
Okay, but what are extensions exactly?
Extensions are scripts running inside VLC, that will popup windows and fetch information on the web for you. To use an extension, all you need is to activate it from the View menu (if you are a Windows or Linux user). Then, it should be all self-explanatory.
Examples of possible (or actual) extensions include:
- Wikipedia: get information about the artist, the album or the movie from Wikipedia.
- IMDb: read the plot summary, learn about the cast of a movie and get a direct link to the Internet Movie Database.
- Last.fm: Read useful information fetched from the artist's page on Last.fm.
- Lyrics: Automatically get the lyrics of the current song.
- Subtitles: Find and insert subtitles on top of the video in two clicks.
- Concerts: Learn about the next concerts of this artist.
Obviously, if you have other ideas, I'd be glad to know about them!
Where do I start?
At the moment of writing, VLC 1.1 is yet under heavy development. Thus, in order to try these Extensions, you'll have to install a nightly build of VLC from http://nightlies.videolan.org.
Once this is done, you can find extensions here on the page Extensions for VLC. Download the Lua scripts and copy them to your VLC scripts folder:
- Linux: ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/
- Windows: %APPDATA%\VLC\lua\extensions
Launch VLC or open the Plugins & Extensions dialog to reload the list of extensions. Take a cup of coffee and enjoy!
Can I write my own?
Yes you can, but more details and tutorials will come later in another article. If you really want to get started now, read the README files and the example scripts provided. Remember you'll have to wait for VLC 1.1 before seeing them in you favorite media player.
by Jean-Philippe André at January 30, 2010 03:15 PM
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
VLC 1.0.5 et 1.1
Disclaimer: Vous retrouverez cet article co-écrit par moi, sur le site de PCinpact.
VLC 1.0.5
Estampillée 1.0.5, la nouvelle version de VLC est presque prête, puisque les sources sont déjà publiées. Les binaires vont suivre.
Cette nouvelle version est principalement intéressante pour les utilisateurs de Windows, puisqu’elle change de compilateur et met à jour les codecs embarqués.
En effet, toutes les versions depuis la 0.9.0, et notamment l’actuelle 1.0.3 (50 millions de téléchargements), ont été compilées avec la version 4.2 du compilateur gcc. L’introduction de la compilation avec gcc 4.4.2 devrait améliorer les performances générales, sans modifier de façon importante le code.
La mise à jour des librairies de codecs devrait apporter un gain supplémentaire de performance, notamment pour le décodage H.264. Enfin, de nombreuses corrections mineures ont été ajoutées durant le développement des versions 1.0.4 et 1.0.5 ainsi que de nombreuses traductions.
La dernière version avant la 1.1.0 ?
La prochaine version majeure après la 1.0.x sera la 1.1.0, nommée "The Luggage".
Le gel des ajouts de fonctionnalités pour la 1.1 devrait arriver vendredi prochain (5 février) et sera suivi par une « Technology Preview » très rapidement.
Que peut-on attendre de cette version ?
- Réécriture du cœur vidéo
Probablement la partie la moins visible et la partie la plus importante de cette version, la réécriture de la partie qui gère les sorties vidéos et de la plupart des sorties vidéos permettra de partir sur de meilleures bases et d’ajouter des fonctionnalités essentielles pour la suite (1.2). Il faut noter que les sorties vidéos sous linux ont été réécrites à partir de zéro pour utiliser XCB à la place de xlib.
- Support du décodage en GPU sous Windows
Sous Windows Vista et 7, comme nous en avons déjà parlé, les cartes graphiques supportant le décodage matériel devraient être utilisables depuis VLC, en utilisant DxVA2, pour H.264 et VC-1 (le mpeg-2 attendra probablement la version suivante). Toutes les cartes graphiques ne seront pas équivalentes et certains fabricants devraient être favorisés.
- Nouveaux codecs, formats et protocoles
En vrac, les sous-titres des Blu-Ray et DVB HD, l’Atrac1, les playlists .zpl et .wpl, les fichiers des DVD-Audios (.aob) sont les principaux nouveaux formats supportés pour cette version. Des améliorations pour les fichiers m2ts et les formats des sous-titres sont aussi au rendez-vous.
- Extensions
Une plate-forme d’extensions à base de scripts en lua sera disponible. Elle permettra, par exemple, de chercher des infos sur imdb, last.fm ou wikipedia, de télécharger les paroles, les tablatures ou des sous-titres sans quitter VLC. Ces scripts utilisateurs permettront d’aller chercher des données sur le net et/ou de contrôler VLC. Cette plate-forme est amenée à évoluer par la suite.
- Amaigrissement
VLC 1.1 a vu de nombreux modules se faire supprimer (25 au dernier total) afin de réduire la quantité de code. Mais VLC a aussi vu sa consommation de mémoire diminuer ainsi que le nombre de threads dormants. Enfin, les versions pour appareils embarqués (ARM) ont vu d’importants gains de performances, mais il manque encore des interfaces pour ces architectures, notamment Windows Mobile.
La version Windows verra aussi le support Midi et le support CDDB rejoindre le catalogue 1.1, comme les autres architectures.
Merci à PCINpact
by JBK at January 30, 2010 01:50 AM
January 20, 2010
Rémi Denis-Courmont
Help VLC find Maemo
The base VLC port works fine on N900. That is to say, we have audio and video, and at reasonable speed (though performance could surely be improved). But to this date, there is still no proper user interface. The Maemo 4 interface is incomplete buggy, as it is unmaintained. The Qt4 interface is inadequate for the screen depth (icons are too small), does not have the native feeling (hopefully fixed with the upcoming Qt4.6), and, worst of all, is horribly slow. The HTTP interface is awkward, and does not support battery power saving. In other words, the Maemo 5 port of VLC needs serious help. In the mean time, we are stuck with the command line interface through the N900 built-in terminal emulator.
Geoffroy Couprie
5 reasons to wait for VLC 1.1
The next VLC media player release is drawing near (it will be ready when it will be ready), and it comes with a lot of new features and bugfixing:
GPU decoding
One of the coolest new features (do I say that because I worked on it?). We can now decode videos using a graphic card, with DxVA on Windows Vista and 7, and VAAPI on Linux. If you want to test, we are looking for a little help.
Media library
That is a feature a lot of you are waiting for. We will now store a list of all your files in a database using Sqlite.
Windows 7 integration
Some of you already know that VLC media player 1.0.3 is compatible with Windows 7. We didn’t stop there. The next release will bring you cool taskbar buttons à la WMP, jump lists, thumbnails, etc.
Interface rework
I like the grey VLC. Maybe I have forgotten what the word “ergonomic” means. But some of the developers have not, and they’re doing an amazing work with the Qt interface, to change the layout, add nice effects and make it a lot prettier.
Lua extensions
People who read my previous blog know that I love tweaking VLC with Lua scripts. One developer had a nice project for this year’s Google Summer of Code: adding a way for lua scripts to change the interface. Now, lua scripts can add menus, open windows, etc. OK, it doesn’t sound cool at first, but what you will see thanks to this code is really nice: automatically downloading lyrics and subtitles, finding data on IMDb, doing a Google search, whatever you want! Isn’t that cool?
Still not convinced?
These were the features I’m excited to see in the next release. But that’s not all:
- N900 port
- Milkdrop visualizations using projectM
- WPL and ZPL playlist support
- desktop mode for Direct 3D video output (you know, the trick to show the video as a wallpaper…)
- …
by Géal at January 20, 2010 10:30 AM
January 07, 2010
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
videolan.org stats for 2009: 90 million visits
2009, a transition year for VideoLAN
As I was saying in my presentation at the VideoLAN Dev Days 2009, 2009 was an important year for VideoLAN:
- VideoLAN has become an non-profit organization
- VideoLAN Dev Days (end of ‘08) helped to structure and take decisions
- VLC 1.0.0 was tagged and released
- DVBlast and VLMC were started
- Acceleration of development, and communication around VLC and VideoLAN
- Lots of ideas for the future were discussed.
Statistics and Website
One of the question we have the most is: How many users VLC has?
.
The answer is quite difficult to get, and we’ll rediscuss about it later.
However, there are trends that are easy to measure, and Google Trends is not the only option here. 
videolan.org
One of the important way to measure the VLC popularity is to check the audience of videolan.org Website and its increase.
videolan.org numbers for 2009
In 2009:
- VideoLAN has seen over 90 million visits on its website,
- from 68million different IPs.
- Pages view are around 480million pages.
- Best month was december, with 9,25 million visits.
- 0 advertisement.
- and is hosted on a single machine
Compared to 2008, this is an increase of 50%, since we had 60 million visits in 2008!
Operating Systems changes
Comparing December 2009 to 2008, our traffic is split like this:
- Windows: 79,3% (from 81,4%)
- Windows 7: 17%
- Windows Vista: 16.6% (from 21%)
- Windows XP: 43,6% (from 57,2%)
- Windows 2000: 0,5% (from 1.1%)
- Windows 9x/Me: 0.3% (from 0.8%)
- Mac OS X: 12,4% (from 10.8%)
- Linux: 4.1% from 5.2%
And the rest…
Conclusion: nothing surprising here, and we see that 7 is already ahead of Vista… We were right to drop Win9x support :D
Browsers changes
Comparing December 2009 to 2008, our traffic is split like this:
- Firefox: 42,8% (from 45,3%)
- Internet Explorer: 33,9% (from 39%)
- IE6: 7.8% (from 14%)
- IE7: 7.8% (from 23,4%)
- IE8: 17.7% (from 0.7%)
- Safari: 8.3% (from 8.9%)
- Opera: 3.1% (from 3.2%)
- Chrome: 6.5% (from 0.7%)
Conclusion: well, here, seeing Firefox loosing 3% in one year (in fact 2% in December alone) seemed weird, while Google Chrome is quite strong. I can’t say I am much surprised though.
by JBK at January 07, 2010 10:00 PM
December 30, 2009
Rémi Denis-Courmont
VLC on a diet
VLC is on a diet...
VLC 1.0.3 meets udev
VLC 1.0.3 will be the first VLC media player version to support the WMA Professional codec and the Windows 7 operating system properly. But we also have a new goodie for Linux users: VLC will now provide two new services discovery plugin based on libudev. The libudev discs discovery will eventually replace the existing HAL-based discovery, as HAL is being obsoleted. The libudev capture devices discovery is completely new, and makes webcam or video capture card streaming a little bit easier.
December 17, 2009
Ludovic Fauvet
VideoLAN Movie Creator: Cross-platform Video Editor
After 9 months of hard work, VideoLAN Movie Creator (aka VLMC) will be unveiled to the community during the VideoLAN Dev’days 2009 in Paris!
VLMC is a free, cross-platform, non-linear video editing software based on the famous VLC Media Player.
Made by a team of 6 students, the project started in March 2009 as an end of studies project and is now (almost) ready for its first public alpha release. Expected for early 2010, it will provide a new alternative for editing videos on Linux, Windows and even Mac.
Meet us and discover the new power of the cone on the 18th, 19th and 20th december 2009 in Paris.
by etix at December 17, 2009 03:09 AM
December 15, 2009
Jean-Paul Saman
2nd VideoLAN Developers Days 2009
In a few days time the second VideoLAN Developer Days is organised by the VideoLAN association. It is a yearly held conference around multimedia usage and software development meeting to discuss roadmaps for VLC, DVBlast (and other VideoLAN projects: http://www.videolan.org/projects/).
For more information about the VideoLAN Developer Days 2009 see this link: http://www.videolan.org/videolan/events/vdd09.html