Planet VideoLAN
April 27, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
CoverFlow and VLC in a webpage
This is just a very short post about a cool hack made by someone on the VideoLAN forum: VLC&Coverflow.
This webpage uses Flash technology to let you choose the movie you want, in a CoverFlow-Like mode.
When selected, you can get the VLC to play it without the disadvantages of Flash Video format (slow, low quality, CPU hungry...)
by JBK at April 27, 2008 06:02 AM
April 16, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
VideoLAN Webbys 5s in London.
Webbys 5s .org
This blog was calm last week, since I was invited to a Webbys Award event in London.
This event was focused on the .org community and the importance of having a .org for some non-profit association.
I made a small talk (5 slides, 5 minutes, 5 sentence by slides).
The other .org were: Greenpeace, Alternet, Wikipedia and IdeaList.
This was very funny and I met a lot of nice people.
Contents
Photos
Presentation
Coming soon!
Vidéo
Coming soon!
by JBK at April 16, 2008 10:43 AM
April 08, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Reflexions about the first part of this SoC
Maybe no one cares, but still here are some random thoughts about what happened so far for us. I write them now, because I might forget those when all will be over.
Introduction
This is the second year for VideoLAN as a mentoring organisation for the GSoC.
In our first year we didn't outperform for many reasons (see here for details
VideoLAN is not a very stuctured organisation.
Candidacies
But this year, we received 85 candidacies (+8 ineligible) against something between 40 and 50 last year... (I fear that I don't have the
exact number 
)
I know the GSoC is getting bigger every year, but still this is a big increase for us. Moreover, some of the students did some really good patches (one almost solved the main subject of one of our idea ) and the application level is better...
Why ?
So I don't really know exactly why, but here are a few guesses:
- Last year, GSoC was a bit of a surprise for us. This year, we know way better what we can expect from students/mentors.
- Last year, VideoLAN was mentoring only for VLC media player, this year, we have VLC media player and x264 (we have roughly 70/15 applications for VLC/x264)
- Ideas were done mostly the same way, but we put more of them on our wiki this year. Ideas are more sized for a summer (see first reason)
- We added ideas cross projects (x264-VLC, VLC-other codecs libraries, VLC-FreePV)
- We added qualification tasks (VLC: compile VLC, provide a patch on the trunk, x264: more complex qualification tasks). This highered the quality.
- We have tried to work with other projects (some FFmpeg mentors can read our applications (and vice-versa), we accepted FFmpeg and x264 qualification tasks as an "ok" for us, ...)
- We announced everything earlier and were more organised between mentors (ml, IRC, meetings...)
- We have a former student who is a mentor now.
- I have more time than last year during that phase... :D Must be because the sun is better in California than in France...
Many ideas were recommendations that came from the Mentor Summit, so I must say that this summit did help us a *LOT*.
Hope this can help some people...
by JBK at April 08, 2008 09:16 PM
March 28, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Build VLC media player under Ubuntu Hardy (8.04)
I found an ubuntu hardy installation, and needed to test something on the trunk of VLC so I needed to compile a VLC for it. Here is a complete HOWTO to do the same !
This post is an update of the popular howto for Build VLC with feisty.
Introduction
So we are going to build the latest VLC possible.
Everything will be done in a console/terminal and should be straight-forward. Every question should be asked on the forum, or in the comments here.
Conventions
Every line beginning with a #
should be done as root, or using the sudo
command.
Every line beginning witha %
is a normal line.
Building VLC
Prepare your environment
We need a few package starting from a fresh hardy:
# apt-get install vlc # apt-get build-dep vlc # apt-get install cvs build-essential subversion git git-core automake1.9 libtool # apt-get install libgcrypt-dev # apt-get install libfaad-dev libtwolame-dev libqt4-dev libjack-dev # apt-get install libxpm-dev libcddb2-dev liblua5.1-0-dev libzvbi-dev libshout-dev
Checkout VLC trunk and bootstrap the tree
% git clone git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git % cd vlc % ./bootstrap
Build x264
x264
x264 is a library to encode movies in H.264.
% cd extras/ % % git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git % cd x264 % make % sudo make install % cd ../..
Configure VLC
Configure
% mkdir build; cd build;
%../configure --prefix=/usr \
--enable-snapshot --enable-debug \
--enable-dbus-control --enable-musicbrainz \
--enable-shared-libvlc --enable-mozilla \
--enable-lirc \
--with-ffmpeg-tree=../extras/ffmpeg \
--enable-x264 --with-x264-tree=../extras/x264 \
--enable-shout --enable-taglib \
--enable-v4l \
--enable-dvb \
--enable-realrtsp --disable-xvmc \
--enable-svg --enable-dvdread \
--enable-dc1394 --enable-dv \
--enable-theora --enable-faad \
--enable-twolame --enable-real \
--enable-flac --enable-tremor \
--enable-skins2 --enable-qt4 \
--enable-ncurses \
--enable-aa --enable-caca \
--enable-esd --disable-portaudio \
--enable-jack --enable-xosd \
--enable-galaktos --enable-goom \
--enable-ggi \
--disable-cddax --disable-vcdx \
--disable-quicktime --enable-lua
Finish
% make
You just have to wait a bit :D
by JBK at March 28, 2008 11:49 AM
March 17, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Google Summer of Code: VideoLAN
GSoC
Hello to everyone,
I am glad to announce you that VideoLAN is a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of code 2008.
Students, ideas
If you are an interested student, please check the ideas for VLC and x264 on our wiki.
Original ideas are more than welcome.
Timeline
Please check the SoC timeline. http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/
Rules
Unfortunately, we have to unforce a few rules to avoid failures and not-serious enough students: Rules.
Those rules are flexible, especially for x264.
Contact Us
If you are interested in anything around SoC, please contact xtophe (vlc), Dark_Shikari (x264) and me (vlc and other weird requests)
Everything is quite flexible, but I would like to focus on quality more than quantity.
May the code be with you.
by JBK at March 17, 2008 05:10 PM
March 11, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
H264 encoding: "some boring x264 stuff that you’d better not forget.
Copy from IRC and thresh's blog
From Dark_Shikari.
Absolutely 100% generic commandline for maximum quality without stupidly insanely slow options: –bime –bframes 16 –trellis 1 –mixed-refs –8×8dct –subme 7 –b-rdo –me umh –direct auto –b-pyramid –weightb –threads auto –ref 8 For extra slow, add –no-fast-pskip, –merange 32, and –partitions all for more slow, raise –ref to 16, and –me to esa and also, get the latest AQ build and use my AQ at strength 0.7-1.0 or something. if you want faster encoding 1) Lower –ref to 4 2) lower subme to 6, remove –b-rdo 3) remove me umh if you want realtime encoding you’ll have to go lower on most machines
by JBK at March 11, 2008 02:29 PM
March 05, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Howto build VLC on Windows on a fresh Windows
Hello to everyone!
Yet again
I already explained how to compile trunk versions of VLC on linux, ubuntu and debian.
I rewrote the howto for Windows, using CYGWIN and put it on our wiki.
Find it here.
by JBK at March 05, 2008 10:49 PM
March 02, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
VLC switched to Git
Everything is in $subject.
Anyway, to check out the VLC repository, now:
git clone git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git
Have fun!
by JBK at March 02, 2008 10:14 AM
February 29, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
VLC media player release: 0.8.6e and coverity
Release
We just released a new stable version.
This version is ONLY focused on security vulnerabilities and minor bugfixes.
0.9.0
0.9.0 version is in the work, and an alpha preview is due soon. :D
Coverity
I am quite unpleased with Coverity, that does a free scanning of open source projects. We applied many times for VLC, and they always replied that they would do it soon, but they actually never done it. :'(
Security
This is a bit bad, because VLC is one important Open Source project, and more used that some of the projects they already scan...
Anyway, this is a bit problematic, because we need help in finding security issues and do some auditing of the VLC media player code. And since there are web plugins on VLC, this is dangerous.
by JBK at February 29, 2008 03:04 PM
February 21, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
VideoLAN @ FOSDEM
Hello !
The VideoLAN team will be partly but greatly represented at the FOSDEM, this week-end in Bruxelles.
If you want to join and to say hello, please do so.
I will be there with my VLC t-shirt.
by JBK at February 21, 2008 01:02 AM
February 10, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Video on Demand: RTSP vs HTTP
Disclaimer
Rémi still hasn't any RSS feed, so here is another article about protocol.
This article is not my production
VoD
For those who don't know him, Rémi is, between many other stuffs, the network expert in VideoLAN team.
On his personal website__
Here is a copy-paste of his introduction
As a developper of VLC media player, I often get to see people wonder ing whether they should use RTSP or HTTP to stream their audio or audio/video content. Even though I like open standards (which the IETF champions), I cannot say I am a big fan of RTSP.
Remark
N.B.: this article is concerned about video-on-demand. For live streaming, there may be more reasons to prefer RTSP over HTTP.
by JBK at February 10, 2008 08:11 PM
February 05, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Rémi: "Why CMake sucks?"
Since the last post on CMake, here is an opinion, quite strong against CMake, from one of the VLC developer.
This is NOT my opinion, because I am not the one handling all those difficulties...
by JBK at February 05, 2008 09:14 AM
February 04, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
FOSDEM
A few VLC developers are going to attend FOSDEM in Bruxelles in a few weeks.
If you are around, please come and discuss with us... :D
I am trying to go too. Updates soon.
by JBK at February 04, 2008 07:04 PM
VLC: misc and builds
Just some miscellaneous news about VLC and build systems:
- Tree Cleaning: we decided to clean the tree of all the not really necessaries folder that are around now. See the wiki.
- There is some experiments to build VLC using CMake inside the main tree. Checkout the latest VLC to test it.
- Windows nightly builds are back after the big changes in the building and in the config.h changes.
- New contribs with updated 3rd party libraries are done for windows.
- Windows CE and Symbian port are advancing... Not yet released, and ETA is really unknown.
- Roadmap are changing, more about that soon.
by JBK at February 04, 2008 07:02 PM
January 03, 2008
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Day of the cone
Not mine. Tombigel did it.
by JBK at January 03, 2008 02:15 PM
December 21, 2007
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
KDE4 Release Event
Hey, I'll be at the KDE4 release event party in Moutain View, January 17 – 19, 2008.
I know, I don't use KDE as my primary desktop, but still, I am working on VLC-qt4 interface, and am going to work on the phonon engine, so I feel kind of concerned...
And maybe, if eean, sebr, and ferai are persuasive enough, I'll quit using my Xfce...
by JBK at December 21, 2007 10:23 AM
December 14, 2007
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Configure-step in VLC building.
Idea
VLC can be built with a classical process:
./bootstrap; ./configure --options; make
However, since VLC is very modular, not everyone wants the same modules built so the configure line can be very long.
Therefore, I'll try to explain a bit the main configure options and give a few examples.
Configure
./configure
General and Developers options
--prefix=/usr \ --host= \ --build= \ --enable-debug | --enable-release # Choose the mode you want --enable-optimizations # Optimisations are good idea --enable-sse --enable-mmx # for releases --enable-optimize-memory # Smaller memory for less perf --enable-cprof --enable-gprof # Profiling --enable-fast-install # Libtool --enable-testsuite # If you want the tests to be built --enable-static # Static libraries --enable-shared # Shared libraries --with-words # Endianess
Main VLC options
--enable-vlm # VLC Manager --enable-visual # Visualisations --enable-update-check # Check the updates? --enable-sout # Streaming Server --enable-snapshot # Create VIdeo Snapshots --enable-lua # Script VLC --enable-freetype --enable-fribidi # No Need to disable this --enable-nls --enable-libxml2 # or that.
Codecs
--enable-a52 [--with-a52-fixed] # AC-3 --enable-dirac --enable-faad # MPEG-4 Audio --enable-fluidsynth # Midi --enable-mpc # Musepack Audio --enable-real # Real Audio --enable-loader # DirectMediaObject support for WMV --enable-theora --enable-twolame # MPGA Encoding --enable-tremor --enable-x264 # H.264 Encoding --enable-vorbis --enable-speex --enable-tarkin --enable-zvbi | --enable-telx # Teletext support --enable-dca # DTS --enable-flac --enable-ffmpeg # lots of codecs [--with-ffmpeg-a52 --with-ffmpeg-mp3lame --with-ffmpeg-zlib --with-ffmpeg-amrnb --with-ffmpeg-amrwb --with-ffmpeg-faac --with-ffmpeg-theora --with-ffmpeg-vorbis ] --enable-libmpeg2 --enable-mad # Mpga decoding --enable-png --enable-svg --enable-sdl-image
Video Outputs
--enable-xvideo # Linux --enable-xinerama --enable-x11 --enable-glx --enable-directfb --enable-wingdi # Win32 --enable-directx --enable-opengl # All --enable-sdl --enable-caca --enable-aa
Audio outputs
--enable-alsa # Unix --enable-arts --enable-esd --enable-jack --enable-portaudio --enable-hd1000a --enable-oss --enable-waveout # Windows
Access
--enable-screen # Desktop record --enable-bda # DVB for windows --enable-dshow # DirectShow device --enable-v4l # video 4 linux --enable-v4l2 # video 4 linux 2 --enable-dvb # DVB for Linux --enable-pvr # PVR/IVTV --enable-dv # DV support --enable-gnutls # Encrypted streams --enable-gnomevfs # Gnome VFS- --enable-smb # Samba/Windows shares --enable-cdda | --enable-cddax # CD Audio --enable-dvdnav # DVD video --enable-vcd | --enable-vcdx # VCD --enable-dc1394 # 1394 support --enable-hal --enable-live555 --enable-realrtsp # RTSP --enable-bonjour --enable-cyberlink # Various Service discoveries --enable-upnp #
demux
--enable-mkv # Matroska --enable-mod # ModPlug (instruments) --enable-ogg # Ogg --enable-gme # GME videogames
interface
--enable-qnx # QNX platform --enable-qt4 # Default interface in Qt4 --enable-qte # QTE/Opie interface --enable-skins2 # skins2 --enable-wxwidgets # Old default interface in wxWidgets --enable-xosd # OSD interface --enable-ncurses # Ncurses interface --enable-fbosd # FrameBuffer interface --enable-pda # Small gtk interface --enable-httpd # HTTP daemon and interface --enable-mozilla # Mozilla integration --enable-activex # IE and ActiveX integration --enable-dbus # D-Bus control --enable-dbus-control --enable-lirc # InfraRed Remotes --enable-java-bindings --enable-python-bindings
Visualisations
--enable-galaktos --enable-goom
Metadata support
--enable-id3tag # metadata using id3tag --enable-taglib # metadata using taglib --enable-musicbrainz # Musicbrainz --enable-libcddb # CDDB/FreeDB integration --enable-libcdio # CD-Text
by JBK at December 14, 2007 08:09 PM
December 08, 2007
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Planet repaired
VideoLAN planet is repaired.
My dotclear rss feed was broken because of a dotclear bug with TimeZone handling.
by JBK at December 08, 2007 02:01 PM
December 07, 2007
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
VLC media player Lines of Code
Numbers
VLC has around 600,000 Lines of code, with:
- 312,000 lines of code in the modules.
VLC uses a lot of external libraries, which are over 3,020,000 lines of code....
IDE
Did you know that almost all VLC developers use VIM as a main editor? :D
by JBK at December 07, 2007 09:15 PM
November 30, 2007
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Qt4 screenshots
Hello, just two small screenshot of my work:
by JBK at November 30, 2007 11:37 PM
June 30, 2007
Jon Lech Johansen
iPhone sold out…
Actually, no. I went to the Apple Store earlier with a friend who got a MacBook Pro and an iPhone. We were in and out in 5 minutes. This no-camping procedure is also known as having a life. Too bad for those who over-estimated the demand, camped for hours or even days thinking that they’ll be able to sell their iPhone on CL for $2000.
by JonLech at June 30, 2007 04:53 AM
June 25, 2007
Jon Lech Johansen
Norwegians at the duty free
Letting Norwegians loose in the duty free store is like letting kids loose in Disneyland…
A 1l bottle of Martini Bianco is 150 NOK (25 USD) at the monopoly store in Norway. At the airport it’s 50 NOK (8.5 USD).
by JonLech at June 25, 2007 11:25 PM
May 03, 2007
Sam Hocevar
Obligatory 契ȑ璝寣䇘앖噣삈
The proverb of the day is “契ȑ璝寣䇘앖噣삈” (pronounced “kulr’koykotsu huabszhoubbyiss” by anyone fluent in Mandarin, Serbo-Croatian, Korean and Japanese). I have no idea what it means, but it certainly has to do with knocking a hydra’s head, freedom of information or mediocre cryptographic design.
Oh, by the way: echo -n '契ȑ璝寣䇘앖噣삈' | iconv -t ucs-2le | hd
May 02, 2007
Derk-Jan Hartman
DMCA takedowns have no merit to the world
Wow internet people of the world. I was surprised tonight. As slow as defending DeCSS took off all those years ago, so quick was the defending of the AACS key. Many people on the Internet spoke out tonight after AACS LA started sending out takedown notices to companies that hosted a key published by some of their users. The biggest thing as far as I'm concerned is that people seem to be willing to break the companies they love (digg and Google) just to prove the stupidity of the DMCA take down notices. These users are not against Digg and Google, they are it's most active supporters, and they will use their favourite tools to prove the governments in the world that the DMCA is giving the DRM companies too much power over other companies that are simply doing their work. They proved that the "secret" is to be protected by the DRM company, and not by all the other companies in the world. The secret is out, and Google and Digg can't stop it, just as little as the DRM companies could prevent the "secret" from getting out in the first place. To ask Google and Digg to stop it is unrealistic, costly and without merit to society as a whole. There are thousands of ways we can communicate those few digits, songs, videos, DNS records, different notations, weak "encoding" variants, barcodes, images, ascii art, etc etc.
It is my full conviction that not a judge in the world will judge Google or Digg as libel in this case. There was no stopping the world, without a full take-down of the companies involved. They couldn't have hired people fast enough to remove it, as others would be able to post it online. Let's HOPE it goes to court, that will stop this idiot-icy once and for all.
I'm proud to be part of the new Internet generation. Sure it has it's faults, the world always has had faults, but it's time people realize that there is no stopping to this. Information is shared now almost by definition, and the knowledge it has spread is far outweighing the "bad" knowledge it's spreading. Information is our drug, our virus. Change your business models, because I'm tired of not owning what I buy, and I'm not the only one.
These companies are forgetting that they serve society in their needs. We pay them and expect certain things back. More and more of our expectations are flatly ignored in order to "save the income" of these companies. If we don't give you money, then that means you are doing something wrong, and the company deserves to go broke. It should not get protected by governments and organizations that serve those same organizations. Many people have said: "If there was a better business-model, then that model would be more successful and win over the other companies". However this is no longer true. This industry as a whole has become so protected that any other business model is no longer viable. You want proof of that ? Well here is a model: I use work of others that I'm allowed to use for free. Let's say an Internet radio station and freely licensed music. Sounds like a viable model, albeit one where I have to do a lot of work. Any commoner would come to such a conclusion. Guess what; It's not viable. In the USA you will have to pay SoundExchange (a daughter of RIAA) regardless of what kind of music you broadcast on the Internet. If the artist doesn't join up with RIAA and collects it's fees, too bad for them, all the money goes to RIAA. (link) This is just anti-competitive and the US government should be thrown out over allowing RIAA to work in such a matter.
There is one big thing that people are often forgetting. There is a lot of talk about the movie and music industry. Their sales are indeed rapidly decreasing etc etc. But what we forget is that the Entertainment industry as a whole is still growing. Television, gaming, sports, events, internet entertainment, iPod, etc have all seen enormous growth over the past years. We are just busy with more stuff then ever before and that's the primary reason we consume less music and movies. You are not losing money over piracy, you are losing money because you are not correctly reading the market you are selling to. Hell some people are even turning to piracy now because of the trouble they have to go trough with their legally bought digital music. And knowing the average computer capabilities of the Internet user I'm not surprised, and neither should they be.
Finally more and more people start to see where all these guidelines are problematic and they start fighting it. This is not about not being willing to pay certain companies for their products. It's about the protection these companies enforce and the government's involvement with these companies. It's about owning a song once you bought it, regardless of the format. It's about being able to buy what you want, without having to wait 1,5 year before the product enters your geographic-market. It's about being able to decrypt your movies 30 years after official DVD players were taken out of production. It's about your right to publish a 16 hex number, regardless of what it means. It's about the bullying of the companies we love, by the companies we hate. And if one happens to go bankrupt in order to defend that, then we will gladly sacrifice such a company and create another one once the issue is settled.
So with saying: "09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0" to everyone I end this post.
by The DJ at May 02, 2007 03:51 PM
January 16, 2007
Sam Hocevar
Exposing file parsing vulnerabilities
Binary file parsing is difficult. There is a lot of byte swapping,
offset computation and magic bit mask handling involved. Add to that the
fact that many binary formats were reverse-engineered and do not even have a
public spec, are so convoluted that there is no way to write a decent parser,
or have so many buggy writer implementations that the readers
need to accommodate for that.
Media players, web browsers and email clients are probably the most exposed ones. These programs are full of bugs, not more than any other program, but more dangerous bugs. Admit it, you just play any video you find on the Intarweb, click any image link and read your email (seriously, even mutt uses antiword to read .doc attachments). It is no longer necessary to have network listening services to be exposed to security issues, the users themselves listen to the world.
Using my fuzzing tool zzuf that I eventually decided to release, I found more than 40 bugs in common Unix tools, popular media players and other utilities, simply by reading valid files and slightly corrupting them. The most scary ones are the media player bugs:
| VLC | MPlayer | xine | FFmpeg (ffplay) | GStreamer (gst-launch) | mpg321 | ogg123 | |
| MP3 | robust | SIGSEGV | robust | robust | robust | robust | N/A |
| Ogg Vorbis | robust | SIGSEGV | robust | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | N/A | robust |
| MPEG-1 | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | robust | N/A | N/A |
| MPEG-2 | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | robust | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | N/A | N/A |
| MPEG-4 AVI | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | deadlock? | N/A | N/A |
| FLAC | robust | SIGSEGV | robust | heap corruption | robust | N/A | SIGFPE |
| Ogg Theora | robust | SIGSEGV | robust | SIGSEGV | robust | N/A | N/A |
| WMV | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | N/A | SIGSEGV | robust | N/A | N/A |
| AAC | heap corruption | SIGSEGV | SIGSEGV | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| AC-3/A52 | SIGSEGV | robust (I KID YOU NOT) | robust | SIGSEGV | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Each of these segmentation fault bugs is a potential security hole in Debian. zzuf also found bugs in Firefox, Openoffice.org, antiword, ImageMagick and even objdump. And there is more to come.
September 24, 2006
Clement Stenac
New job
Hi,
From tomorrow, I'll be starting a new job at the french company Exalead. The business is quite exciting, as they are developping search engines, both for entreprises and home usage, as well as a web search engine. The web engine features some very interesting tricks, like automated categorization of results, which helps you deal with homonymous words.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how their stuff works :)
by zorglub at September 24, 2006 09:39 PM
September 14, 2006
Derk-Jan Hartman
IBC 2006
Jean Paul Saman and I visited IBC 2006 again this year, and I have put a small photo tour online. VLC was seen quite a few times again on the floor, this time some of the companies included were names like Cisco, Siemens, Thomsson and Fraunhofer. Our friends from Anevia were there as well of course. It was a busy IBC this year with great weather and we had a wonderful time. I was however a bit disappointed by not seeing much revolutionary technology. It was all basically a refinement of what we saw last year, but nothing really stood out.
Let's hope next year will show as some new things.
by The DJ at September 14, 2006 02:28 PM
August 30, 2006
Jon Lech Johansen
More gadgets for sale
I am moving to a new apartment so I’m cleaning out old stuff. The following is for sale to anyone in San Francisco:
- AirPort Express: Used for a couple of months. This is the device I used when I reverse engineered AirTunes and authored JustePort, the first non-Apple software to support AirTunes. $120.
- HP Photosmart R717: Used for 1.5 years. 1GB MMC card included. Have a look at my gallery for some pictures taken with this camera. $150.
- Unlocked Motorola V330 GSM: Barely used. Charger and car charger included. $100.
- Creative Labs Webcam Live Ultra for Notebook VF0070: Used only a couple of times. $60.
I am also selling a 7 day old 1.83GHz MacBook. Used for testing. Original box. $1120.
Update: The MacBook and the webcam have been sold.
by JonLech at August 30, 2006 07:55 PM
August 16, 2006
Clement Stenac
A sneak preview of VLC 0.8.6
Introduction on the new features that will be added in VLC 0.8.6
VLC 0.8.6 will be quite a major release of VLC, with many improvements. Once more, VLC is going to fail the "Release early, release often" rule, but we have some excuses for this. Well..., we try to have.
Once of the most visible changes is the one that is the driver for such a long time between two releases: the new interface for Windows and Linux. We are switching away from the wxWidgets toolkit to Qt4. This switch was motivated by a series of annoying problems with wxWidgets, most notably the encoding handling, and the fact that it is not totally cross-platform, and not easily customizable.
Qt4 is a more modern framework, which provides a number of features and development facilities that we didn't have with WX.
We will also be improving some interface features that were too complex or clumsy, like the preferences, the seek slider, the open dialog box, the playlist, ...
As we didn't want to rewrite some interface code for some things that were about to disappear, we decided to do more changes while the interface rework is underway, and here lie two more big things for 0.8.6: some playlist work, and so-called "streaming profiles".
The playlist will start featuring a Media Library, which will be automatically saved and restored. There will still be the old "playlist" that gets forgotten at each restart of VLC. Sorting, filtering and searching capabilities will also be enhanced for the new playlist, and Shoutcast support will be enhanced.
Streaming is inherently complex, and our earlier efforts to simplify this, via GUIs and wizards have not been very successful. The main problems of the wizard were that it didn't show all the power of VLC, and that it still required the user to make some complex decisions about what muxer to use, for example.
Streaming profiles should be implemented in 0.8.6, and we hope that they will provide an efficient solution to this problem. You'll be able to choose from one of the shipped profiles, depending on what you want to do, like "Save what I'm watching on TV", "Stream to my LAN", "Stream to friends on Internet", "Transcode this video for my iPod", ... and you'll only have to make a few final choices, like "Video quality", "Bandwidth", ... The system should make it easy to write new profiles, thus easily expanding the capabilities.
Other improvements will include:
- Native WMV9 support, through FFMPEG, thanks to the work done in the Google Summer of Code.
- A new Direct3D video output that should bring better video quality (better rescaling).
- Some video filters will be made streamable.
VLC will also have some more features for developers, with an updated libvlc (a library that, that will allow for much more things. We will have complete Java bindings for it, thanks to the JVLC project by Filippo Carone, and we hope to have complete Python bindings, with the help of Olivier Aubert. This would mean that you could embed VLC features (either as a player or as a streamer) in a C, C++, Java or Python program.
Thanks to the ActiveX control, you can also benefit from a subset of the features in VB, Delphi, ...
Now, VLC 0.8.6 is still far from completion, you probably have to expect at least two more months before we can even do the first test release. Some things announced here might even finally go, if it appears that it takes too long to implement. In the meantime, we might do a 0.8.5a release with a few selected improvements taken from the 0.8.6 development tree.
And, last but not least, the VideoLAN.org website will get a liftup, following our redesign contest. Stay tuned here ...
by zorglub at August 16, 2006 10:06 AM
August 11, 2006
Derk-Jan Hartman
The founding of VideoLAN
VideoLAN has been around far longer then most ppl realise. The project's sourcecode wasn't released till somewhere in 2001, but there was something working long before that. One of the 4 co-founders that started with the idea, intially known as 'network 2000', was Antoine Brenner.
Antoine was recentrly interviewed by a friend of him. The vidcast of this interview (in French) is now available on the Mobitrends weblog.
by The DJ at August 11, 2006 11:25 AM
June 08, 2006
Jon Lech Johansen
Moved to San Francisco
I’ve moved to San Francisco. Why? As one of you commented, San Francisco girls are cuter than San Diego girls 
I’ll be joining DoubleTwist Ventures.
by JonLech at June 08, 2006 01:56 AM
April 06, 2006
Jon Lech Johansen
Hacker Bar
My new favourite snack: the Black Cherry Almond Clif Bar. Great for all-night reverse engineering sessions.
(I did not get paid for this blog post, but I’m hoping someone from Clif Bar & Co. will see this and send me a few boxes!)
Update: Thanks Amy!
by JonLech at April 06, 2006 01:17 AM
BlackHawk gloves
I bought these gloves a couple of weeks ago for biking. They’re great, although they’re not quick-drying as BlackHawk claims.
by JonLech at April 06, 2006 01:16 AM
April 01, 2006
Sam Hocevar
Apple-VideoLAN partnership announced, Mac VLC to be Intel only
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Paris, France (2006/04/01) - In an effort to help Apple with its Intel transition, the VideoLAN team, distributor of the industry leading cross-platform media player VLC, announced its intent to drop support for the now outdated G4 and G5 based series of Mac computers.
“We had to do something for Apple in return,” former project leader Antoine Cellerier said in a public statement earlier today. Cellerier was referring to Apple’s stance against the French DADVSI law. The controversed law, voted in March 2006 by French MPs, seriously jeopardizes VLC’s development by forbidding French citizens to use software that bypasses Digital Right Management, such as DVD encryption or the protection scheme commonly found on music bought on the Internet.
But in late March 2006, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said the DADVSI law would “result in state-sponsored piracy.” Apple then threatened to take down its French iTunes Music Store.
Despite Apple’s tendency to send cease and desist letters to every website on the Internet, the VideoLAN team immediately understood that they were in fact trying to help Free Software. “After all, they built OS X on top of FreeBSD’s cremated remains, and used what could still be saved from KDE’s bloated web browser to develop Safari, which can only mean they fully embrace Open Source,” VideoLAN developer Sam Hocevar added.
The VideoLAN team hence announced that starting from the next release, VLC would only run on Mac Intel hardware. Apple is already ahead of schedule; the Mac Intels were originally announced for June of 2006, yet that mark was beaten by almost half a year. Apple is confident VideoLAN’s move will help finish the transition. “VLC is the most downloaded OS X application. By making it Mac Intel only, we can probably make the transition even faster. Let’s not repeat the PowerPC fiasco,” an Apple spokesperson said. The M68K to PowerPC transition, initiated in the 90s, led to the so-called “fat binaries” and excruciatingly slow versions of the Mac OS.
When asked how long older versions of VLC for the G4 and G5 series of processors would remain available, a VideoLAN webmaster said, “You’d better hurry. Our software is free, but webspace and bandwidth aren’t.”
About VideoLAN: VideoLAN (http://www.videolan.org/) is a project to build open source, cross-platform multimedia tools. Their VLC media player is the most downloaded Mac OS X application according to versiontracker.com.
About Apple: Apple is the creator of the hyped and overpriced Macintosh computer. Until recently, Apple buyers could brag in front of PC users about how their PowerPC-based computer was twice as expensive, but also twice as powerful as the Intel-based counterpart. Now, thanks to the Intel transition, Apple computers are only twice as expensive.
January 30, 2006
Derk-Jan Hartman
The VideoLAN servers
For those who are interested, and just so that I remember the link. Here is a gallery and a description of the VideoLAN serverpark.
by The DJ at January 30, 2006 10:09 PM
January 29, 2006
Derk-Jan Hartman
GPL violations
So after our recent issue with the Sony Rootkit, yet again several things have been reported to us. This time someone is selling our software for $29,99 without informing the user they will simply be getting VLC media player which is free for download. Read the full story on the blog of J_K9 Linux. The other report is about the possible violation of the Elanvision EV-8000S STB, which firmware includes VLC.
by The DJ at January 29, 2006 10:43 PM
VLC is just delicious
Have you seen Del.icio.us yet? It's an online community for sharing bookmarks basically. Now you know I always have to check what VLC brings up in tools like this. Well, the results are in.
Among the different interesting tidbits, I found this link to a website describing how to RIP Windows Media based Musicvideo's from Yahoo. The tutorial is pretty extensive, and applies to most other MMS streams as well. There is even a nice Flash video showing you the exact proces.
by The DJ at January 29, 2006 10:43 PM
January 17, 2006
Derk-Jan Hartman
Google and VLC
I have always liked crawling trough Google search results for websites and images that look at, use, review, list etc. VLC in one way of another.
I have now created a small webpage that presents you with 6 random images from the Image search result of Google. It's fun to see what users do with their VLC. Give the page a whirl and see what you run into.
by The DJ at January 17, 2006 09:52 PM
VLC subtitles in Japanese or Chinese
People keep running into issues with this, even though it is described in the README.MacOSX.rtf file on the diskimage. I happened to run into a small HOWTO explaining it a bit more detailed, and with pictures. I hope that by listing it here, people will be able to find the solution faster.
by The DJ at January 17, 2006 09:45 PM
December 06, 2005
Jon Lech Johansen
Balboa Park
I’ve put up some images in my gallery from this weekend’s visit to Balboa Park. I noticed on the Mingei International Museum’s website that they have an exhibition about Norway.
by JonLech at December 06, 2005 05:09 AM
November 23, 2005
Jon Lech Johansen
Birthday Weekend
Spent my birthday weekend in the SF Bay Area.
Berkeley
by JonLech at November 23, 2005 04:50 AM
November 21, 2005
Sam Hocevar
Suspicious Activity? Indeed
I spent
the whole weekend looking for a DRM-encumbered Sony CD so that I could check
for myself whether my code was really being redistributed without permission.
I eventually found one: Suspicious Activity?, by The Bad Plus. A rather
enjoyable post-modern jazz album. I am lucky, it could have been
Céline Dion.
As expected, installing the CD’s custom player also installed a stealth aries.sys driver along with a few other interesting files such as $sys$DRMServer.exe, all hidden in a $sys$filesystem directory. I rapidly got rid of this cruft and started studying the really important file, ECDPlayerControl.ocx. It is the file Sebastian Porst and Matti Nikki found to be containing parts of mpglib, LAME, faad2, VLC...
Evidence that the DRMS code comes from VLC
There are of course obvious similarities between some functions and structures of ECDPlayerControl.ocx and the ones in VLC’s source. However, given how precise the implementation of a cryptographic protocol needs to be, the possibility that two separate implementations show many similarities must not be dismissed. The data structures and constant tables especially are likely to be identical. I think however that I found strong enough evidence that this is not the case here.
The original drms.c was written by Jon on 01/05/04. I then hacked on that file on 01/18/04 and reorganised it, also replacing the reverse-engineered MD5 and AES functions with clean implementations, then Jon added DRMSv2 support on 05/05/04 and I reorganised the code again on 05/08/04. Some of these changes were specific to VLC (not in that they made the code unusable outside of VLC, but rather that they made it possible to use an external MD5 hash provider, for instance), so they were the bits I was looking for in ECDPlayerControl.ocx.
For instance, Jon’s original code had the following instruction:
p_acei[ 4 ] = 0x5476212A;
Since all bytes of this long word are comprised between 0x20 and 0x7f, it was later rewritten like this:
char p_secret1[] = "Tv!*";
This change makes the code more human-readable because many other secrets in the Apple DRMS protocol are ASCII strings. Also, I know how to look for binaries that use the string "Tv!*", but it takes me some more time to think of a way to find binaries that use 0x5476212A. And the Sony rootkit uses the following (only relevant lines shown):
.text:100883B8 mov cl, byte ptr ds:xxxxx+4 ; 0 .text:100883C2 mov eax, dword ptr ds:xxxxx ; "Tv!*" .text:100883C8 mov [esp+70h+yyyyy], eax .text:100883DC mov [esp+7Ch+zzzzz], cl
The use of xxxxx+4 shows that ECDPlayerControl.ocx uses a string instead of a 32 bits integer to store the secret, disregarding the fact that the 5th character of the string (a null char) is never used.
Another example: in this commit I reorganised the DoExtShuffle() function, merging FourthPass() and FifthPass() and discarding a structure allocated on the stack. What is important here is that DoExtShuffle() was built by a complex combination of choices, the main purpose of which being to reduce the size of the C functions:
static void DoExtShuffle( uint32_t * p_bordel ) { uint32_t i_ret; i_ret = FirstPass( p_bordel ); SecondPass( p_bordel, i_ret ); ThirdPass( p_bordel ); FourthPass( p_bordel ); }
Note how i_ret is not reused and could be merged into the p_bordel array, or maybe SecondPass() merged into FirstPass(). This choice is definitely a legacy of how the code evolved. And the Sony equivalent: a perfect match.
.text:10089F3C xxxxx: .text:10089F3C mov ecx, esi .text:10089F3E call yyyyy .text:10089F43 push eax .text:10089F44 mov eax, esi .text:10089F46 call zzzzz .text:10089F4B add esp, 4 .text:10089F4E call ttttt .text:10089F53 call uuuuu
After having studied the Sony code for a while, I have of course gathered dozens of such examples. But I also discovered a few new things.
Where does the DRMS code come from?
The code undoubtedly comes originally from VLC, but it has traveled a lot. I would be surprised if it came directly from VLC, as no other part of VLC is included with the rootkit. And although there are parts of FAAC in the Sony code and FAAC includes VLC’s drms.c, the version currently in the FAAC CVS is horribly outdated.
Sebastian Porst also noticed a few obvious differences between the Sony code and the version of drms.c present in VLC. The most obvious being this one:
if( p_shuffle->i_version == 0x01000300 ) { DoExtShuffle( p_bordel ); }
Which became:
.text:10089F2E cmp eax, 1000300h .text:10089F33 jz short DoExtShuffle .text:10089F35 cmp eax, 1000400h .text:10089F3A jnz short skip .text:10089F3C DoExtShuffle: .text:10089F3C ... .text:10089F58 skip: .text:10089F58 ...
That 0x01000400 is a version check for 4th generation iPods firmwares. I also discovered at least 40 KB of new lookup tables that seem to be used for more buffer shuffling. At first I thought it was simply F4I’s DRM implementation, but the shuffling calls are nested with iPod hardware information retrieval from our DRMS code, so they’re really part of drms.c.
Sony distributing a DRMSv3 descrambler?
The only explanation I can think of is that someone took the VLC code, added support for an upcoming Apple DRMS format version and redistributed the software without letting the VLC authors know, probably violating the GPL (I only say that because I have not found the software yet, but I feel pretty safe in saying it).
Since it is based on GPL software, I was already entitled to ask Sony for the source code of ECDPlayerControl.ocx. But as the copyright holder of a significant part of the software they counterfeited, maybe I have a greater chance of being heard.
Not that it would be difficult to reverse-engineer it yet another time, but it would be awesome if the next opensource iTunes Music Store file player was contributed by Sony!
November 18, 2005
Jon Lech Johansen
22. Am I old enough?
I’m 22 years old today and it’s story time: When I was 17 years old I bought my first portable MP3 player. I reverse engineered the Windows driver that came with it and wrote a Linux driver. After some time I was contacted by the Singaporean company that manufactured the player. They were quite happy with my work because they had “lost contact” with the Chinese company they had outsourced driver development to. Not only did they give me their support, they wanted to hire me to write a Linux driver for their next product. I was willing to start the work immediately, but they needed my CV first due to formalities. After I sent them my CV I never heard back from them. I doubt it was due to my lack of work experience, as I had already demonstrated that I had the necessary skills. So if you were wondering ‘Old enough for what?’ after reading the title of this post, the answer is ‘Old enough to write software for a company in Singapore.’
by JonLech at November 18, 2005 05:27 PM
Sam Hocevar
The fuss about Sony’s DRM
Apparently some GPL code written by Jon and me can be found in Sony’s XCP DRM software. I have not been able to confirm this by myself (I went through the EFF’s list of Sony-BMG XCP-encumbered discs and The Dead 60s’ album seemed worth buying, but the only copy I could find in France is distributed by Deltasonic Records 2002 and did not go through Sony-BMG’s hands). I will however assume that the disassembly chunks published here and there are genuine, though this is something anyone in their right mind should check more thoroughly before blindly copying the information from blog to blog.
By the way, if anyone owns such a CD that they are willing to give away or sell, I am interested in owning at least one of them.
Is there really VLC code in XCP?
The short answer is yes. I have little doubt that the code is a derivative of VLC’s drms.c. The idea of ROT13’ing the Apple copyright string was Jon’s, and I know of no other clean-room reimplementation of Apple’s DRM.
However, it could pretty well be the code of another application that itself uses the drms.c code. It is virtually impossible to track the usage of GPL code, so the code in XCP could come from anywhere. And that other application could or could not violate the GPL, we have no idea either. The only ones who could enlighten us are First4Internet.
Is it a GPL infringement?
The first question that absolutely anyone should ask before drawing conclusions is: “are the code copying and redistribution terms really done without the authors’ consent?”. No one should ever assume anything about what Jon and I do with our code without making sure we did not relicense it to third parties under different terms.
But just to reassure everyone: I did not relicense any code from VLC under a non-GPL license.
Sony’s “evilness”
Again, we have no idea who the real culprit is, so do not draw conclusions too early. It could be:
- Sony-BMG, by buying GPLed code from First4Internet and redistributing it without complying with the GPL.
- First4Internet, by selling GPLed code to Sony-BMG under a different license.
- Absolutely anyone else, distributing VLC’s GPLed code under a different license, that somehow found its way to First4Internet.
And unless they were heavily trolling, I would like to publicly laugh at the Slashdork who decided not to buy a PS3 because of this story involving Sony. As if Microsoft’s Xbox 360 or Nintendo’s Revolution deserved it more.
The Apple copyright string
Just to make sure no one accuses Sony of violating Apple’s copyright, here is a copy of a comment I did on Slashdot about the presence of the ROT13’d string "copyright (c) Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.":
I have to make sure everyone understands why this string is here. To be fair with Sony (or whoever they mandated), it is not an attempt from them to hide the code theft. Rather, it is an attempt by Apple to prevent not only code theft but also clean-room reimplementations.
Apple’s encryption scheme includes the generation of a key. The important parts of this key come from the machine’s unique hardware information. But to prevent (at least that’s my only plausible explanation for it) people from reimplementing the scheme by using the same information, they also add this copyright string to the key generation. Reimplementing their protocol means the string has to be used.
We just store it ROT13’ed in VLC because it would be confusing to have an Apple copyright in our code. Although technically the string itself is created by Apple, it is too short to qualify for copyright.
Why do Sony’s CDs need to unscramble Apple’s iTune music?
I don’t think they need to do that. I think they just needed a free or low-cost media or music player shipped with their CD, and either VLC or some other software happened to fill the gap. The drms.c code just happened to be in there and no one bothered to remove it.
What now?
For those who expect hot sweaty action now, I am afraid I may disappoint you. The whole affair already gives Sony a very bad name, it raises public awareness of the dangers of stealth DRM and of the “respect our IP because we’re bigger than you, but we fuck with your IP because we’re bigger than you” doublespeak.
Lawsuits, or even large, friendly lawyer letters written in all caps, require money, time and energy. And I do not have any of these to waste. I prefer getting money from people who like what I do rather than from people whose doings I don’t like.
November 15, 2005
Jon Lech Johansen
Mt. Tamalpais
Went hiking in Mount Tamalpais this weekend.
by JonLech at November 15, 2005 08:44 AM
November 10, 2005
Derk-Jan Hartman
New Buildserver
We have asked for donations in the past in order to assist us in developing for the Mac OS X platform. Now all of a sudden we had to return our Xserve machine, which was doing the daily nightly builds and the buildbod commit checks. So we cut to the chase and bought ourselves a Powermac G5 1.8 Ghz Dual Processor machine.
It's standing at my apartment atm and I'm working on setting it up as the new buildserver. The G5 is lovely and really fast. HDTV is a breeze with this machine.
After we set it up as the new server, and as soon as I have a TOS cable etc, I will start working on improved Digital Audio support for VLC OSX, and then i made give Video Capture a try, since I know also own an iBot firewire webcam.
I'm not making any promises, but I think I should be able to get something usable soon.
by The DJ at November 10, 2005 04:15 PM
November 04, 2005
Derk-Jan Hartman
VLC iPod Video Conversion
As reported on tuaw.com, Phil Windley has created a script to automatically convert Tivo (or other MPEG2 sources) into iPod G5 compatible MPEG4 video files.
by The DJ at November 04, 2005 03:05 AM
October 17, 2005
Derk-Jan Hartman
DJ on Air
Hi all, it's been a long time since my last posting unfortunately. The latest news however is that I will be on the Radioshow Track21. This show is targeted at students in and around Enschede (where I live) and is broadcasted by a Local radiostation. It will be live and will begin around 19:50 CET. The subject is going to be VideoLAN and how it grew from a student pet-project into a full blown Open Source Community.
The interview is due to an article in the magazine SUM where my name was apparently mentioned in an article concerning VideoLAN.
by The DJ at October 17, 2005 02:27 PM
October 10, 2005
Sam Hocevar
Taking over libmpeg2
Meuuh and I eventually took over libmpeg2, in a totally friendly way. Our first job will be to review every patch that was submitted in the last 18 months. The biggest work will be, as with libdvdcss, to deal with MPlayer’s usual inability to split a patch into functional subsets.
October 08, 2005
Clement Stenac
The not-so-long march to ten millions
The VLC 0.8.2 downloads counter is currently at 9,775,000 and he increasing by about 1.5 per second. This means we should cross the 10 millions line on Monday. VLC 0.8.2 was released on June, 26th, so this will make about 3 months and a half. Far from Firefox statistics, of course, but quite encouraging anyway.
This is by far the most successful VLC release ever (ok, this is also the first one for which we have kept very accurate statistics). It's great to see that the popularity of VLC is still increasing steadily. VLC has gotten quite some press attention recently, especially in France with the FreePlayer by french ISP Free, but also worldwide, with Google Video for example. We are also featured on more download websites (and VLC is now the #6 most popular software on Freshmeat !)
You probably have noticed that we released VLC 0.8.4-test1, the first test release for the upcoming 0.8.4 release. We hope to release -test2 very soon now, and we expect to release VLC 0.8.4 by the end of October. This would make 4 months since the last release. It is an improvement on the latest releases, but not very successful in our goal of shortening release cycles.
This goal has become quite important for us, after the very long delays we experienced to get 0.8.0 and 0.8.2 out (0.8.1 was a quick bugfix release). We have quite succeeded in getting the features in the SVN at the time we wanted, but we should now work on improving our focus on releasing once this step is done. The Trac we use has proven to be very helpful here, and we recently set up buildbot that manages our continuous integration and nightly builds, allowing us to improve bug fixes (especially for architecture-specific bugs)
Anyway, I guess we should celebrate somehow. Any idea ?
by zorglub at October 08, 2005 10:36 PM
September 09, 2005
Derk-Jan Hartman
Going to IBC and VLC on Dutch Television
I'm going to IBC tomorrow. Ticket was free, and there should be quite some interesting stuff to see there. Jean Paul and Sigmund will be attending as well, and the guys from our very own spinoff company anevia even have a stand (#1.444). Hopefully, I can spread the word on VLC a bit more (I'll be wearing my VideoLAN T-shirt).
So I was watching the news this evening, and on channel RTL4 there is this item about gadgets on IBC. And guess what? First gadget they show is a WinCE device running VLC media player for WinCE !!!! Now THAT is wicked stuff. You can see the clip here (MMS).
by The DJ at September 09, 2005 08:14 PM
September 08, 2005
Derk-Jan Hartman
VideoLAN in the news
With a lot of popularity, comes more and more publicity it seems. Everything our friend Jon does get blown out of proportions of course. This is one of the reasons Jon only talks to a very limited set of journalists anymore.
Lets take the latest example of cracking the NSC encoding. Jon only talked to The Register about this. Unfortunatly they got a little bit too enthousiastic, and missed the point somewhat this time. Now it's funny how much such an article gets copied. Almost all other articles blindly copied this.
What is truly funny though is that friday late afternoon, I got a call on my cell...: "Good day, I'm looking for an interview with mr. Jon Lech Johansen". Right, how did this fellow get my number? Well, my website is named in Jon's Blog article on NSC. And my website is on my domain, which is registered on my name, and the registration has my phone number of course (Scary....). I explained that Jon is very difficult to reach, and that I would relay the message to Jon. We got talking a bit about the project, and he asked me some questions, and before I knew it I was giving an interview. The article is online now, and I specifically tried to correct some of the wild ideas that had grown in the online community about this NSC thing. It's a pretty decent article, with only a very few small errors.
Then there was carp.nl. A Dutch magazine that wanted an interview with us. They visited Antoine in Paris, and did a telephone interview with me. The article is now on page 22 of their latest issue (#13). It shows a bit about the culture of the VideoLAN project and makes for quite a nice read. Not always 100% accurate about the more technical things, but if you don't know a thing about Video or FOSS, you won't notice, care or be misinformed. Great publicity beyond our usual online attention. Let's hope it gets the word out even more.
It's nice that we are clearly making a stir beyond our own little circle. VLC is getting more popular. Lets hope we can all keep up, for we are not FireFox.
by The DJ at September 08, 2005 01:37 PM
September 04, 2005
Clement Stenac
VLC on "Framakey"
Framakey is a french project to have a set of free software (for Windows) on an USB key.
The software can be run directly from the key, without any risk for the system they are run on. The goal is to allow people who can't install anything on their computers (in compagnies, for example) to run free software anyway.
VLC 0.8.2 has been included on the Framakey, along with OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox, Thunderbird, CoolPlayer (audio player), Scite (text editor) and Abiword
You can either download the software packages to copy them on your own USB key (256 MB at least for the complete version, 128 MB without OpenOffice), or buy a pre-installed key from Framakey.
This initiative looks very interesting for nomad users who want to have free software everywhere.
by zorglub at September 04, 2005 10:19 AM
August 31, 2005
Derk-Jan Hartman
Multicast from Windows Media Server
Our good friend Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered the encoding used by NSC announcement files which contain the information to join Multicast Windows Media Streaming sessions. So i'm working on getting this into VLC right now and hopefully "Very Soon Now", VLC will support WMS multicast. Let's REJOICE.
Update:I now have a nsc file decoder for VLC. Next step is to get this information passed to a new connection so we can have decode the ASF in the UDP stream we receive.
by The DJ at August 31, 2005 07:46 PM
VLC 0.8.2 passes 6 million downloads
VLC media player is getting really popular now. The latest release (0.8.2) has been downloaded over 6 million times now. That truly is a lot of downloads and I think everyone in the team is really proud of that. Lets hope that we will grow and grow and one day can get close to the quality that a project like mozilla provides.
Also let us not forget that the 6 million downloads are almost all Windows and Mac OS X downloads. The linux distributions often distribute VLC themselves. And then there is the Freeplayer spin off, and the Google Video Viewer plugin, and Annodex plugins and Tryst and all those other applications that are based on the VLC source code. Lets keep going guys !
by The DJ at August 31, 2005 12:39 PM
June 26, 2005
Clement Stenac
VLC DMO module build
VLC can read some proprietary video codecs thanks to the DMO (DirectMedia Object) interface, under Windows.
VLC has support for integration with mplayer's DLL loader, in order to be able to read these codecs under Linux.
I made some builds of the DMO module for Linux, so as to make it easier for people, as this build is quite tricky.
More details on http://clement.stenac.org/projects/videolan/dmo.html
by zorglub at June 26, 2005 06:07 PM
June 15, 2005
Clement Stenac
Live downloads counter
I felt inspired tonight and finally fixed the downloads database for VLC. I added a small RSS feed with the up to date downloads number (since end of January) and hacked the ffcounter script to generate an odometer for VLC downloads.
That's really funny stuff :)
VLC does not perform that bad, with approximately 0.6 downloads/second (Firefox is around 3.5).
I will provide some more detailed reports using this database, that would be too bad having data and not using it
by zorglub at June 15, 2005 09:40 PM
April 25, 2004
Sam Hocevar
VLC in sarge
VLC has entered Debian testing yesterday. It was a real nightmare due to the GNOME/KDE/Mozilla/whatever build dependencies, but it eventually did it. The last update was more than two years ago!
March 09, 2004
Sam Hocevar
CVS to SVN and back again
I finished migrating the VideoLAN CVS repositories to SVN. Since a lot of people were still using the anonymous CVS to retrieve the code, I had to write post-commit scripts to reinject SVN commits back into the CVS repository. I finished my SVN to CVS and back again HOWTO which still has limitations but already works pretty well.
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