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, ...
February 21, 2014
Felix Paul Kühne
VLC media player for Mac OS X, versions 2.1.4 and 2.0.10
Today, we released 2 versions of VLC media player for Mac OS X targeting different client systems. Version 2.1.4 This is a small bug fix release, which improves an important regression regarding DVD playback and improves compatibility with HUffYUV contents … Continue reading 
January 08, 2014
Rémi Duraffort
@FOSDEM
We will be at FOSDEM to talk about PRoot and some other tools based on it. Cedric will do a Lightning talk saturday about syscall instrumentation. He will present some tools, based on syscall instrumentation, that we develop and use at STMicroelectronics: PRoot, emulate chroot, bind mount and binfmt_misc for non-root users CARE (aka.... Read @FOSDEM
December 24, 2013
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
The state of the open Blu-Ray playback in 2013
With the holiday season approaching, we've seen a few library releases for the open Blu-Ray playback libraries!
Releases
libbluray
2013 has been a good year for libbluray. After a release in April, one in September, we just released libbluray 0.5.0!
A very large part of this release is related to BD-J, the interactive menus of the Blu-Ray specification. Numerous improvements on portability, on menu support, on overlays and system integration are also part of this release.
The Java part of libbluray might even work on Windows now!
Last but not least, libbluray might try to open libmmbd from MakeMKV for decryption.
libaacs release
A new libaacs version has been released too: 0.7.0!
With this one, we are now approaching feature-completion on the AACS standard. One of the main feature that was missing is the support for bus encryption. Additionally, it now supports device keys, internal keys and verification of message authentication codes to have a more precise control of the device.
Maybe libaacs should now focus on other AACS real-life implementation than the Blu-Ray one. 
libbdplus library
A new library named libbdplus has emerged too! This is the last part of the triforce.
This is a totally new library developed to study and research around the BD+ Virtual Machine-based DRM technology.
It implements some of the "BD+ System Specifications" and has been developed in a legal way.
Absolutely NO KEYS and NO configuration files are part of this library.
It's quite early stage, so expect rough edges when working with it
How to play a Blu-Ray
So the question now is: How do I play a Blu-Ray?
VLC + Closed tools
The first and simpler solution is to use non open-source software, like MakeMKV or AnyDVD-HD and use VLC to play the Blu-Ray.
It will be simpler with VLC 2.2.0 compiled with libbluray 0.5.0, but that should come soon
Free and Open source solutions
To do that, you will need:
- a libaacs compiled for your system,
- a libaacs KEYDB.cfg file with the keys for your Blu-Ray,
- a libbdplus compiled for your system,
- the libbdplus configuration files for your Blu-Ray disk generation,
and VLC, of course...
Have fun! Happy Holidays!
December 02, 2013
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Readying VLC on WinRT
WinRT platforms
So, here is an update about our port on WinRT platforms.
I now say WinRT platforms
, but that means:
- Windows 8/8.1 ModernUI
Metro
- Windows Phone 8
- XBox One? (who knows?)
The WinRT platforms have mostly 2 flavors: x86 and ARM. And we'll try to be on both of them.
VLC port status
We have now:
- support for all usual VLC formats, including MKV and FLAC,
- audio :D
- video, (with correct aspect ratios),
- basic subtitles support,
- file and network stream support,
- a simple, but working UI,
- passing the WACK certification,
- working on Windows 8 and 8.1.
Screenshots
Those are the current screenshots, and you can even see some actual bugs.
Readying the release
We are preparing the release, fixing the important bugs, notably an audio crash that got us rejected from the store. We have numerous small bugs that are annoying, notably some thumbnails, crashing and the audio browsing part.
We hope to work on it until this week-end and then submit once again.
Open source
As soon as we have one release out, all the code will be open sourced, and we will welcome contributions, notably on the UI/XAML part.
ARM
At the same time, we're spending quite a bit of time to get a working version for ARM, so we can deploy on Windows RT too. We don't know exactly how much time, but we hope it's a matter of weeks. The issues are mostly compiler related.
Windows Phone should not need a lot of extra work for the API, but will require some work for files management. Adaptation of the basic UI should be simple enough.
Thanks a lot.