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, ...
December 03, 2019
Announcing VLC 3.2
Geoffrey Métais
VLC 3.2 is the second feature update for VLC 3. This update focused on polishing the user interface, adding some more features to Android TV and chromebooks and improving network browsing.
Under the hood, the VLC app is now (almost) 100% written in kotlin!
UI redesign, including player and TV browsers
Android TV
The browsing on Android TV has been made easier and more efficient.
You can now browse your media, filter them, jump to headers in a brand new screen.
When listening music, a Now playing line now displays media currently played
Players
On phones and tablets, the video player interface has been modernized and the controls have been reorganized.
The audio player design has also been improved.
Playlists
The playlist now has redesigned covers and can be easily modified.
Equalizer
The equalizer UI has been completely reworked and is now more pleasant to see and to use!
Media info
The media information screen has been redesigned to be clearer.
Chromebook
We added the support for desktop multi-selection with ctrl and shift. We also implemented most of the VLC desktop player keyboard shortcuts.
The support for external devices has also been improved.
You can read more about this on the Android developer story
Group videos by name feature
The videos can be grouped by name or by folder allowing you to find the right video quicker. This implementation is quite basic right now, next feature update will improve it to have grid view for any king of videos grouping.
Voice search on TV
The Medialibrary content is now searchable from TV launcher.
Cleaner media titles
The media titles are cleaned up for a better readability. Medialibrary now removes files extension and common garbage keywords from video files title.
Improved SMBv2/3 support
The SMB support has been improved to provide a better network browsing experience. There should be no conflict between SMBv1 and v2/v3 anymore. And login process has been improved too.
Under the hood
LibVLC has been updated, to get latest fixes, security patches and performance enhancements.
The whole Android app is now 100% written in kotlin! (but the medialibrary and libvlc API bindings remain in Java, to not induce kotlin dependency)
We also improved the architecture by continuing our Android Arch components integration and by the use of kotlin coroutines.
October 29, 2019
dav1d 0.5.1: more speed!
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
A few reminders about dav1d
If you follow this blog, you should know everything about dav1d.
The VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have been working on a new AV1 decoder, dav1d, to be the best and fastest decoder.
0.5.1
2 weeks ago, we released dav1d 0.5.0.
With 0.5.0, we showed that we were between 3x and 5x faster than aomdec on desktop CPUs, including 32bit CPUs, and between 2.5x and 3x faster on Android and iOS 64bit phones.
We even showed we were a lot faster than the new gav1 decoder on Android 64bit.
However, there were 2 cases where dav1d was not the best:
- desktop without SSSE3 capabilities, aka very old CPUs, in single-thread,
- Android phones in 32bits, in single-thread.
0.5.1 is a small release focused on those cases.
0.5.1 gets up to 50% speed improvements on SSE2 CPUs, which should make dav1d faster than aomdec in all desktop cases, from C to AVX-2.
At the same time, 0.5.1 gets up to 41% speed improvements on ARMv7 CPUs, which makes dav1d at least as fast as gav1.
Of course, in multi-thread, we were already faster 
So, yes, dav1d is now faster than all the other decoders in all cases.
October 14, 2019
dav1d 0.5.0 release: fastest!
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
tl;dr: dav1d is getting even faster
If you want a quick summary of this post, about our AV1 decoder:
- dav1d is still ready for production, and getting used more and more,
- dav1d has a speed gain of 12% on ARM64 mobile CPUs,
- a gain of 22%-40% on SSSE3 processors
- and another gain of 4-7% on AVX-2 processors, which was already quite fast.
Read the following for more details...
A few reminders about dav1d
If you follow this blog, you should know everything about dav1d. Two months after 0.4.0, and Four months after the 0.3.0 release, we show our new release: 0.5.0.
AV1 is a new video codec by the Alliance for Open Media, composed of most of the important Web companies (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, Mozilla...). AV1 has show to be 20% better than the HEVC codec, but the patents license is totally free, while HEVC patents licenses are very complex to acquire.
The VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have started to work on a new decoder, dav1d, to be the best decoder.
0.5.0
The release 0.3.0 was a very solid release, bringing huge gains in performance, and getting AV1 decoding ready for primetime.
0.4.0 (which I did not blog about, sorry) brought 15% gains on ARM64 and notably reduced the RAM usage by half.
This new release, 0.5.0, aka "Asiatic Cheetah", is bringing even more speed improvements to AV1 decoding.
On AVX-2, I know I said already 2 times that we were at the maximum speed, but we got even faster, notably thanks to improvements on MSAC and CoefDecode. The gains range from 3% to 7% depending on the content.
On SSSE3, we have merged now most of the assembly functions, for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. This gives improvements ranging from 20% to 40% on SSSE3.
You can now see that our SSSE3 performance is quite close to our AVX-2 performance. This is, of course, very CPU dependent.
Because you shouldn't blindly believe me, you should really see the Phoronix article on our release.
As you can see, depending on the content, we're between 3 and 5 times faster than aomdec, and 8 times faster than gav1 on desktop CPUs.
ARM64 performance
On ARM64, for mobile, we've continued to merge ASM code too. We've done all the major functions in ASM now.
The speed improvements from 0.3.0 to 0.5.0 are close to 15% in Single-Thread. This can give improvements around 20% in Multi-Thread, depending on the CPU and the content.
If you look at other ARMv8 CPU, we're almost at 1080p30 for the Chimera sample:
AV1 decoding on Android: gav1
As you might have heard, there is a new player in town: Google released gav1 decoder, "optimized" for Android.
As you can see here, on ARM64, the architecture of all the recent smartphones, dav1d is beating gav1 quite largely:
It seems that gav1 is slightly faster on ARM32, but no recent device is running ARM32. So what's the point?
On iOS, we've measured between 30% and 170% increase in Single Thread.
Next?
We need to keep improving, because it will be fun. The next targets for improvements are SSE2 and ARM32, because we still have gains there.
A release in the next 2 months, maybe?
September 19, 2019
VLC for iOS 3.2: a new hope
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
A new release: 3.2!
VLC for iOS is our port of VLC on the iDevices and has been around for quite some time, and is quite popular.
However, lately, the application development had a bit slowed-down and the interface was outdated. So, we decided to do a massive refresh on the code and on the interface.
Here comes VLC for iOS 3.2!
Interface
This release gives the first part of the interface refresh, focusing notably on the audio and video collection views.
The audio view features a full audio media library, similar to the Android version of VLC, sorting by Artists, Albums, Genres and so on.
As you can see, this is more fitting for modern version of iOS. In addition, you can see that the main menu has moved to a bottom tabbar, instead of the side menu.
The playlists have their own entry on the tab, with network (NAS, URLs, Cloud) and settings.
Dark/Light
Whether you prefer the dark or the light path of the force, we added both modes to VLC:
After?
There are still a lot of changes to be done in the interface, notably for the network section and the video player.
But we couldn't wait to have everything fixed in a single version. Therefore, those views will be refreshed in the version 3.3.
Also, missing features will be added, depending on the user reports.
Under the hood
We focus on the interface, but in this release, a lot of the work was not visible, and was done to improve the code and simplify the future evolutions of the application.
First, as the name indicates, this release is based on libVLC 3, like the current desktop version.
It is not based yet on VLC 4.0, the development version of VLC, as VLC 4.0 is not ready yet.
However, a very large number of bugs have been fixed specifically for the iOS port of VLC, in the VLC 3.0 branch
Swift
The biggest change in the codebase is the move to Swift for all the new code added to the project, in addition to some migration from Obj-C to Swift for some internal classes.
You should look at the changes on the gitlab project.
MediaLibrary
The media management for this version of VLC has moved to the medialibrary project, written in C++, common to Android and iOS, and soon the desktop version of VLC.
This new library replaces the medialibrarykit project.
As it is written in C++, a wrapper for the medialibrary was created, in Obj-C, to be able to use it in our application.
Test it
Because of the large amount of changes, there are probably numerous bugs in this release, so please test and report, so we can fix it quickly!
August 25, 2019
VLC plug-in for YoutubeDL
Rémi Denis-Courmont
Just a little something I whipped up during my spare time... This VLC plug-in uses YoutubeDL to extract videos and music from websites, supporting a whole lot more sites than VLC's own Lua parsers do.
June 10, 2019
VLC adaptive HTTP User-Agent injection vulnerability
Rémi Denis-Courmont
VLC 3.0.6 suffers from an HTTP request injection vulnerability.
June 09, 2019
Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2019
Rémi Denis-Courmont
I will be giving a talk on VLC media player in cooperation with the VideoLAN foundation at the upcoming Hong Kong Open Source Conference on 14-15 June 2016. Follow the link to sign up. See you there.