Planet VideoLAN

Jean-Baptiste Kempf: VLC 1.0.3 is out!

JBK — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:40:00 +0000

Again? A release? Why ?

Instead of enumerating the features that VLC 1.0.3 brings you, let’s talk about why we had to do yet another release.

Speeding the development

With the 1.0.x branch, we decided that we would speed up the release cycle for minor versions, for a few reasons:

we didn’t want major bugs to stay around for too long,
we find it easier to track regressions,
we can fix crashes and potential security issues in a better timely fashion.

That doesn’t mean we were careless about the quality of older releases, it means that now we care MORE about user feedback and quality. This is unlikely to change…

Therefore, since 1.0.0 has been out, we have had:

1.0.1, 3 weeks after 1.0.0.
1.0.2, 8 weeks after 1.0.1.
1.0.3, 1 month after 1.0.2.

1.0.3 is important for Windows users

On Windows, VLC up to 1.0.2 used a way to scale the video that seems to be unsupported by the lastest drivers for Windows 7 (and now affects some Vista drivers too, because they backported the improvements…) and therefore the quality of the video was very bad and pixelated. VLC 1.0.3 fixes that.

Moreover, since VLC has now earned the logo for Windows 7 compatibility, we had to fix this huge bug. :D

I hope you understand our point and have fun with it.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf: VLC: CDDB on Windows!

JBK — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:28:00 +0000

CD-Audio

Audio-CD have usually two main ways to get the meta-data associated with the tracks:

embedded CD-Text information
online, with CDDB protocol, using FreedDB

VLC and Audio-CD

VLC has had 2 main Audio-CD modules, named CDDA and CDDAX, one using libcdio, the other not.

On windows, because of the difficulty to get libcdio, we use CDDA. But CDDA didn’t have CD-Text support. And libcddb didn’t work for us, at all.

So, on Windows, it used to be no CD-text, no CDDB…

Part one: VLC 1.0.0

VLC 1.0.0 has seen the addition of CD-Text for the CDDA module, and Windows version got it.

Part two: VLC 1.1.0

VLC 1.1.0 will see the addition of the CDDB support for VLC for Windows, since the fixes for libcddb and regex have just been done, tested and pushed by your servant on the main tree of VLC!

Yeah!

Conclusion

While VLC 0.9.x on WIndows didn’t had much to get information from CDs on Windows, VLC 1.1.x will have both CD-Text and CDDB to get informations from your Audio-CDs.

Of course, VLC isn’t the best for audio, but improving can’t hurt, can it?

Jean-Baptiste Kempf: VideoLAN and April

JBK — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:25:00 +0000

This is a short post topic about the VideoLAN association.

What is April ?

Pioneer of free software in France, April has been since 1996 a major player in the democratization and the spread of Free Software and open standards to the general public, professionals and institutions in the French-speaking world. In the digital era that is ours, it also aims to inform the public on the dangers of an exclusive appropriation of information an knowledge by private interests. The association is made up of individuals, companies, associations and organizations from various backgrounds who share the values of freedom.

VideoLAN and April

As of today, the VideoLAN association (or non-profit organization) is now a full member of the April association.

We have worked together quite a few times, and you might have seen the April’s campaigns on videolan.org, but we weren’t officially a member.

However, now that VideoLAN has a clean association and status, we were able to formalize this relationship.

Let’s hope it will be for the best.

Rémi Denis-Courmont: VLC 1.0.3 meets udev

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:30:03 +0000

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.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf: Meet me in SF bay area soon

JBK — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:41:00 +0000

Hello fellow readers and VideoLAN fans,

This is a very short post to tell you that I will be around San Francisco / Bay Area for a few days at the end of the month.

So, if you need / want to see me or need to discuss VideoLAN matters, please contact me as soon as possible.

Konstantin Pavlov: Using VDPAU via VAAPI in VLC

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:15:38 +0000

This post describes the way to enable and utilize vaapi support in VLC to use with vdpau.

1. Get http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/libva/libva-latest.tar.gz
2. Build libva-latest with patches applied from debian/patches/ (for i in debian/patches/*; patch -p1 < $i;)
3. Get http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/vdpau-video/vdpau-video-latest.tar.gz
4. Build vdpau-video-latest against libva from 1-2.
5. Check if vainfo output looks something like this:

thresh@snowwhite ~ $ /home/thresh/sandbox/bin/vainfo
libva: libva version 0.31.0-sds3
Xlib:  extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /home/thresh/sandbox/lib/va/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA API version: 0.31
vainfo: Driver version: Splitted-Desktop Systems VDPAU backend for VA API - 0.5.2
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Simple              : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                : VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            : VAEntrypointVLD

6. Patch ffmpeg with http://git.altlinux.org/people/thresh/packages/ffmpeg.git?p=ffmpeg.git;a=commit;h=edccd9dc979e04f0d3446074a413c524aca6984b .
7. Build ffmpeg against libva from 1-2.
8. Get latest VLC from git master.
9. Configure VLC with --enable-libva and build it.
10. Test vlc with some h264 file: amongst other things, it should output something similar to:

[0xb22007ec] avcodec decoder: Using VA API version 0.29 for hardware decoding.

11. ...
12. PROFIT.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf: VLC and Windows 7 Logo

JBK — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 09:07:00 +0000

Compatible with Windows 7

The new operating system from Microsoft Windows 7 will be out this month.

As every time with Windows, there is a new Logo program for certification. As opposed to Vista, where they were 5 or 6 different logos, there is just one logo for everyone.

VLC 1.0.2 has been tested against the testing suite and was considered as "Compatible with Windows 7". This just mean that VLC conforms to the specifications and tests from Microsoft. It is supposed to check for common issues to minimize the number of crashes, hangs, and reboots and is compliant with Windows 7 64-bit.
VLC also install and uninstall in the correct way on Windows 7.

Of course, this should be transparent for all users, but it will matter for people upgrading older install of Windows to Windows 7. This also shows the quality that can be managed in open source community.

Works with Windows Vista

At the same time, VLC also got the "Works with Windows VIsta" Logo. I am not sure it is really of any interest now. :D

VLC issues on Windows 7

However, be careful, VLC still has issues on Windows 7, because of many broken drivers, made by major hardware makers. It can show pixizelated outputs when rescaling. Please change the video output to OpenGL and restart VLC as a work-around.

Rémi Denis-Courmont: VLC on smartphones

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:30:03 +0000

Increasingly often, the owner of a smartphone asks where/when/if the VLC port for his/her gadget is available...

Jean-Paul Saman: Meet people from the VideoLAN team on T-DOSE 2009 (3 and 4 October)

jpsaman — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:17:50 +0000

In a few days time T-DOSE 2009 will start. The dutch based conference is being held for the fourth year in a row and has interesting talks. If you want to meet people from VideoLAN project and know more about VLC 1.0 then meet us at the booth. People from VideoLAN team will be present at the T-Dose conference in the next days. For more information on T-DOSE schedule visit this link.

Rémi Denis-Courmont: See you at Maemo summit 2009!

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:30:03 +0000

I will be attending Maemo summit 2009 and presenting the Ofono project. It will be held in Amsterdan, Netherlands on the 9th, 10th and 11th of October.

Jean-Paul Saman: VLC media player wins "tim Award" at PC-WELT event

jpsaman — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:01:55 +0000

On 30 October 2008 VLC media player won a "tim Award" in category "Multimedia Software" at PC-WELT event. The awards were announced during a gala diner at "Bayerische Hof" in Munich. Two famous german TV presenters hosted the event. The VideoLAN team is very honored by winning this award and wants to thank its user base for giving us this token of your appreciation. VLC media player could not have won this award without the support and dedication of its users and Open Source developers.

Read more about the event on PC-WELT website.

Konstantin Pavlov: конструктор

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 17:39:09 +0000

вчера играл в лего с ip-камерой axis 231d.
умопомрачительная конструкция у нее, на самом деле + еще кронштейн и внешний защитный корпус.
к вечеру, впрочем, собрал. vlc, как обычно, рулит. в 0.8.6 (-test1, кстати, будет доступен на выходных) вроде бы стала работать перекодировка на лету из mjpeg в mpeg4 (хотя, может это и эта камера поумнее того, что у нас стояло до этого). в результате пол-офиса втыкало сначала в меня и ноутбук, а потом в красиво нарисованный листик с "работать !".

сегодня же весь день пытался пробросить broadcast'ы внутрь openvz'шного контейнера.
получилось, попутно еще освоил и бриджевание brctl'ом. оказалось, что с интерфейсов сбриджеванных надо сначала убрать адреса. =)

так и живем -- после отпуска (хоть и мини-) производительность таки вырастает, да.