VLC for Android

Triumvirat update 6 months after the first libbdplus release, and my post about the open Blu-Ray playback stack state, we've updated a bit the libraries. We have seen, in the last weeks, the release of: libbluray 0.6.0 libaacs 0.7.1 libbdplus 0.1.1 ... [More] So, the three libraries of the stack have been updated with a few important features. What's new For libaacs and libbdplus, the updates are minor and are mostly for fixing compilation against new libgcrypt, build system issues and a speed issue in libaacs when using MMC to retrieve the MKB. For libbluray, this update is a major update. This release is the first release where the BD-J (the Java interactivity layer) is actually usable. The Java code was tested on Linux, Windows and MacOS, and it should work with J2ME and J2SE and with both the OpenJDK and Sun/Oracle's JDK projects. It's quite big, since it adds more 200 commits, mostly in the Java code base (the diff is more than 15kLoC). In addition to BD-J, it fixes numerous issues on Win32, improves cross-compilation and allows to compile without libxml. Photos In addition, here are 2 photos of VLC on a rPI, with a USB BD-drive, using VLC 2.2.0 hardware acceleration for decoding. Note: this is not my setup. Video Pierre Dandumont made a couple of video of a Blu-Ray with menus. [Less]

Few months back I started working on a new project for the VideoLAN organization called Mirrorbits. Fast-forward, now in July 2014 it is finally online and open-sourced on Github! Mirrorbits is a geographic download redirector written in Go. Let me ... [More] rephrase that, it’s an application server that finds the best mirror to redirect a given user based on its location, pretty much like a CDN but using a pure software stack. For example, to distribute VLC we have to rely on a bunch of mirrors (around 70) located around the world and to make you able to download VLC faster we use mirrorbits to find the most suitable mirror for you. That means finding a mirror close to you, that is up and which has the file you requested. At first glance it can seem to be a pretty easy task to achieve but in reality there’s a lot of things to take care of. Take a look at the main features to find out all the things it can do. The software is still in a early stage but is already used in production since April of this year, handling an average of 1 million downloads each day without a single hiccup and with a very low footprint. The system does not require a lot of attention and can run for months without human intervention since most of the usual tasks are fully automated. If a mirror goes down it will temporary be disabled until it recovers, all the scans of the mirrors (via rsync / ftp) are done in the background, … Unlike other redirectors that only support the standard HTTP redirect, mirrorbits also has a JSON query API to be able to generate your own customized download page for showing alternate mirrors or a sponsor logo along with a countdown. On the control side it has a simple but yet powerful CLI to do the general maintenance. Usage: mirrorbits [OPTIONS] COMMAND [arg...] A smart download redirector. Commands: add        Add a new mirror disable   Disable a mirror edit        Edit a mirror enable    Enable a mirror export    Export the mirror database list         List all mirrors refresh   Refresh the local repository reload    Reload configuration remove   Remove a mirror scan      (Re-)Scan a mirror upgrade  Seamless binary upgrade version   Print version informations But that’s not all, it also has a web interface to get details about any served file, get real-time download statistics and see the number of downloads for each mirror. Feel free to use mirrorbits for your own purpose but keep in mind that it’s still a very young project. And since I did not have the time to write a documentation yet you can contact me directly by email to get personal support To get the latest news about the project you can either star it on Github or follow the twitter account @mirrorbits. [Less]

Few months back I started working on a new project for the VideoLAN organization called Mirrorbits. Fast-forward, now in July 2014 it is finally online and open-sourced on Github! Mirrorbits is a geographic download redirector written in Go. Let me ... [More] rephrase that, it’s an application server that finds the best mirror to redirect a given user based on its location, pretty much like a CDN but using a pure software stack. For example, to distribute VLC we have to rely on a bunch of mirrors (around 70) located around the world and to make you able to download VLC faster we use mirrorbits to find the most suitable mirror for you. That means finding a mirror close to you, that is up and which has the file you requested. At first glance it can seem to be a pretty easy task to achieve but in reality there’s a lot of things to take care of. Take a look at the main features to find out all the things it can do. The software is still in a early stage but is already used in production since April of this year, handling an average of 1 million downloads each day without a single hiccup and with a very low footprint. The system does not require a lot of attention and can run for months without human intervention since most of the usual tasks are fully automated. If a mirror goes down it will temporary be disabled until it recovers, all the scans of the mirrors (via rsync / ftp) are done in the background, … Unlike other redirectors that only support the standard HTTP redirect, mirrorbits also has a JSON query API to be able to generate your own customized download page for showing alternate mirrors or a sponsor logo along with a countdown. On the control side it has a simple but yet powerful CLI to do the general maintenance. Usage: mirrorbits [OPTIONS] COMMAND [arg...] A smart download redirector. Commands: add Add a new mirror disable Disable a mirror edit Edit a mirror enable Enable a mirror export Export the mirror database list List all mirrors refresh Refresh the local repository reload Reload configuration remove Remove a mirror scan (Re-)Scan a mirror stats Show download stats upgrade Seamless binary upgrade version Print version informations But that’s not all, it also has a web interface to get details about any served file, get real-time download statistics and see the number of downloads for each mirror. Feel free to use mirrorbits for your own purpose but keep in mind that it’s still a very young project. And since I did not have the time to write a documentation yet you can contact me directly by email to get personal support. To get the latest news about the project you can either star it on Github or follow the twitter account @mirrorbits. [Less]

Intro VLC for Android is on the store since quite some time, and it is quite popular, notably knowing it is only a Beta release. After more than 6 months since the last release, we've developed a new version that is changing a lot of things. ... [More] This could be mostly considered as a Second main release of VLC for Android. The most important parts are a new UI, closer to a modern Android theme and a rewritten hardware acceleration. New interface This release has a new interface, available in dark or white colors. The UI is closer to an Android look and will evolve more in the future. Video Browser The video browser has seen a simple evolution: Audio Browser The audio browser has evolved quite a bit: We even have an equalizer: And a playlist that you can edit with gestures: Video Player We also updated the video player: Hardware acceleration The second important change is the introduction of full hardware acceleration. With this release, we've been able to decode 4K streams on a Nexus 5 or a BayTrail tablet. Hardware acceleration is now enabled by default on 4.3 and 4.4. You can access it on 4.1 and 4.2 in preferences. It also features the better looking subtitles support that was added on VLC on the desktop. Software decoding has been accelerated too. Misc This release supports Widi and HDMI screens; it fixes some audio bugs on 2.3 and SD cards misdetections. Have fun! Versions This release of VLC for Android is the 17th Beta. It's numbered 0.9.0, since it's the last important version before the 1.0.0 release. It's available everywhere, except in the US, but will be pushed as a staging release on the store. It will be finally available in the US with our next release. VLC for Android is compatible from Android 2.1 to 4.4 Get it VLC for Android [Less]

François Cartégnie and myself will be holding a keynote session at the next Hong Kong Open Source Conference.

After the first beta release a couple of days ago, a second build fixing the most important crashes has been submitted to the store, for certification. It should notably fix the crash on start, on some machines, but other stability issues, on the ... [More] music side too! We'd like to thank the new contributors that helped. It should appear automagically in a few hours on the store. Next release, next week! Have a nice week-end! [Less]

Oh boy, this has been a long and bumpy ride! Today, the first Beta of VLC for WinRT is getting deployed on the store. As many of you know, the road to come to this point has been long... Very long. I've been driving or helping some ports of VLC ... [More] on mobile, but this port has been the hardest, by an order of magnitude. I'll speak a bit more about the lateness of this port, another time. Today, I'll introduce a bit to this application. Features This application, version 0.2.0, is a BETA stage of the port of libVLC on WinRT. WinRT is the runtime of Windows 8/8.1 Metro/ModernUI, Windows Phone 8 and Xbox 1. As this is a beta, some features are still not perfectly stable, but we are working on that. We thought we should share it with the users, so that people could test and help us. This application: works on Windows 8.0 and 8.1: too many people are still on 8.0, so we had to use that. This decreases the stability of the application, though... is compiled for Intel x86 CPUs: Windows RT version will follow as soon as we are able to compile it. ARM version will also apply to Windows Phone. plays all video and audio formats of VLC, including MKV, Ogg and Mov files or FLAC and MPC; supports the same codecs as the VLC application for desktop, from MPEG-1 to H.265, through WMV3 and VC-1; supports multiple-audio tracks selection; supports embedded subtitles; supports Background Audio playback; features a easy-to-navigate but complete UI, notably for audio browsing; supports Live Tiles! supports removable storage and DLNA servers. However, there are a few limitations: This app is currently slow, and is slower than VLC for desktop for video decoding and has no hardware acceleration; Subtitles support is not very good yet, and notably it only supports embedded subtitles; this is our major point of focus for now. Audio does not seem to work in all configurations; Playlists and streams are not supported in the UI (they are present in the core) It's clearly not as stable as it should be. We are working on all those points, but notably on subtitles and audio quality and stability. Since we now have a release, it will be easier to do releases quite often, as soon as we can. We also have longer terms goal to work on, and we'll share them when we know more We hope you like this application, and if you don't, we'll fix that soon [Less]

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 →

Today, we released a small update of VLC for iOS. It solves the most important regressions in last week’s 2.2 major release, but also includes a major improvement: full initial support of 64bit aka AArch64 aka arm64 on late 2013′s … Continue reading →

Today, we published version 2.2 of VLC for iOS on the App Store. It features a re-designed interface for iOS 7, which we demonstrated in early November last year. Since then, we took the time for further improvements, polishing and … Continue reading →