VLC for Android

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 ... [More] 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). [Less]

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 ... [More] 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. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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. [Less]

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 ... [More] "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. [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 ! [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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 ... [More] 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 [Less]

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!

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.