46th VideoLAN report

A new week, a new weekly report about the VLC and VideoLAN communities!

Vienna Meeting

This week-end was the Q2 meeting of the VideoLAN asso, hosted in Vienna, by PSPDFKit.

We gathered to fix pending issues for VLC 3.0, and we worked on the mobile apps and the VideoLAN server infrastructure. It was a great week-end!

Features

VLC

During the week-end, we released VLC 2.2.4, to fix 2 security issues, one in VLC, one in a 3rd party library! It is already released and pushed to our users.

Core and libVLC

The input core was modified to support network slaves, aka external subtitles or audio tracks, over the network. In the past, it was only working for local subtitles.

The libVLC API added for this is called libvlc_media_player_add_slave .

The core threading code was improved for recent versions of Windows: it can use futeces and generic semaphore, starting from Windows 8.

We also added the libvlc_media_player_(get|set)_role calls for libVLC, to set the media role (notification, video, audio) that are reflected to the audio output mixer. This is notably used for the PulseAudio output.

Finally, the preparser was reworked to allow interruption and have a default timeout. Applications can also now cancel their preparsing requests with libvlc_MetadataCancel .

Modules

The Qt interface received the first renderers selection dialog. You should be able to detect your ChromeCast from this interface, and stream to it.

The UPnP module was improved to support more type of servers, more metadata per item and the code was heavily cleaned. (The library we use is still very bad though).

The OS X interface got new HUD panels and widgets for the dark mode.

Finally, we added the first AppStream Metadata for Linux distributions, a few Qt minor changes, support for GoPro highlights chapters in MP4 and some OS X interface fixes.

Android

Nothing very exciting on Android, just the beta 1.9.13, 2.0.0-rc1 and 2.0.0-rc2 releases, pushed to the store.

For 1.9.13, we mostly focused on activating subtitles over the network, and improving the support for subtitles.

2.0.0-rc1 was mostly focused on fixing the UPnP support and 2.0.0-rc2 was minor fixes for bugs reported by several beta testers.

WinRT

On WinRT, we reimplemented the playlists management, and the support for playlists in the PlaybackService.

The Search page, that was hidden, is now visible again, and we support favorites for streams and servers, like the Android version.

The notifications and toasts were reworked to be less intrusive, and Cortana support was improved.

Finally, the new equalizer got a facelift.

And of course, numerous bugs were fixed, so we can have a proper release soon!

That's already quite a bit for last week, see you next!