Planet VideoLAN

VLC plug-in for PipeWire

Rémi Denis-Courmont

The first release of the VLC PipeWire plug-in is now available for testing, providing a native PipeWire audio output.

March 31, 2022 05:26 PM

VLC plug-in for YT-DLP

Version 3 of the VLC YTDL plug-in is now available. This switches to YT-DLP as backend and brings a few minor fixes.

March 31, 2022 05:23 PM

VLC media player for iOS, iPadOS and tvOS version 3.3

Felix Paul Kühne

After a long time, I have exciting things to share!

VLC media player for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Apple TV is receiving a major update on the App Store today. As always, it is completely free of charge in all countries and the source code is here.

We spent a bit of effort to bring the update to iOS 9 as there seem to be many people still using the 2nd generation iPad or the original iPad mini for video and also even iPhone 4S – so those are the oldest devices we still support – like in our last major release 2 years ago! It will even run faster than before now.

VLC 3.3 on iPhone 4S

In this update, we added a completely rewritten video playback user interface that simplifies and modernizes the user experience. Additionally, we add support for the SFTP and NFS protocols for media shares and change the network stacks for UPnP, SMB and FTP shares – this improves reliability but also adds the often requested download feature from shares to the local storage.

Further, we added a full black UI theme for OLED devices and access to media stored locally on iOS / iPadOS devices outside the application scope. This includes external USB storage devices.

Full black UI theme on iPhone 13

In our mission to support everything possible in multimedia, we also added very special interesty features to this release, such as SAT>IP support including custom channel lists, RTSP streaming with enforced TCP mode and modified the white point adaption mode on supported devices. You can also list more than 500 files in your folder on Dropbox and Google Drive now. The full change log is here.

VLC 3.3 on iPad Pro, iPhone 13 and iPhone 4S

Along side the major update for iOS and iPadOS, today we also updated our port to Apple TV. It includes all the lower level improvements as well as quite a few smaller improvements and refinements.

March 21, 2022 12:15 PM

Running VLC on RISC-V

Rémi Denis-Courmont

VLC builds on RISC-V already. Next step would be testing in an emulator or simulator...

March 13, 2022 06:32 PM

Building VLC for RISC-V

Rémi Denis-Courmont

Support for a whole new instruction set architecture (ISA) is a somewhat rare occurence in VLC development...

February 15, 2022 08:23 PM

FFmpeg 5.0

Jean-Baptiste Kempf

FFmpeg 5.0 release

Today, FFmpeg made a new release, numbered 5.0, called Lorentz.

This release is a major release, with numerous API changes, a few new features, and because we hope to have this one as LTS.

Big API changes and deprecations

FFmpeg has had a lot of API changes during its history, but the project is very careful about those deprecations and removals: we deprecate then we wait to allow the users time to upgrade, then we remove the APIs, because it could break the users programs.
But lately a lot of the APIs marked as deprecated were kept. Worse, internally, some of those APIs were still used, because it has been 4 years since we last removed anything.

So, in FFmpeg 5.0, a huge patchset removing all those deprecated APIs was merged last April. You can see that the patchset is more than 80 commits of removal

Some APIs were deprecated since 2013 and the changes can appear huge. But it's a good thing for the project, to avoid too much cruft. However it will probably require you to update your application (unless you did follow the deprecations very closely).

Some of the main API changes are:

• avcodec encoding+decoding change
  • Single API for Audio & Video
  • Decoupled codec input & output
• new callback allowing encoders to output data into user-managed buffers
• AVFrame based API in swscale
• disentangled avformat and avcodec
  • demuxers no longer embed an entire decoder context
• new bitstream filtering API
  • can be used as codec header analyzer
• codec/format registration APIs removed, all formats are always registered
• type safety: int to size_t replacements in various APIs
• libavresample removal

In the meantime, you can still use FFmpeg 4.4, that is still supported

Features

You can see the list of features for 5.0 on the website, but I will focus on the most important ones.

FFmpeg 5.0 has:

• a few new decoders, including a native speex decoder and decoders for MSN Siren, GEM Image and Apple Graphics (SMC);
• big additions to VideoToolbox support with VP9 and Prores decoding and Prores encoding;
• improvements on Vulkan support and notably Vulkan filters;
• optimizations for the loongarch platform;
• slice-threading in swscale;
• RTP packetizer for uncompressed video (RFC 4175);
• support for libplacebo video filter for all your HDR needs;
• numerous audio and video filters, notably segment, latency, decorrelate and several color filters;

and a few other (see the Changelog and the git log)

LTS and time-based releases?

Finally, this FFmpeg 5.0 release is important, because I hope that this release will start a new scheduling of FFmpeg releases.

I'd like to see one major release per year, and a LTS every other year. Which would mean 5.x would be a LTS release...

We'll see how realistic this is.

Enjoy this release!

January 17, 2022 04:03 PM