Unhandled expression » VideoLAN

VLC 1.1.1 is out: GPU decoding for ATI

Géal — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:20:06 +0000

VLC 1.1.1 was just released! A lot of bugs were fixed, and now, GPU decoding works on ATI cards! You need Catalyst 10.7 to use DxVA on your ATI GPU.

Other important news: libVLC has a lot of new useful functions, like libvlc_set_user_agent(), or libvlc_video_set_callbacks() and libvlc_video_set_format() to replace the –vmem-* hack.

Enjoy this new release!

Current state of security in VLC on Windows

Géal — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 12:34:07 +0000

A recent report from Secunia states that popular Windows applications don’t use the DEP and ASLR protections. It is true for VLC up to 1.0: the latest version at the moment, 1.1, supports permanent DEP mode, and ASLR on all of its DLLs.

One thing the report could have shown is the difference between applicatins built with MSVC or GCC. Adding DEP and ASLR in Visual Studio means adding /NXCompat and DynamicBase to the compilation options. With MinGW, there is a different trick. This article on my old blog is slightly outdated: ld in binutils 2.20 supports the –nxcompat and –dynamicbase options. So, now, the developers using GCC have no more excuse!

Let’s sum up the state of the security of VLC:

1.0.5 is NOT SAFE on Windows. 1.0.6 brings a lot of security fixes, but this version was not released on Windows. And security features are not used.
1.1.0 supports permanent DEP and ASLR (with DllCharacteristics flag, only on Vista/7) and termination on heap corruption
1.1.1 supports the same as 1.1.0, and adds DEP on XP SP3 with SetProcessDEPPolicy
SafeSEH and stack cookies are not yet used

The developers using LibVLC should check their software: DEP won’t be activated if their executable doesn’t support it.

5 reasons to wait for VLC 1.1

Géal — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:30:40 +0000

The next VLC media player release is drawing near (it will be ready when it will be ready), and it comes with a lot of new features and bugfixing:

GPU decoding

One of the coolest new features (do I say that because I worked on it?). We can now decode videos using a graphic card, with DxVA on Windows Vista and 7, and VAAPI on Linux. If you want to test, we are looking for a little help.

Media library

That is a feature a lot of you are waiting for. We will now store a list of all your files in a database using Sqlite.

Windows 7 integration

Some of you already know that VLC media player 1.0.3 is compatible with Windows 7. We didn’t stop there. The next release will bring you cool taskbar buttons à la WMP, jump lists, thumbnails, etc.

Interface rework

I like the grey VLC. Maybe I have forgotten what the word “ergonomic” means. But some of the developers have not, and they’re doing an amazing work with the Qt interface, to change the layout, add nice effects and make it a lot prettier.

Lua extensions

People who read my previous blog know that I love tweaking VLC with Lua scripts. One developer had a nice project for this year’s Google Summer of Code: adding a way for lua scripts to change the interface. Now, lua scripts can add menus, open windows, etc. OK, it doesn’t sound cool at first, but what you will see thanks to this code is really nice: automatically downloading lyrics and subtitles, finding data on IMDb, doing a Google search, whatever you want! Isn’t that cool?

Still not convinced?

These were the features I’m excited to see in the next release. But that’s not all:

N900 port
Milkdrop visualizations using projectM
WPL and ZPL playlist support
desktop mode for Direct 3D video output (you know, the trick to show the video as a wallpaper…)
…