VLC and VideoLAN what you might know, what you should know and what - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

VLC and VideoLAN what you might know, what you should know 
 and what you don’t know Felix Paul Kühne – fkuehne@videolan.org IEEE Region 8 Student & Young Professional Congress 2016

Felix Paul Kühne • Contributor to VideoLAN since 2003 • Author of VLC-Mac 2.0 • Author of VLC-iOS 2.0 and VLC-tvOS • Medic • Software Developer and Project Lead 
 at VideoLabs SAS, Paris, France • Treasurer and former secretary of the 
 VideoLAN non-profit organization

History & Overview

Ecole Centrale Paris

VIA VIA Centrale Réseaux • Campus student association • Internet access through RENATER 
 Network Upgrade • How to pay for our network? • Justify the needs of a bigger network?

Video Streaming!

2001 1998 Reboot • Publication as • Modularity open source • Cross-Platform • Licensed under • 2nd year project GPLv2

VLC 0.2.70 Qt interface (1st gen), April 2001, GNOME Desktop

Port to BeOS VLC 0.6.x, August 2003 (initial release: December 1999)

Port to Mac OS X VLC 0.3.x / 0.4.x, February 2003 (Initial release: April 2001)

Port to Microsoft Windows VLC 0.5.x, February 2003 (initial release: June 2001)

Apple Design Award Runner-up June 2003

Early industrial support

Input features • Support for DVDs • region independent • prevents forced chapters and subtitles (if desired) • Blu Ray • HD-DVD • Network Streams • Unicast, Multicast, all flavors of adaptive streaming • External hardware • Cameras, TV input, …

Download statistics and installed base • 2.2.4 for desktop released June 5th More • 49.6M downloads on Windows, 4.4M on OS X 
 than 2.2B over total 180M on Windows, 17M on OS X lifetime • ~ 23M/month — 66% updates • Windows Phone: 3M — Windows Store: 12M • iOS: 11M • Android: 65M

Who are those users?

Break-through? • 0.8.6 release series in 2006 - 2008 • more than 117M downloads • 10x more than previous releases • major press coverage • last release of the wxWidgets interface

VideoLAN association • Non-profit organization launched in 2009 • Members: VLC’s core developers — 0 employees! • Supports • Travel • Sprints and VideoLAN Dev Days • Legal • Hardware and services

Contributors • core team of 10 people • 700 over lifetime • 130 per year • partially volunteers, partially consultants

Collaboration • Quarterly team meetings throughout Europe • Additional topic specific sprints • IRC and mailing-lists • git deployment since early 2007

What is VLC?

1 source file

Architecture VLC VLMC VLC for … Your app libvlc libvlccore Access Demuxer Decoder Audio output Interface Access output Muxer Encoder Video output Renderer

Architecture Video 
 Video 
 Video 
 Codec Filters Output Subtitles 
 Protocol Format Renderers Codec Audio 
 Audio 
 Audio 
 Codec Filters Output Metadata

Our code in your app

libvlc • Stable C API and ABI • Bindings in C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, Python • Steadily improved - 40 new API calls in v3.0 • Cross platform • Proven and tested code used by millions

Playback with libvlc #include <vlc/vlc.h> void play(const char *url, void *drawable) 
 { libvlc_instance_t *vlcInstance = libvlc_new(0, “”); if (vlcInstance == NULL) return; libvlc_media_player_t *player = libvlc_media_player_new(vlcInstance); libvlc_media_player_set_nsobject(player, drawable); libvlc_media_t *media = libvlc_media_new_location(vlcInstance, url); libvlc_media_player_set_media(player, media); libvlc_media_player_play(player); }

Playback with VLCKit #import <VLCKit/VLCKit.h> @interface ViewController () { VLCMediaPlayer *_player; } @end

Playback with VLCKit @implementation ViewController - (void)viewDidLoad 
 { _player = [[VLCMediaPlayer alloc] init]; _player.drawable = self.videoOutputView; VLCMedia *media = [VLCMedia mediaWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@“http://…”]]; _player.media = media; [super viewDidLoad]; } - (void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated 
 { [super viewDidAppear:animated]; [_player play]; } @end

libvlc deployment • Windows • precompiled binaries on videolan.org • VLCKit / MobileVLCKit / TVVLCKit • multiple precompiled Cocoapods available • Android • library needs to be compiled

Licensing • Full playback stack distribution under Lesser GNU General Public License version 2.1 or later • Compatible with any App Store terms of service • Compatible with proprietary apps and plugins • Notable exception: DVD playback, UIs

Do people really do that?

Your code in libvlc

How to start • Pick your favorite platform • desktop 
 (Windows, Linux, BSD, OS X, OS/2, …) • mobile 
 (Android, iOS, WinRT, Windows Phone, Tizen, tvOS) • Get our code and compile it. • We are there for you.

Development • source code management using git • git.videolan.org • code.videolan.org • sharing patches using mailing-lists • pull requests will come! • discussion on IRC • bug and feature tracking on http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/timeline

Architecture VLC VLMC VLC for … Your app libvlc libvlccore Access Demuxer Decoder Audio output Interface Access output Muxer Encoder Video output Renderer

Every feature is a module! –VLC devs, 1998

Let’s write a module

Module definition #include <vlc_common.h> #include <vlc_aout.h> #include <vlc_filter.h> #include <vlc_plugin.h> static int Open (vlc_object_t *); static block_t *Process (filter_t *, block_t *); vlc_module_begin () set_shortname ("Karaoke") set_description ("Simple Karaoke filter") set_category (CAT_AUDIO) set_subcategory (SUBCAT_AUDIO_AFILTER) set_capability ("audio filter", 0) set_callbacks (Open, NULL) vlc_module_end ()

Open function static int Open (vlc_object_t *obj) { filter_t *filter = (filter_t *)obj; if (filter->fmt_in.audio.i_channels != 2) { msg_Err (filter, "voice removal requires stereo"); return VLC_EGENERIC; } filter->fmt_in.audio.i_format = VLC_CODEC_FL32; filter->fmt_out.audio = filter->fmt_in.audio; filter->pf_audio_filter = Process; return VLC_SUCCESS; }

Worker function static block_t *Process (filter_t *filter, block_t *block) { const float factor = .70710678 /* 1. / sqrtf (2) */; float *spl = (float *)block->p_buffer; for (unsigned i = block->i_nb_samples; i > 0; i--) { float s = (spl[0] - spl[1]) * factor; *(spl++) = s; *(spl++) = s; } return block; }

Production example: SAT>IP • Open standard based on RTSP, UPnP and HTTP published by SES S.A. • Stream satellite television (DVB-S2) on the home network via unicast and multicast • One module of 800 LoC added • runs on any supported platform, 
 no adaptation needed • One switch added to the existing UPnP discovery module

Additional open-source SDK • runs on iOS, tvOS, Android, Android TV • 1200 LoC for iOS and tvOS • 1500 LoC for Android and Android TV • identical libvlc code base • Public this fall

Do people really do that?

Advanced or little known features

Extensions • written in lua • highly customizable • Use cases: • automatic subtitle downloads • Context information from imdb, wikipedia or Allociné • Sharing on Twitter • available for download on addons.videolan.org

Service discoveries & 
 playlist parsers • Detects media automatically: • Local files • Network services • Internet services • Resolves links to YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Apple Trailers, ... • Highly customizable • Written in lua • Publish and get them from addons.videolan.org

Screen Casting

Wall filter & netsync

Web Interface

libcaca video output

Questions


 www.videolan.org Felix Paul Kühne fkuehne@videolan.org IEEE Region 8 Student & Young Professional Congress 2016