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Tag: vlc (Page 8 of 9)

VLC 1.1.0 has been released

June 22, 2010 / / 11 Comments

VideoLAN team has released version 1.1.0 of their VLC player.

This  release has many improvements over the previous 1.0.0 version of this “swiss army knife of media players“.

A detailed description of the changes can be found in the team’s announcement of the new release. You can also have a look at the supported features of the player.

Slackware packages are available for you: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-slackware.html . I’ll be happy with feedback from you, if you are using my package. Please note that you do not have to install any other package if you use mine. There are no package dependencies (except for libdvdcss which you have to install additionally if you want to watch “encrypted” DVDs – which means almost all DVDs).

Please note that the VideoLAN developers have decided to deprecate all older versions of their player. This means that as soon as a vulnerability is discovered in releases before 1.1.0, this vulnerability will not be patched and you will be urged to upgrade to 1.1.0 (or later) instead.

This decision was made because the developer team is currently stretched thin and is unable to maintain more than one stable and one development branch.

Have fun with this great piece of software!

Eric

Decoding HD video in VLC

June 14, 2010 / / 18 Comments

In past posts, I talked a bit about video decoding in VLC, particularly using the GPU (your graphics card’s processor) to decode frames instead of letting the software do all the work. My previous posts mostly revolved around the fact that this did not yet work in the release candidates of VLC 1.1.0 (which will hopefully be released soon).

There is good news however! Last weekend, the bug in VLC was fixed which made the player crash as soon as the VAAPI functions were called. My updated packages (32-bit and 64-bit) for vlc-1.1.0-rc3 are available now, with the patch included, and indeed I have no more crashes. Get those new RC3 packages and enjoy!

So, what is this GPU supported hardware decoding of video and why is it beneficial?

High Definition video has become a de facto standard on the internet, and lots of home video recorders save in HD format too. Playback of a HD video on your computer will stretch the limits of what your CPU can do… resulting in stuttering playback (dropped video frames) or display artefacts because the CPU can not keep up.

This is where the Video Acceleration API (VAAPI) originally drafted by Intel, and adopted by other hardware vendors (Nvidia and Ati of course) comes into play. VAAPI is a software interface which provides access to hardware accelerated video processing, using your computer’s  GPU which is very much suited for computationally intensive operations. For instance, owners of a Nvidia graphics card will notice that VAAPI-supported HD playback will drop the CPU usage from 100 to 30 or less percent.

My VLC package supports VAAPI hardware acceleration, if you add the following package(s):

  • libva: your computer will at least need this one. This is the library which exposes the VA API and adds the driver which VLC will use if your graphics card is an Intel one.
  • vdpau-video: this is only needed if your graphics card is an Nvidia. Vdpau is Nvidia’s own acceleration API and this package adds a VDPAU backend to libva.
  • xvba-video: this is only needed if you own an Ati-powered graphics card. This package adds a XvBA backend to libva. Unfortunately (for you) I do not own an Ati card, so I can not compile this software into a Slackware package. Get the sources here and compile them yourself, after you installed my libva package.

I should mention one caveat:

It depends on your hardware, how good the support for GPU-accelerated video processing is. An Intel card can only accelerate MPEG-2 video, whereas Nvidia and Ati cards will also support acceleration for MPEG-4/H.264/VC-1 video formats. Note that hardware-acceleration is not limited to HD video. VAAPI will for instance be beneficial to Atom-powered netbooks too, their Intel graphics will allow fluent full-screen playback of DVDs in VLC with low CPU usage, thereby saving your battery.

You can easily determine what your card’s capabilities are. After installing libva, run the “vainfo” command and examine the output. This is what my T410 laptop reports:

$ vainfo
libva: libva version 0.31.0-sds6
libva: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva: Trying to open /usr/lib64/va/drivers/i965_drv_video.so
libva: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA API version: 0.31
vainfo: Driver version: i965 Driver 0.1
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD

Have fun! Eric

VLC and creating WebM video

May 26, 2010 / / 13 Comments

The VLC packages which I created to accompany the release of Slackware 13.1 support the playback of WebM video, the Google-sponsored new free video format.

What the VLC graphical interface can not yet do, is allow you to encode WebM video. Lucky for us, VLC has a command-line interface as well, with a humongous amount of options whose learning curve is even steeper than that of vi 😉

The VLC command-line allows to encode/transcode WebM video! Want to try it out?

Assume you have an existing video file, let’s say “my_first_video.avi” in an arbitrary video/audio encoding format. We are going to transcode that file to WebM format, the resulting file will be called “my_first_video.webm”, containing VP8 video and vorbis audio streams. This is the command do achieve it:

cvlc my_first_video.avi  –sout “#transcode{vcodec=VP80,vb=800,scale=1,acodec=vorbis,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file,mux=”ffmpeg{mux=webm}”,dst=my_first_video.webm}”

(note: the commandline is not completely visible in this blog post, but you can select the lines with your mouse and that will select the full commandline)

When the command prompt returns, your transcoded WebM video is ready! If you use “vlc” rather than “cvlc” then you will see a VLC window appear but instead of playing the video, it will just show the slider moving forward which is actually a good indicator of how far the transcoding has progressed.

Eric

Slackware 13.1 is here

May 24, 2010 / / 10 Comments

Just to add another message to the turmoil of cheering blog posts 🙂

Slackware 13.1 has been released today.

Read all about it in the official announcement or  read the ANNOUNCE.TXT directly.

As usual, it is recommended (but not mandatory) to buy a copy of the DVD or CD-set which helps funding the development of the distro (no, I am not getting any money out of that). The ISOs are of course available for free, and Bittorrent is the fastest way to get them: http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php

Alphageek’s “sligdo files” are a very fast way of creating byte-exact copies of the official ISOs in case you already have a local mirror-copy of the full Slackware 13.1 tree. The ISOs you create with sligdo (http://alphageek.dyndns.org/linux/sligdo/) will pass the GPG verification test. I just hope he will have those sligdo files ready for downlooad in time. If not, I have copies here: http://alien.slackbook.org/sligdo/ .

If you want to know more about how to create a Slackware USB installer if your computer does not have a CD or DVD drive, read this older article of mine: ??http://blog.slackware.nl/installing-slackware-using-usb-thumb-drive/ – or for the Windows users: http://blog.slackware.nl/welcome-windows-user/

If you install or upgrade to the 64-bit version of Slackware 13.1 and want to have a system which is capable of running 32-bit software too (Slackware64 itself is a pure 64-bit distro), then you can make your Slackware64 multilib – read all about the process (which is fairly easy and straight-forward): http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib

To celebrate the occasion, I have created Slackware 13.1 packages for the VideoLAN Player (VLC) with added support for the new WebM video format which has the potential of becoming the default  video format in the implementation of the HTML5 “video” tag. Packages here (look for vlc-1.1.0.rc – at the moment of publishing this post I am still building them on a fresh Slackware 13.1…): http://www.slackware.org.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ . An example .webm video file is here if you want to try: http://www.jbkempf.com/~jb/yt3.remux.webm with thanks to Jean-Baptiste Kempf of the Videolan team.

Have fun! Eric

New version of VLC fixes security holes

April 23, 2010 / / 4 Comments

The VideoLAN team have released version 1.0.6 of their VLC player. This version fixes several vulnerabilities which were found during development of the upcoming version 1.1.0.

I have built Slackware packages for vlc-1.0.6 (Slackware 13.0 32-bit and 64-bit) which you can find at the usual place, http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/. This is the release announcement in my repository’s ChangeLog.txt:

Fri Apr 23 10:35:49 UTC 2010
vlc: updated to 1.0.6. Several security holes were fixed in this release.
These packages do inotify-tools libnotify contain MP3/AAC audio encoders (playback of mp3/aac audio works fine); you can get packages with MP3/AAC encoding capability at http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ as usual.
For playback of encrypted DVDs you’ll additionally need to install libdvdcss.

One remark: I found that the midi plugin (based on fluidsynth) does not work in this package because of a library linking error. I will try to get this resolved for Slackware 13.0 in a new build if I find the time (but KDE 4.4.3 is getting near). When I built a VLC package on Slackware-current, I did not have this issue however.

Note for those who run VLC on an older Slackware:

Older versions of the VideoLAN player will not get patched. Most notably the version 0.8.x which is still widely used. This version has already been vulnerable for some time, and the new vulnerabilities just get added to a growing list. Upgrading to the newest version will not be an option for everybody. Older releases of Slackware but also of other distro’s simply lack the libraries required by the current version of VLC. Too bad… or finally time to upgrade your Slackware?

Eric

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