Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: videolan (Page 4 of 5)

VLC media player at version 2.0.0

February 18, 2012 / / 30 Comments

Videolan developers finally got rid of all the blocking bugs and released the newest installment of the massively popular Open Source all-purpose media player VLC.

Initially meant to become version 1.2.0, the decision was made some months ago to change the version to 2.0.0 because of the many differences to the previous release series 1.1.x.

Get over to the VideoLAN web site and read trough the announcement. Also check out the list of new features and enhancements on that page!

For users of my Slackware packages, this news is not changing much. If you have been using my “vlcgit” package, you will have experienced a lot already of vlc 2.0.0. I have been building GIT snapshots for quite a while. Just be aware that with the official release of 2.0.0, my “vlcgit” package has become obsolete. I have removed it from my repository. Perhaps when I start building snapshots of a new release cycle (2.1 ?) you will see the vlcgit package return.

Enough said – you should get the freshly compiled VLC packages for Slackware now. They are available for Slackware 13.37 (on which I compiled them) but will work on Slackware-current too of course.

The usual caveat applies: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode mp3 and aac audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

There are other mirrors too of my SlackBuild package repositories – if you cannot find them, give me a yell..

 

Have fun! Eric

VideoLAN update: vlc-1.1.10

June 6, 2011 / / 10 Comments

It’s that busy time for developers again… are they all preparing for holidays and cleaning the house?

Yesterday saw an update of my favourite multimedia player, and I had missed it…

VLC player is now at stable release 1.1.10 – apart from bugfixes and codec updates, this is also a security update (no known CVE number yet) so everybody is enccouraged to upgrade his installed version.

Get Slackware packages from my repository or one of its mirrors. And remember, if you need to encode mp3 or aac audio (there is no functional difference in decoding audio between all my packages) you need to grab the package which is inside the “restricted_slackbuilds” directory. Patent trolls prevent me from hosting those packages in the US on slackware.com.

MP3/AAC patent restricted:

Enjoy! Eric

New libreoffice, vlc packages for your Slackware

March 24, 2011 / / 21 Comments

Yummy food for your hungry Slackware boxen!

* VLC 1.1.8 available

Another minor release in the 1.1 series, version 1.1.8 saw the light yesterday. Bugfixes and updates for the translations are its main features, but several small enhancements were made to the codec modules.

New encoders for dirac video (now using the schroedinger implementation) and webm /vp8 were added but to be honest, I have not looked at those since I rarely encode audio or video. Feedback welcome of course!

Noteworthy is the fact that VideoLAN celebrated its 10th birthday of going open source this february – the software was initially developed as a french student project under a closed-source license. Hilarious promotional video there… typical french humour?

Get the Slackware packages here (built on Slackware 13.1, will work on later versions too):

The “US restrictions” are ludricous crap, but there you go… otherwise I would not be able to host the packages on the slackware.com server. Of course, mp3 and aac decoding is not a problem at all.

And for you KDE 4.6 users, remember having this problem with the “Media > Open” file browser dialog box taking 30 seconds to appear, that issue has been resolved. The fix was applied on the KDE side (it was gone with KDE 4.6.1) but I thought I’d mention it here regardless because it was a nuisance. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260719 for a nice discussion between KDE and VLC developers. Interesting to read on https://bugs.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/+bug/708527 is, that while we do not have this bug anymore in Slackware’s KDE 4.6.1 (well, my own KDE 4.6.1 for Slackware 13.37 to be precise), it appears that Kubuntu’s KDE 4.6.1 still suffers from it…

* LibreOffice 3.3.2 … wow that was fast!

The LibreOffice development really shows the power of collaboration. Little over a month after their previous “micro release” 3.3.1, here we have 3.3.2 already. It shows plainly that LibreOffice is diverging fast from its origin OpenOffice.org. How is that possible? Well, the most obvious reason is the growth in numbers of developers. What was impossible while SUN and later Oracle held the reigns, is now showing its worth: people are contributing code, and with more people starting to dig at the deeper levels of code, this momentum of development will only accelerate.

Specific highlights for the 3.3.2 release are the code cleanups: german-only comments have been replaced and no longer used code has been removed. If the schedule is not slipping we’ll see the big release 3.4.0 in May. This is supposedly the release that is going to make the large step away from OpenOffice.org.

I created some Slackware packages for you (built on Slackware 13.1, works on Slackware 13.37 too). Using the new LibreOffice menu icons instead of the old OpenOffice seagull logos, its looking prettier even! I added a dictionary to the italian language pack, but other than that I did not diverge from the way I built the previous 3.3.1 packages.

One word about the dictionaries (which I included for en-GB, en-US, es, fr, it, nl language packs): they are installed as “shared dictionaries” i.e. they will show up in your extension manager as locked and unchangeable. You can still install your own dictionary on top of that, if you find one that is more advanced or better suited to your work. This personal version will be installed into your ~/.ooo3 user directory and will have preference over the shared version.

Get packages here:

Enjoy!  And tell me if you like these packages (or if you see room for improvement).

Eric

VLC’s newest release: 1.1.6

January 24, 2011 / / 13 Comments

VLC team made their newest release of the VideoLAN Player available to the general public.

VLC 1.1.6 which is now available as a source tarball fixes a security hole that was reported in december 2010 which makes it a recommended upgrade.

A lot of other changes and bugfixes went into the new VLC , you can read all about that on the release notes page. I think that now, the waiting is really for the next revision of VLC (1.2.x) to come out of the git repository and be released as stable. That has been in development for a long time now, and offers a completely re-developed mozilla plugin (the plugin package which accompanies VLC 1.1.x is not really a reliable piece of work) and of course a whole lot of feature enhancements compared to the maturing 1.1.x series.

One of the things that the 1.1.6 version should have fixed is the annoying behaviour in KDE 4.6 where, if you select “Media > Open file” it takes 30 seconds to open a file browser. After that first delay, every subsequent file-open dialog will open instantaneously – strange isn’t it? There is an open bug report for this issue: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260719 and it shows a lot of discussion but no real fix since the KDE and VLC developers basically point to each other to provide a fix. Looks like fixing this in KDE is going to be difficult and VLC would be able to work around the issue. Unfortunately, the code that went into VLC at the last minute (see http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc/vlc-1.1.git;a=commit;h=ac11f9c0e27905087afdfb46180ece227a4d76e7) does not fix it for me.

Enough said. Before I point you to the download location for my Slackware VLC packages, let me humour you with this VideoLAN promotional video made by Adam Vian: http://images.videolan.org/images/vlc-player.mp4 (download first, then load it in VLC). Very funny, worth watching.

Slackware 13.1 packages for vlc-1.1.6 can be found here (32-bit and 64-bit, they will work on slackware-current too of course):

Rsync access: ?rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/

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

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑