New VLC and Flash

Time for an update of Adobe’s Flash Player plugins folks! I uploaded Slackware packages for the version 32.0.0.114 of the flashplayer-plugin (NPAPI plugin for Mozilla based browsers) and the chromium-pepperflash-plugin (PPAPI plugin for Chromium based browsers) to my repository. This release does not address security issues and instead resolves feature and performance bugs.

The VideoLAN media player, VLC, saw a new release a few days ago. I skipped 3.0.5 which is a lucky streak I guess according to the release notes for 3.0.6: “… fixes an important regression that appeared on 3.0.5 for DVD subtitles“.

Noteworthy to tell is that I added the ‘dav1d‘ decoder for AV1 video to this VLC package.
AV1 is a new video codec by the Alliance for Open Media, composed of most of the important Web companies (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla…). AV1 has the potential to be up to 20% better than the HEVC codec, but the patents license is totally free. VLC supports AV1 since version 3.0.0 but I never added the ‘aom‘ decoder/encoder to my vlc package, since ‘aom’ is the reference implementation of the video format and it does not really perform.
The VideoLAN and FFmpeg communities are collaborating on ‘dav1d’ to make this a reference optimized decoder for AV1. Now that ‘dav1d’ has an official release I thought it would be cool to have in the VLC package. Mozilla and Google browsers already have the support for AV1 video playback built-in, so… overdue here.

Remember that this VLC package depends on Qt5 – you’ll need libxkbcommon, qt5 and qt5-webkit packages, and on Slackware 14.2 additionally libinput and libwacom (those two are already part of -current).

Have fun! Eric