largeVLCThe VideoLAN team released version 2.1.2 of their VLC player today.

This is a maintenance release, “fixing a numerous number of bugs and regressions introduced in 2.1.0, notably on audio device management and SPDIF/HDMI pass-thru“. The 2.1.2 release also “allows experimental decoding of HEVC and Webm/VP9” video, according to the release notes.

In my vlc.SlackBuild I have not only upgraded the VLC source, but additionally updated the internal libraries for bluray, dvdnav, dvdread, ffmpeg, fribidi, live555, opus, speex and x264. I also enabled the 10-bit decoder for H.264 video (also known as High 10 Profile or Hi10P) which should please the Anime fans out there. I really thought I had done this way back already, but apparently not so for VLC 2.1.x.

My next mission is to find out what’s wrong with hardware decoding of the video. Either I get a complete crash of the application (mp4 files) or the picture is all jerky and blocky (mkv files). With the parameter  “-avcodec-hw no” added to the vlc commandline I can watch any video without issues (Nvidia binary driver on multilib slackware64-current with libva-0.32.0 installed… perhaps I should use the same version of libva as I use internally in VLC, which is libva-1.2.1).

Where to find my new VLC packages:

Rsync acccess is offered by the mirror server: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

My usual warning about patents: 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.