I was invited as a guest speaker to this year’s Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) in Sydney, Australia. It will take place during the first week of december at the University of Technology. This is the first time for VideoLAN developers to present at a conference in Australia. I will give an introductory talk on VideoLAN and VLC focussing on what you can do beyond simple playback and on what’s up with VLC on mobile devices. My talk is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon at 1:30pm in the Open Room. ...

We released VLC 2.0.4 for all platforms today. It includes various fixes and improvements for the Mac OS X port as well as all the other desktop platforms. Let’s start with the specific improvements for the Mac: Improved audio output behavior when the output device is plugged or unplugged during playback and fixed live audio device selection. Disabled CoreAnimation UI effects on OS X Leopard leading to overall performance improvements Improved menu display and behavior Fixed various crashes and minor issues in bookmarks, playlist, main window buttons, streaming wizard, video size, hotkeys and fullscreen controler Fixed font selection for unicode subtitles Improved system sleep behavior when playing audio-only media. The screen is now allowed to sleep while the system is kept awake during playback. Added option to the Audio Effects panel to activate the karaoke filter Improved behavior when using command-line options to control the Mac interface ...

For the 4th year in a row, virtually all people involved in open source multimedia applications gathered in Paris to discuss the latest developments, schedule future features and share a few beers. Photo credit: Diego Elio Pettenò For the Mac, we were finally able to solve the infamous #4834 ticket, so VLC no longer fails to output audio if you unplug or replug an external audio device during playback. Of course, there is way more cool stuff to come.

We released VLC 2.0.3 this morning. This update mostly targets the Mac OS X platform: it adds support for OS X Mountain Lion. Additionally, we added a few Mac-specific bug fixes (hotkey handling, fullscreen toggling when using a remote app on a phone), fixed issues with some Flash Video (flv), APE files and a small number of radio streams broadcasted through the HTTP protocol. On Windows 8, VLC’s interface will be drawn correctly now. ...

Back in 2005, VLC 0.8.4 included one of my first noticeable contributions to the Mac OS X port: the Streaming and Transcoding Wizard. Since then, VLC moved on quite a bit, but the window and its functionality is still present (with some small additions). While it was cool and handy at that time, things beyond the VLC universe moved on, too, so we decided it was time for a re-write to enable more users to make use of the nifty included features by making it more easy to access and to configure. Quite a while ago, transcoding presets were added to the Linux and Windows ports. This new panel is an attempt to bring these presets to the Mac along with the flexibility already known from the wizard. Here’s a first look at the current draft, which will evolve during the next months in time for VLC’s next major release version 2.1 Rincewind. Most importantly, the streaming features will also become part of this panel as well as minor missing features like the ability to extract parts of a media sample. ...

Jean-Baptiste Kempf and me were invited as guest speakers to this year’s Fórum Internacional Software Livre in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from July 25 until the 28th. This is the first time for VideoLAN developers to present at a conference in South America. We will give a talk on VideoLAN and VLC focussing on advanced end-user features and more technical details with in-depth coverage of libvlc’s usage in desktop and mobile products. ...

About a month after passing the 1,000,000,000th download, we released VLC 2.0.2 last nights. It’s now available on videolan.org. It includes the following security content: Fixed Ogg Heap buffer overflow Updated taglib (CVE-2012-2396) VLC 2.0.2 adds further refinements to the new Mac interface. We improved the video playback experience by enhancing the crop features and restoring the highly desired “go automatically to fullscreen” feature. Additionally, the aspect ratio is respected like in the 1.1.x releases. The Retina Display (HiDPI) on the new MacBook Pro is natively supported, too. ...

VLC’s next release, version 2.0.2, will include HiDPI / Retina Display support for its video output. This way, both video and subtitles or other overlays will be rendered at the display’s native resolution leading to a greatly improved viewing experience. If you’re one of the lucky guys to have a MacBook Pro with Retina Display already, you’re welcome to check out tomorrow night’s nightly builds (CEST). Click on the screenshots to see the differences more in detail. ...

We will have a booth at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany this week along with our friends from libav. It’s #167 in hall 7.2a. We are looking forward to show you the latest developments in VideoLAN’s projects and would love to hear your feedback! The booth will be manned by Hugo and Ludovic on Wednesday and Thursday, while I’ll be there on Friday and Saturday. Jean-Paul and Mirsal will be available throughout the week and all of us during LinuxNacht. ...

In VLC 2.0, we introduced a brand new interface, which looks quite different to VLC 1.x. We basically did 2 things here: clean up the code by striping out most of the accumulated hacks of a 10 year old code base introduce a new interface design, which suits the look and feel of nowadays Mac applications However, there are quite a few users, who want to customize the UI, which is easily possible. Let me show you how. For sakes of simplicity, I’ll demonstrate the gray, default appearance only. However, it works exactly the same way if you prefer the dark style. ...