For the second year in a row, members of the VideoLAN team will be at the Annual Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles.

This year, SCALE takes place at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport Hotel from February 22 to 24.

On Saturday, Feb 23, at 1:30 PM, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of the VideoLAN organization, will give a talk about VLC in the Century CD room. On both Saturday and Sunday, Ludovic Fauvet, Jean-Baptiste and me will man booth 7 to show the latest developments on VLC and further VideoLAN projects, to answer your questions and to discuss future ideas.

We are looking forward to your visit at our talk and our booth!

The entire VLC team and most teams from further projects hosted by VideoLAN will be at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium, on the first weekend of February.

While we won’t have a booth or a dedicated dev room this year, we will be around for the entire weekend to attend interesting talks, meet great people and enjoy one or two Belgian beers.

Additionally, the president of the VideoLAN association and lead developer on VLC, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, will give at talk at the Legal Issues dev room (K.3.201) on Relicensing libVLC and VLC modules from GPL to LGPL on Sunday morning.

Drop by if you are around and say hello! You will recognize us by the usual cone t-shirts!

Last night, we reached the goal of our fundraiser for VLC for Windows 8, RT and Phone. We are enormously proud of the result and stunned by the support of the folks who made this possible.

Any further money coming in will greatly speed up the availability of our port of VLC to Windows Phone 8, since it will allow us to parallelize the workload of the ports to Windows 8 / RT and Phone.

Furthermore, we proposed a few additional features, on which we will be working full-time after the initial release is done and as long as money is left:

• camera input support — This allows you to record anything your connected cameras can see and to stream it live where ever you like.
• DLNA client and server integration
  • Play media stored on DLNA capable servers on your Windows RT tablet or Windows Phone
  • Stream everything VLC can play on your tablet or Windows 8 PC to your DLNA capable devices (Xbox, …).
• integration with locally attached devices for media playback and synchronization
• Smartglass support

NB: This text is an excerpt of Update #6 on kickstarter.

On Tuesday, we pushed a 2nd update on our fundraiser for VLC for Windows 8, RT and Phone.

It includes a first mockup of the application interface on Windows 8. We are proud of the positive feedback and we are looking forward to yours! You can find the update here.

Furthermore, since Wednesday noon, you can find Update #3 on Kickstarter, which includes additional mockups to demonstrate our new port on Windows RT tablets.

Last night, we published Update #4, which gives insights on the technical implications of our ports to Windows 8, RT and Phone.

At the time of writing, 95 % of our goal were pledged thanks to almost 2,400 backers and there are 6 days to go. Thanks for all the support! Let’s go on on this track!

and hey, our project is featured as a Staff Pick on Kickstarter, right now!

Today, we released VLC 2.0.5. This is a minor update to VLC’s 2.0.x series, which improves the overall stability of our application.

It’s available for download now as well as through the in-app updater on Mac OS X. We will push the update to our users on Windows directly as soon as the load on our servers allows.

Noteable changes include:

• Improved reliability for MKV, Koreus and SWF playback
• Resolved system sleep issue on OS X 10.5
• Resolved potential security issues in HTML subtitle parser and AIFF demuxer
• Fixed MPEG2 audio and video encoding
• Various minor fixes and improvements
• Improved HTTPS streaming on WIndows
• Improved reliablity for libVLC based applications
• Updated translations for Asturian, Bengali (India), Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, Galician, Scottish Gaelic, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Malayalam, Polish, Slovak, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish and Thai

Additionally, I would like to give a status update on our fundraiser for VLC for Windows 8, RT and Phone on Kickstarter. At time of writing, it is at 56 % of our goal of £40,000 thanks to more than 1,500 generous backers. Thanks a lot for the support! It’s another 14 days to go and we really hope to achieve our goal in time. More updates on this endeavor, soon!

In this post, you’ll find current information on our fundraiser for VLC for Windows 8, RT and Phone.

As of writing, £13,448 were pledged, so 33 % of our goal.

Over the last few days, we achieved the following progress:

The first important news is that a port of VLC to Windows Phone 8 appears to be easier than expected. While the roadmap is about Windows 8 for Intel followed by a version for Windows RT, it appears to be feasible to publish another version with a specific interface for Windows Phone shortly after, since the WP8 APIs are way more similar to Windows 8 than WP7 ones.

Therefore, this fundraiser will help developping a version of VLC for Windows Phone 8. Interestingly, while WP8 offers the same programming interfaces available to Windows 8 & RT apps, it is less restrictive in some regards. Notably our existing networking code is going to run as is.

Then, we’ve been in touch with Microsoft representatives, who are thrilled about our endeavor and ready to collaborate with us. They are looking into ways of supporting us directly through non-financial matters, notably hardware, technical and design help. This is great news.

Moreover, we’ve been in touch with several designers and some hardware chip vendors about this project.

Regarding admision to the Windows Store, we will need to stick to Microsofts rules and pass a check called WACK. As published in our “Challenges and Risks” section, we will try very hard to fulfill its requirements in order to be published on the Windows Store. Therefore, as this seems the biggest challenge, we have already been working on that aspect, during the last days.

A significant number of backers asked about legal implications of a publication of VLC on the Windows Store. So far, the Windows Store terms and conditions seem to be compatible with the GNU GPL.

About the capability of distributing codecs from the Store, we hope to be able to do it, but we are not sure about it yet. We would like to invite you to have a look at at our generic Legal page on videolan.org, which should answers most questions: http://videolan.org/legal.html

You are welcome to get in touch if you require more information.

We are proud of this campaign’s progress so far and we hope make it within the next 19 days.

We are going to publish more updates this week, including imagery of the current UI mockups as well as a video demonstrating our ideas for Windows Phone.

You can find our kickstarter project here.

NB: This post was shared on Kickstarter as Update #1.

Today, some VideoLAN team members launched a fundraiser on Kickstarter to support a port to the new User Experience on Windows 8 (aka “Metro”) and Windows RT.

VLC for Windows is widely used since a few years now and it is by far the dominant platform for VLC according to our user base numbers. Installation numbers are estimated as followed:

• 100,000,000 on Windows
• 10,000,000 on Mac OS X
• 2,000,000 on Android
• countless on GNU/Linux, BSD and OS/2¹

The current version of VLC is able to run on Windows 8 which was launched last month. However, VLC is currently limited to the desktop experience, which is hidden by default along with other classic applications, behind one of the tiles (interface element of the Start screen).

We want to allow users to get access to VLC from the Start screen and Metro experience too.

To run in Metro, important parts of VLC need to be re-written or ported and an entirely new interface needs to be created. This is very time-consuming and considering our current Windows design, we need professional designers to adapt the interface to Metro. Additionally, we would like to have it in the hands of our Windows 8 users as soon as possible.

Porting VLC to Metro by relying on volunteers during their spare time would take a long time, just as how VLC for Android has. This is why we decided to run this fundraiser. If successful, it will allow two developers to work on this project full time. Donors will get access to a broad range of goodies and users will benefit from quality software. The project is projected to be published early next year.

Running a fundraiser is something the VideoLAN project has never done before. While the donations received through the VideoLAN association (a French non-profit organization) allow us to purchase testing devices, attend and prepare conferences, and pay for servers, employing developers on a contract base would be beyond its current capabilities. This Kickstarter program will make it possible to do such contracts.

We hope that you like our idea as much as we do and we are looking forward to answer any question you might have.

Here’s the page on Kickstarter including our concept video.

NB: Why does this article appear here on the Mac blog? This endeavor is a joint effort by core members of the VideoLAN team and it happened that I’m coordinating the fundraiser and eventually shipment of goodies, while the folks experienced with development on Windows can focus on the code. The Mac port is still being expanded and I still care about it as much as I used to.

¹ Downloads for these platforms are not published through VideoLAN.org but through the respective distributions. That’s why there is no way for us to give an exact number.

VideoLAN association’s president and lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf was invited as a guest speaker to this year’s FOSS.IN in Bangalore, India. The event takes place in the NIMHANS Convention centre from Nov 29 until Dec 1.This is the first time for VideoLAN to send people to Asia!

He will give a talk on how to add your own features to VLC, how to build your own application based on VLC be a it a player, a converter or a streaming server and how to contribute to VideoLAN in general.

Drop by if you are around!

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.

I will spend the entire week in Sydney and will always be available for a beer or a chat.

This is going to be exciting and I hope to see you there.