[vlc-devel] Re: VLC 0.5.0 ?

[Gildas Bazin]

On Sunday 08 December 2002 01:00, Christophe Massiot wrote:
> 0.5.0 is going to be a killer app, and I'm wondering what's missing 
> for a release. I mean, in which areas are there feature regressions 
> from 0.4.6 ? I don't think we should care about new unfinished 
> features, or future under-the-hood improvement, because frankly the 
> user doesn't care, and they can wait for 0.5.x releases.
> 

I agree that the 0.5.0 release needs to happen soon now. The 0.4.x branch is 
getting much too old and really can't compete with xine, mplayer or such.

On the other hand, if we really want 0.5.0 to be a killer app, we should be 
carefull not to release something in an unfinished state (here I'm talking 
as much from and end-user point of view than a developer point of view).

> * audio output: can be considered stable
> * macosx: the only missing feature is The Return of the Porn Slider [jlj]
> * vlcs: vlcs support is broken
> * all interfaces: missing support for aout3
> ?
> 

IMHO there are at least 3 other important features that should go into 
0.5.0:

* Unification of the configuration framework and the variables framework.
(I'm working on it now). Mainly because users can't set default values 
(preferences) for variables yet, and also because we currently have 2 APIs 
to do similar things.

* Autogeneration of contextual menus in interface plugins.
Basically, we should be able to register variables which can be modified on 
the fly by users and have the interface plugin autogenerate contextual 
menus from this info. This work is kind of related to the one above.

* I think sam is also working on a very much requested feature, which should 
allow inserting/removing vout filters on the fly (think deinterlacing, 
etc...).

There is also some work/bugfixes required in quite a few areas:

* The libdvdplay plugin isn't currently really stable and chokes on quite a 
few DVD menus.
* 0.5.0 needs heavy testing/tuning under Win9x/Me. It has not been tested at 
all on these OSs.
* And I'm sure there are plenty of other things ;)
(hint: bugzilla.videolan.org)

I don't want to be pessimistic, but I doubt we can do all this before the 
end of the year. However I must say that I would have nothing against a 
pre-release so we can have some bug-reports and iron out things before the 
actual release.

Anybody against a 0.4.99 or 0.5.0-pre release in the few coming days ?

--
Gildas
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