VLC Roadmap

Christophe Massiot massiot at via.ecp.fr
Fri Feb 22 21:55:43 CET 2002


Dear friends,

Maybe we should consider discussing our (non-existant) roadmap. The 
first issue we have to tackle is the version numbering. I don't think 
next version should be 0.2.93, since there has been major 
improvements since 0.2.92. We can then consider several choices, such 
as 0.2.95, 0.2.99, 0.9, which depend on what we want to do next.

A big question is : when the hell are we releasing 1.0 ? VLC has been 
out there for long now, and I don't think it still deserves a < 0.3 
number. I'd say the major feature we lack to get an excellent media 
player is DVD menus (plus many bug fixes, of course). As a 
consequence, I think we should jump to 1.0 when we have DVD menus.

What do we do before then ? We can say that current CVS is almost-0.3 
release, and call the next version 0.2.99 or 0.2.95, in prevision of 
an early 0.3 release. We can say that current CVS will soon lead to 
1.0 and start 0.9.x preleases. What do you think ?

Another problem is that for the moment, no one is willing to work on 
DVD menus :-(. And don't ask me, I do not even have a DVD drive :-).

We have yet another decision to take. VLC uses more and more external 
libraries, and I expect this to increase in the future. We can 
currently optionally use libmad, liba52, and libdvdread, but they are 
not activated by default. We'll probably need another library for DVD 
menus. Since those libraries provide better performance, better 
reliability and better features, I think we should drop support for 
the built-in replacements (dvd, ac3_adec and mpeg_adec plug-ins). 
When ? It isn't as easy as it seems. We need to provide easy access 
to the libraries in some way (putting packages on the web site ?). 
But more important, we need to ensure that these libraries compile 
and run on all platforms we support, and port them is necessary. This 
is quite a big job, and I don't know if we get enough feedback to do 
so. We'd probably need a responsive « port maintainer » for all 
platforms.

On a related note, libdvdcss is in the CVS of VLC, and now has its 
own CVS. When do we remove it from VLC's CVS ?

-- 
Christophe Massiot.

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