[vls-devel] Further developments on the VideoLAN Server

[Christophe Massiot]

Dear friends,

Some of you may be surprised by the declining CVS activity in VLS 
CVS, though there are plenty of projects we'd like to start (VOD, 
MPEG-4 streaming, DivX...). The reason is that the project here at 
the École Centrale Paris has decided to take a new strategy for these 
developments. I'll try to sum up what we intend to do.

VLS architecture, as it currently is, isn't well suited to our new 
projects. In particular, MPEG-4 or AVI streaming would require a 
major rewrite of the code. Consequently, we will only continue the 
development of VLS in the following areas :
* DVB input, which is a major highlight of our work,
* Simplification (for instance nitrox has just added VLMS-like 
command-line options to VLS),
* Basic maintenance.

That's what the ECP team plans to do. Other individuals or companies 
may continue to improve VLS of course, and we'll still accept 
patches, but we are reallocating our resources on two new projects.

The first one is a decent multi-purpose streamer. It is based on the 
libvlc's architecture, where the decoders are replaced by a 
"multiplexer" and a "stream output". The advantage is that this 
streamer will accept right out of the box all input formats supported 
by libvlc, and will go down to the ES level, allowing such things as 
transcoding, encoding and fixing of bad stream (in the long run :). 
Laurent Aimar, Éric Petit and myself are currently in charge of this 
project, and the development has already started.

The second project is a "manager" of streamers, which would be 
capable of managing servers on several machines, with advanced 
functions of scheduling and remote control. This project is much 
younger and we haven't written the specs yet. Damien Lucas and others 
are working on that.

For more technical information, please refer to these two mails :
http://www.via.ecp.fr/ml/videolan/vls-devel/200208/msg00000.html
http://www.via.ecp.fr/ml/videolan/vls-devel/200210/msg00023.html

-- 
Christophe Massiot.
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