Spill the beans

Free music and VLC

ivoire — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:23:00 +0200

Actually more and more artists are following the Open Source movement and create really nice content (both audio and video). Since the lastest release of VLC media player (1.1.0), we added the ability to access selections of Free Music directly from the playlist. Let's have a look at these contents.

Free music inside VLC In the last release of VLC media player, we introduced the ability to browse some selections of free music. The following screenshot shows VLC playing a selection of the 20 most popular albums on jamendo Actually in the VLC playlist you can access to: A selection of music from jamendo A selection of famous free songs... Read Free music and VLC

ZFS and shred

ivoire — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:02:00 +0200

ZFS is a really powerful and convenient file system but the way ZFS works makes some tools absolutely inefficient...

ZFS: a short overview ZFS is a file system designed by Sun Microsystems. The file system is based on the Copy-on-Write (CoW) paradigm. When a file is modified, the blocks that must be changed are never modified in place. Instead the following operations are executed: Copy the block Change the new block A block is never ever modified in... Read ZFS and shred

Saving memory for free

ivoire — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:08:00 +0200

We have reduced the memory footprint of VLC media player only by repacking some important structures. Let's have a look at the way the structures are arranged in memory and its impact on the memory usage.

Memory representation of a structure When creating a structure you do not really care about the representation of this structure in memory. You expect the structure's size to be the sum of its components sizes. Unfortunately the size of a structure also depends on other parameters. These parameters are mainly: The CPU architecture (32 or 64... Read Saving memory for free

Visualisations in VLC

ivoire — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:21:00 +0100

Last summer, I worked on VLC media player as part of the Google Summer of Code, One part of my job was to integrate libprojectM inside VLC media player. libprojectM is a library that create visualisation accoring to the samples it receive. As you can see the results are really amazing. And for the next version of VLC media player you will... Read Visualisations in VLC