Chinese Characters in Registry

[steveboot]

Was wondering had VLC been hacked. I found the following



HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\楖敤䱯乁嘮䍌汐杵湩.1 HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\楖敤䱯乁嘮䍌汐杵湩.2

and

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VideoLAN.VLCPlugin\CurVer
VideoLAN.VLCPlugin 䱖⁃捁楴敶⁘汐杵湩愠摮䤠⁅敗⁢汐杵湩 v2

Google Translate HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ the Ji apply 䱯 I chatter 䍌 xi pestle Breast - feeding .1

What gives?

[Lotesdelere]

That looks like a corrupted registry to me. It's just garbage and non sense that can't do any action.

[steveboot]

Negative:

VLC 2.0.3 consistently installs that key and removes it upon uninstalling the application.

I tried eariler versions and the key is not present.

[Lotesdelere]

Did you download VLC from the official download page ?

[mrollin]

I'm having the identical problem. The registry items affects are specifically the ActiveX control. I used the official installer (tried three times).

Uninstalling successfully removes these entries from the registry, which is good news, but reinstalling puts them back, which is bad news.

This appears to be a bug, not a threat. However, any insight on how to clear this up would be appreciated.

[mrollin]

Evidently a known bug because as of today (Aug 15) it is corrected in the nightly build.

[VirtualJealousy]

This is still an issue, just downloaded the latest version (2.0.5) and the values are still added to the registry.

If you lookup the registered application for the class id for 楖敤䱯乁嘮䍌汐杵湩.1 "{E23FE9C6-778E-49D4-B537-38FCDE4887D8}", the InprocServer32 the value is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\axvlc.dll

If you lookup the registered application for the class id for 楖敤䱯乁嘮䍌汐杵湩.2 "{9BE31822-FDAD-461B-AD51-BE1D1C159921}", the InprocServer32 the value is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\axvlc.dll

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Patches are welcome, still

[Dialecticus]

These Chinese characters are UTF-16 representation of the text "VideoLAN.VLCPlugin" when written in ANSI. Someone used C-style cast to make this happen.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

still PAtches welcome.

[dantsatsan]

Dialecticus is correct. I briefly looked at the code. I saw that ansi code is mixed with unicode. If I knew how to compile VLC with Visual Studio 2012, I'd try to fix it.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

You can't compile VLC wit VS; VS does not support two (C99 and Lua) of the 3 languages (C99, C++, Lua) that VLC for Windows is written in.

[dantsatsan]

Thanks Rémi Denis-Courmont. Yes, I read that last night.
When I discovered that VLC was writing the Chinese type characters to the registry for plugins, I thought I might try to fix it. But since I started writing with Borland's Turbo C++ then Visual studio, I'm unfamiliar with C99. I've recently been converting some old Windows 3.0 games to run under Windows x64. That being said, It seems that someone familiar with the VLC code should be able to fix the registry routine relatively quick. Best wishes.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

the writing in the registry is done by a script writen in NSIS, very simple to modify.

[cti]

As of the current version (2.2.3 Weatherwax) they are still in the registry.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

4 years later, patch still welcome.

[kimiraikkonen]

I just discovered almost same problem with one of my old VLC builds (1.1.11) on my old computer, containing Chinese extension under FileExt registry key, which appears to be created WHEN I started a desktop capture session via VLC, containing the filename of this capture, resulting in a Chinese extension which is unreadable:


Extension has no translation from Chinese to English with success, and it has no sign of infection but its creation/last write date and time refer to the run time of VLC and the key is associated with VLC.exe on the right pane, screenshot cropped.

Is it a known bug, a corruption occured by VLC?