VLC 1.1.0 Release Candidate supports WebM / VP8

VLC 1.1.0 RC on Mac OS X. The VideoLAN Project developers have announced the availability of a release candidate for version 1.1, the next major release, of their popular VLC Media Player. According to the developers, the latest 1.1 branch of VLC is much faster and more stable, thanks in part to a substantial amount of "important code clean-up" and rewrites. VLC is a free open source cross-platform multimedia player for various audio and video formats.

The latest development preview, code named 'The luggage', is aimed at "power-users" and features a number of changes over the previous 1.0.x 'Goldeneye' branch, including support for the latest open WebM / VP8 video format introduced by Google as part of the WebM Project. Version 1.1 allows users to write their own plug-ins for VLC. Like Mozilla's Firefox web browser, the extensions will let users add even more functionality to VLC, such as an IMDb add-on to get plot or cast information about a movie.

Support for the the sftp protocol, DVB HD and PGS (Blu-ray) subtitles, and CDDB on Windows have also been added. Other improvements include support for several new audio and video codecs, HD codec enhancements, platform dependent GPU acceleration (Vista, Windows 7 and Linux systems) and DSP decoding.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the release can be found in the change log and on the VLC 1.1.0 RC web site. The VLC 1.1.0 release candidate is available to download either as source or as binaries for Windows and Mac OS X. VLC is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). The next major release of VLC following 1.1.0 will be version 1.2.0. The latest stable release is VLC 1.0.6 from the end of April, 2010.

See also:

• Google open source VP8 as part of the WebM Project, a report from The H.
• VLC media player version 1.0.6 release, a report from The H.

(crve)