VLC Media Player 1.0.0 RC1 emerges

The first release candidate for VLC media player (formerly called VideoLAN Client) 1.0.0 has emerged for Linux and Windows systems. VLC is a free open source cross-platform multimedia player for various audio and video formats. Currently, no official posts, however, have been made to the news or developers sections of the VLC website regarding the release candidate.

The release candidate includes instantaneous pausing, frame-by-frame playback, on-the-fly recording and finer speed control during playback. New decoders in the release include the AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, True HD/MLP and Blue-ray Linear PCM decoders. Improvements have also been made to playback of RealMedia files and to the TS de-multiplexer for M2TS files from Blu-ray and AVCHD, in addition to fixes to 5.1 and 7.1 channel decoding and ordering. A new raw audio de-multiplexer supporting raw PCM streams and a dirac de-multiplexer for raw dirac streams have also been added. Support for the Media Keys on modern brushed aluminium Apple keyboards is now included, however, Mac OS X 10.4.x support has been dropped due to its "technical limitations."

More details about the release can be found in the change log. VLC 1.0.0 RC1 is available to download for Windows and Linux (direct downloads) and is released under the GNU General Public License. A 1.0.0 release candidate for Mac OS X, however, does not yet appear to have been uploaded. The release candidate is intended for testing purposes and not for use on mission critical production machines. A final release date for version 1.0.0 has yet to be announced.

(crve)